Since its founding in 2022, the Borderlands and Ethnic Studies Department at New Mexico State University has invited students to learn more deeply about themselves, their communities and their lived environments. Its courses, spanning five fields, strive to provide complete and accurate histories of peoples and places on local and global scales.

Now housed in the College of HEST, the department, known simply as BEST, has much to celebrate. Its growing roster of programs cover relational ethnic studies, Native American studies, Chicana/Chicano studies, decolonial research and Palestine studies. It currently offers three undergraduate minors and one graduate certificate.

Courses in the Chicana/Chicano studies program, for example, maintained strong enrollments over the 2023-2024 academic year, boasting students from every college. Moreover, BEST faculty are developing additional graduate programs in Chicana/Chicano studies and Palestine studies. In 2024, the department received $170,000 in federal funding, secured by New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich, to continue a research program dedicated to creating more culturally inclusive social studies curricula for K-12 students in New Mexico.

"BEST has experienced incredible growth over the past five years," said Dulcinea Lara, BEST department head. "Our dedicated faculty members have developed programs and courses that allow students to understand and navigate a complex and changing world steeped in constructs of race, gender, class, sexual orientation and other areas."

But at the heart of the department's growth is the new BEST Research Center, unveiled in February 2024 as part of Research and Creativity Week.

Now an integral part of the department, the BEST Research Center uses decolonial frameworks as its foundation to prioritize and center the histories and lived experiences of marginalized peoples and communities. Lara and others believe the center will become a hub for research and scholarship in the field of social justice and advocate for inclusive and equitable research environments.

"We will showcase BEST's research projects as the foundation of our new research center. We envision it as a hub of creativity, forward-thinking and sustainable practices that foster ethnic studies and place-based learning for all New Mexicans," said Manal Hamzeh, BEST professor and director of the research center. "It is exciting to be part of the beginnings of BEST's Research Center at a moment when the College of HEST is building a new culture of research propelled by a vision of social transformation."

Through its projects, the BEST Research Center aims to raise awareness of New Mexico's multiethnic communities through communication and collaboration, with the goal of healing racialized oppression, discrimination and epistemicide.

Hamzeh, who teaches courses in the new area of decolonial research and two new Palestine studies courses, said BEST projects are based on intentional collaborations with faculty from other colleges, high school and college students, pre-service and in-service teachers, and policymakers.

"We are committed to co-creating knowledge grounded in place-based histories and context and imagining approaches to research without epistemic violence, knowledge extraction and racial-colonial injustices," Hamzeh said.

One project, "Borderlands Mural Representation at NMSU," is a collaborative re-representation of borderlands peoples and their cultures through public art on campus. Diego Medina, a tribal historic preservation officer of the Piro-Manso-Tiwa tribe and NMSU alumnus, designed the first mural in a stairway that leads to the BEST offices in Garcia Center.

The second mural in the series is located at the entrance of NMSU's astronomy building. A third mural is currently being designed by a Borderlands artist collective, including two NMSU art majors.

In another project, BEST faculty lead an effort to develop more culturally inclusive social studies curricula that meet updated standards.

Working with a team of K-12 educators from southern New Mexico, NMSU faculty and youth from the Las Cruces nonprofit Learning Action Buffet, BEST faculty teamed up with colleagues in the School of Teacher Preparation, Administration and Leadership to support the development of seven lessons on topics tailored to southern New Mexico. The lessons cover Mexican farm workers known as braceros, Japanese internment camps, Black communities in New Mexico, missing and murdered Indigenous women, and figures such as Nadine and Patsy Cordova and Carmelita Torres.

For more information about the BEST Research Center, visit https://best.nmsu.edu/index.html.

A version of this story was originally published in the fall 2024 issue of Pinnacle, the NMSU College of HEST's magazine. To read more, visit https://pinnacle.nmsu.edu/.

The full article can be seen at https://newsroom.nmsu.edu/news/nmsu-s-best-department-celebrates-growth--new-research-center/s/f41ef320-d959-4ee8-9a42-d1b5b1005a57