To All the Parts That Served Me: An Intersectional Portrait of Black Undergraduate Women’s Identity Development at an HSI

This chapter brings to the forefront how Black undergraduate student enrollment at Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) has quadrupled over the last 25 years, indicating a continued diversification of the HSI student profile. Among the 9% of Black students attending HSIs, available research centers Black male student stories in comparison to Black undergraduate women (BUW). The latter group contends with the inimitable interaction of being both Black and a woman, an experience that is further conflated at the marginalized intersections of race and gender. While narrow, the canon of stories depicting Black undergraduate women attending HSIs mimics the encounters of their peers enrolled in Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) by way of anti-Blackness, discrimination, and marginalization. PWIs have a historical legacy of complicity in producing consequential spaces for Black women in college, irrespective of academic levels. As such, the meaning-making and socializing function of higher education becomes particularly nuanced for Black women who matriculate college carrying the disproportioned weight of their gendered and racialized realities, while simultaneously confronting their personal histories and pre-collegiate socializations that are largely negative in nature.