Contextualizing the HSI: Place-based Indicators of Servingness at a Fronterizx Hispanic-Serving Institution

Abstract

Despite the tendency to frame Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) as monolithic, HSIs situated at the U.S.-Mexico border (fronterizx HSI) are a critical site to understand how geography, communities, and language(s) intersect with what it means to serve. Conducting a qualitative case study, we explored student and faculty place-based perspectives and experiences of what it means to serve at a fronterizx HSI. Three themes emerged: borderland community, borderland language, and borderland consciousness. Findings raise implications for research and practice. A pesar de la tendencia a representar a las Instituciones al Servicio de los Hispanos (HSIs, por sus siglas en inglés) como entidades monolíticas, las HSIs situadas en la frontera entre Estados Unidos y México (HSIs fronterizx) son un espacio crucial para comprender cómo la geografía, las comunidades y los idiomas se entrelazan con el significado de servir. A través de un estudio de caso cualitativo, exploramos las perspectivas y experiencias de estudiantes y profesorado en relación con lo que significa servir en una HSI fronterizx. Surgieron tres temas principales: comunidad fronteriza, lenguaje fronterizo y conciencia fronteriza. Los hallazgos plantean implicaciones para la investigación y la práctica.

Fronterizx Hispanic-serving institutions (HSI ¹ ) refer to 2 to 4-year, public or private HSIs which are located within 20 miles of a port of entry at the U.S.-Mexico border. There are ten institutionally diverse HSIs within 20 or as little as 0.4 miles from the border, three of which are in California and seven in Texas. All ten fronterizx HSIs serve a majority of Latinx ² students, ranging from 51% to 96%, with the majority falling within the range of 85% to 91%. Of these students, the majority are first-generation, border commuter students, who have grown up within the binational, bicultural, and bilingual space of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. This student demographic also includes transfronterizx students. Tranfronterizx students are U.S. citizens with Mexican ethnic backgrounds or Mexican nationals who are authorized under an eligible student VISA status (i.e., F1 student VISA) to engage in habitual border crossings to pursue education (Relaño Pastor, 2007). Limited information suggests that transfronterizx students make up 3.5% to 8% of the total student body at eight of the ten schools. Within 30 miles of a port of entry, there are an additional seven HSIs in California that enroll from 30% to 40% of Latinx students, and one additional school in Texas with a 94% enrollment of Latinx students. Despite the wider tendency to frame HSIs as monolithic, fronterizx HSIs offer an example of the significant institutional diversity across HSIs and, in turn, the need for research that pays attention to context-based features of the HSI (Núñez, 2017). To this point, fronterizx HSIs represent a critical site to understand how geography, local communities, and language(s) intersect with what it means to serve. As such, the purpose of this paper is to present findings from a qualitative case study to highlight student and faculty place-based perspectives and experiences of what it means to serve at a fronterizx HSI. In this way, our study centers the geographical and cultural significance of the border to conceptualizations of servingness within the context of a fronterizx HSI. Findings provide critical insights into the ways in which students and faculty conceptualize servingness in relation to local geographic and linguistic assets and pressures that are tightly woven with community contexts through three themes: borderland community, borderland languaging, and borderland consciousness. These themes suggest that cultural and linguistic practices in the local community, along with the consciousness developed from living at the U.S.-Mexico border are inseparable from what it means to serve. We close with a discussion on how these findings inform both academic inquiry and practical application.

Theoretical Framework

To explore the salience of place in how students and faculty at a fronterizx HSI understand and experience what it means to serve, we used two theoretical lenses: the multidimensional conceptual framework of servingness (Garcia et al., 2019) and border-rooted paradigm (Bejarano, 2010; Bejarano & Shepherd, 2018).

Our place-based approach to explore what it means to serve in the context of a fronterizx HSI begins with the multidimensional conceptual framework of servingness. Specifically, we drew on the framework to inform our inquiry and analysis on the contextualized meanings of serving at a fronterizx HSI. Intended to inform research, policy, and practice, the framework identifies outcomes, experiences, and structures that influence serving. Outcomes, where the student is the unit of analysis, include GPA, retention, completion, leadership, and community engagement. Experiences, which include other members of the academic community, can be validating (e.g., cultural validation on campus, Spanish-speaking staff) or, conversely, invalidating racialized experiences, which involve systemic forms of racial and ethnic oppression.

Structures are the organizational features of the HSI that support Latinx student success, like institutional mission, engagement with the community, culturally relevant pedagogy, decision making, as well as broader sociohistorical and political influences. By using the framework as a starting point, we provide novel insights into the significance of place to indicators and structures of servingness within the contextualization of a fronterizx HSI.

Our second theoretical lens, a border-rooted paradigm, helps us to connect servingness with the borderland and to demonstrate the value of a context-based approach to understanding how place intersects with the ways in which students and faculty understand and experience servingness. This is because a border-rooted paradigm frames place as holding cultural and social relevance for Latinx student success. We also chose to use a border-rooted paradigm since it includes assumptions aimed at transforming higher education in ways that can work against deficit framings of HSIs as underperforming monoliths (Núñez, 2017). First, the paradigm involves asset-based assumptions that recognize Latinx students’ lived experiences as relevant strengths and knowledge. Second, it validates the place in which Latinx students’ families and communities reside. Finally, it represents an overarching commitment on the part of the institution to create an inclusive and asset-based environment. Taken together, servingness and a border-rooted paradigm provide a framework to understand the salience of the borderland to contextualized indicators and structures of serving at a fronterizx HSI.

Literature Review

One way that HSIs are meeting the needs of their student population is by changing the curriculum (Garcia & Okhidoi, 2015; Rantz & McNulty, 2024), for example, incorporating culturally-based assets into their curriculum (Romero et al., 2020) or similarly, diversifying the curriculum and the pedagogy to reflect the identities and culture of their student body (Contreras Aguirre, 2024; Hesse & Jewett, 2022). In another example, research at a fronterizx HSI suggests that faculty who transform established norms of higher education through culturally and linguistically responsive curriculum are in a better position to empower Latinx students (Cisneros et al., 2025).

In addition to research that explores servingness and curriculum, literature has also sought to explore servingness and language. For instance, Alamillo (2025) explored contrasting sentiments regarding implementation of Spanish within the political, spatial, and experiential spaces of an HSI in the borderlands. Her findings suggest the need for greater Spanish presence within the schoolscape, which in turn will promote belonging and academic development among Latinx students. In another example, Hesse and Jewett (2022) highlight the importance of language at the intersections of identity, culture, and curriculum. While their work centers on transforming a doctoral program’s curriculum to suit the needs of its students, they emphasize the importance of language as a core aspect of such transformation. This involves recognition of the students’ linguistic heritage as an asset as well as offering a variety of linguistic experiences (e.g., bilingual elective requirements, bilingual completion of coursework) to support Spanish-speaking students while allowing the program to gradually transition into a bilingual one.

Musanti and Cavazos (2018), in their study on reflections and intentional pedagogical efforts to promote bilingualism at an HSI in the borderlands in South Texas, advocate for opening translanguaging spaces within the classroom that may help leverage students’ linguistic resources for the benefit of their learning and knowledge-making. They extend this work by further reflecting on their course design, praxis, and bilingual interactions with students at the same university (Rodriguez et al., 2021). To do this, translanguaging pedagogies were used intentionally and purposefully to respond to the students’ linguistic diversity, resulting in greater promotion and leveraging of students’ bilingualism and biliteracy to maximize their learning (Rodriguez et al., 2021). In sum, the research around language suggests that instructors at HSIs can play a crucial role in the development of a linguistically inclusive approach to instruction.

Because borderland consciousness emerged as one of our themes, it is also important to note that within the larger body of research on servingness, several studies draw on different theorizations of consciousness to examine how awareness can shape servingness in the context of the HSI (see Muñoz et al., 2023; Cristobal & Garcia, 2022). More directly relevant to the place-based focus of our study, Barraza (2024) and Villarreal (2022) drew on theories of consciousness in the contexts of two different fronterizx HSIs. Barraza (2024) explored grant-funded practices among servingness-conscious agents who intentionally sought to create policies, programs, and practices to support equitable higher education for Latinx students. Villarreal (2022) used the theory of Borderlands (Anzaldúa, 1987) to explore scales of HSI consciousness in decision making related to faculty hiring. Both authors point to the significance of the U.S.-Mexico border in shaping how servingness was understood and enacted in their research. Related, these studies suggest the importance of regional community, language(s), and cultural practices to servingness and the HSI. Consequently, Barraza and Villareal advocate for research that considers the significance of the border region and transborder practices to the fronterizx HSI and servingness.

To this end, Contreras Aguire and Cason (2024) explored the impact of mentoring programs on transfronterizx college students at an HSI in the southwest. They argue for more research to bring borderland insights and knowledge from border regions to inform the ways in which fronterizx HSIs can incorporate transfronterizx student assets to support cross-cultural enrichment and to transform higher education (Contreras Aguire & Cason, 2024). Building on this research, our findings offer insights into institutional structures that can serve transfronterizx college students who navigate several challenges to pursue higher education, including the time involved in crossing the border (Cisneros et al., 2025).

In total, our study builds on the existing research to offer place-based perspectives and experiences of students and faculty at a fronterizx HSI. As such, our study contributes to the understudied significance of place, specifically the borderland to indicators and structures of servingness. Related, our study establishes the significance of language, community, and consciousness to serving in the context of a fronterizx HSI, laying the groundwork to build a collective fronterizx HSI identity with other fronterizx HSIs.

Methodology

The analysis provided in this paper is based on findings from a qualitative case study (Yin, 2014), which was part of a larger mixed methods study (Creswell & Creswell, 2017) conducted by a group of educational researchers at a fronterizx HSI. The group convened to form a research council around Hispanic-serving efforts under the support of an NSF HSI institutional transformation grant. The wider charge of the council was to (a) develop a common language around the meanings of serving at the HSI, (b) build research capacity around serving at the HSI, and (c) inform wider grant-related activities on transforming the HSI. All authors on this paper are original members of the council. In the first months of the grant, members of the council reviewed and discussed existing servingness literature, concluding that there was a need to contextualize servingness within the fronterizx HSI. Thus, the overarching purpose of the larger study was to identify concrete indicators of servingness from the perspectives of students and faculty at a fronterizx HSI. The purpose of the case study, and the focus of this article, was to explore the relationship between the location (place) of the HSI at the U.S.-Mexico border and student and faculty perceptions and experiences of serving.

Because contextualizing the HSI and servingness is grounded in the lived realities of students and faculty, we chose a qualitative case study approach (Garcia, 2016; Garcia, 2023; Núñez, 2017). A qualitative case study approach is an important methodology for deeply examining phenomena that are inextricably related to context, focusing on a single, bounded unit of analysis that is, the fronterizx HSI (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016; Yin, 2014). Our qualitative methodology is also informed by our position that people make meaning out of phenomena like what it means to serve as part of the context and the interactions taking place in that context (Patton, 1985). The research questions guiding our case study analysis were: How does the location of the HSI at the U.S.-Mexico border intersect with students’ and faculty’s personal and institutional understanding and experiences of what it means to serve? What are the contextual features of the fronterizx HSI that inform how students and faculty understand and experience what it means to serve?

Data Collection

Our case study analysis drew on qualitative semi-structured interviews (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016) with students and faculty who indicated interest in participating in an interview following completion of an online survey. We also drew on institutional artifacts like the UTEP Edge Framework and the 2030 Strategic Plan. To be clear, the interview was not a follow-up to the survey. The electronically administered survey was emailed to all faculty and students who were 18 years or older at the time of the study and included a link to an approved Human Subjects consent form and a space to indicate interest in participating in an interview. The objective of the interview was for greater depth of understanding around faculty and students’ place-based perceptions and experiences of servingness in the context of the fronterizx HSI.

Semi-structured interview questions, which were informed by the multidimensional conceptual framework of servingness, assume that individuals define the world in unique ways (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). This stance reflects our interest in understanding the subjective and lived meanings and experiences of what it means to serve and how this exists in relation to place. Furthermore, we chose a semi-structured interview to ensure a level of trustworthiness. Since five of the council members conducted interviews, we needed to establish that we were soliciting specific data from all participants, while maintaining our position that individuals define experiences in unique ways. Examples of sample interview questions included: In your role at the fronterizx HSI, how are you supported to fulfill servingness? What needs to happen for servingness to be a core feature of the HSI? In what ways is servingness a part of programs, services, curriculum? What role do you think servingness plays in relation to the borderland community?

Twenty-two faculty and fourteen students participated in the interview. Self-identified faculty participants included five Latinas, one Mexican American woman, one African American woman, five White women, three Latinos, one African American man, one Asian Indian man, and five White men. Faculty representation included 10 assistant, 11 associate, and one emeritus faculty from diverse fields, that is, physical therapy, music, computer science, geological sciences, engineering, education, social work, physics, liberal arts, chemistry, political science, marketing, health sciences, and law. Self-identified student participants included five Latinas, six Latinos, one White Indian woman, one White woman, and one White man. Student representation included six undergraduate students and eight graduate students. Interestingly, student participants were from many of the same fields as faculty, with a few additional fields represented, that is, mathematical sciences and psychology. Interviews were audio recorded, conducted via Zoom in both English and Spanish, and lasted between 30 and 60 min. Participants were assigned a pseudonym to protect their identity.

Data Analysis

In keeping with our qualitative methodology, data analysis was inductive and comparative (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016), meaning that we engaged in an iterative process of moving back and forth between data and theory, and description and interpretation to make sense of the data. To do this, the interviews were transcribed verbatim by the second author. Following, the four authors read all interview transcripts. We then divided the twenty-two transcribed interviews to conduct two rounds of manual coding (Saldaña, 2016). In the first round of coding, we used open coding to identify topic codes. Some of the initial codes were community, border, resources, language, validation, student support, barriers. Prior to focused coding, we met to discuss and compare initial codes. During our discussion, we noted an emphasis on the border, language, and the community.

Next, we conducted focused coding to reduce and refine initial codes. We did this by re-reading and re-coding the same set of interview transcripts, paying particular attention to how the location of the HSI at the U.S.-Mexico border shaped student and faculty perceptions and experiences around servingness. Following, we met several times to discuss focused codes. During these discussions, we considered how the codes were similar and different from indicators and structures of servingness in the multidimensional conceptual framework. To further develop our codes into themes, we also discussed frameworks that had theorized the border relative to the lived experiences of borderland dwellers. Ultimately, we drew on the border-rooted paradigm because of its emphasis on the salience of the border to re-frame the lived experiences of Latinx students and communities as assets and, in turn, to transform higher education to be culturally and linguistically responsive to borderland students and communities.

In a case study, themes reveal patterns in the data that answer the research questions (Yin, 2014). The following themes were regarded as central to how faculty and students understood and lived servingness as a place-based practice at a fronterizx HSI: borderland community, borderland languaging, and borderland consciousness. While these findings are qualitative in nature and not generalizable, they contribute to the research and practice by providing a contextualized portrayal of the significance of place to what it means to serve at a fronterizx HSI.

Research Context

This study took place in the Paso del Norte region. The city of El Paso, Texas, has an estimated population of 679,000 (United States Census Bureau, 2024), with an estimated 889,000 residents in the broader El Paso County (City of El Paso, 2024). El Paso is the second-largest majority-Latinx city in the United States (after San Antonio, Texas), with approximately 81% of its residents being Latinx (United States Census Bureau, 2020), largely mirroring those of the institution. Because of the size and importance of the three cities in the area, Ciudad Juarez, El Paso, and Las Cruces (listed in order of population size and economic impact), the region is often referred to as the Juarez-El Paso metroplex. From a place-based perspective, this term has become a prominent way to invoke a shared sense of this borderland region.

More specifically, this study took place at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), an R-1, open access, and the largest public university of the region, situated at the far western point in Texas, where New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico meet along the Rio Grande. This borderland region has the lowest median income in Texas, and authorized border crossings are a crucial feature of this context.

In 1980, UTEP administration sought to transform the predominantly White institution (PWI) into a public university that reflected the bilingual, bicultural, and binational borderland population. In 1992, UTEP was officially designated an HSI, although in terms of enrollment, it had reflected one for over a decade. As of 2023, total student enrollment stood at 23,880, including 88% (17,696) Latinx undergraduate students, 66% (2,444) Latinx graduate students, 23% (4,659) Latinx first-generation undergraduate students, and 28% (1,053) Latinx first-generation graduate students. Five percent (1,259) of the student body are transfronterizx students. Fifty-nine percent (11,907) receive economic support through the Pell Grant. Overall, the UTEP student body is predominantly bicultural, bilingual, and holds binational roots, cultural customs, and linguistic practices. Thus, beyond enrollment numbers, UTEP is an HSI in several ways.

When viewed through the lens of Garcia et al.’s (2019) multidimensional framework of servingness, UTEP’s commitment to servingness is explicit in the following key structures for serving: (a) its mission of providing access to an excellent education of impact; (b) its 2030 Strategic Plan, which centers goals related to student experience, research, and community impact; and (c) the formation of HSI working groups and a research center. Folded into these structures is the practice of hiring diverse faculty. UTEP has been intentional about increasing the diversity of its faculty in the last 10 years. An estimated 40.2% (589) of faculty are White non-Hispanic; 39.5% (579) are Hispanic. The faculty includes individuals who are entirely bilingual in Spanish and English, especially among Latinx faculty. Due to habitual languaging practices, translanguaging ³ is a common practice (García & Wei, 2014).

It is also important to note that UTEP’s employee demographics have been a work in progress for 35 years, when at that time the former university president made the commitment to mirror student enrollment to regional demographics. While UTEP has made excellent headway in terms of faculty representation, the institution can do more to continue to improve representation at the leadership level, especially at the higher tiers. Still, no matter their background, UTEP encourages all faculty and staff to approach their work through the UTEP Edge framework, which was developed as part of the institution’s last Quality Enhancement Plan. The Edge is premised on the assumption that students bring strengths, talents, dreams, and aspirations with them to their studies, and that these are assets to be leveraged. Foregrounding this lens enables faculty and staff to meet students where they are and provide validating experiences. In doing so, UTEP facilitates access to a top-level education for individuals in the region, which has an impact on their families and the greater community.

In 2018, UTEP became a Hispanic-serving research institution (HSRI) combining accessibility of education with a cutting edge, place-based research portfolio. In 2023, UTEP received $146M in research expenditures, positioning itself as number four among public research universities in Texas. In terms of outcomes, its unique location offers the opportunity for highly targeted research to serve the needs of the community, from health disparities to water, migration, and safety. UTEP has 15 major research centers that work on solving local problems with global impact, for example, inland desalinization, border studies, innovation and commerce, transportation and infrastructure, and space safety. While UTEP has worked towards these goals for several decades, in 2020 the institution made efforts to systematize its practices in a way that could better inform the local and national HSI landscape. UTEP convened the Hispanic Servingness Working Group to work with campus units to build and strengthen the institution’s identity as an HSI. This work led to the formation of the Hispanic Serving Research Council and the Natalicio Institute for Student Success.

Positionality

As faculty and student members of the fronterizx HSI, we are deeply immersed in the institutional and regional context. The first author is of Irish-settler descent and grew up at the northeastern border of the United States but has lived her entire adult life in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The second author is of Mexican descent and has engaged in ongoing migration between the United States and Mexico since an early age. The third author who is of U.S.-Mexican descent grew up in the borderlands, like many of the participants. The fourth author is also of Mexican descent and has lived in the borderlands for a substantial amount of time. This intimate familiarity afforded us with context-specific knowledge to recognize the salience of place to the fronterizx HSI and to place-based instantiations of servingness.

Throughout the research process, we engaged in individual and collaborative critical-reflexivity to uphold an asset-based approach to exploring the HSI (Núñez, 2017), working in opposition to damage-centered research (Tuck, 2009) or naive pretenses that ignore how histories of white supremacy and colonialism continue to shape higher education as well as representations of the U.S.-Mexico border. Our familiarity, appreciation, respect, and discernment for the region come from our different but shared histories of living at the U.S.-Mexico border. These experiences are essential since we framed our study around an interpretive paradigm (Denzin & Lincoln, 2013). Our positionalities are also informed by an equity-oriented commitment to conduct research that can drive meaningful efforts to transform higher education, we were especially interested in challenging deficit and monolithic framings of HSIs (Ojeda et al., 2011). In total, we considered both emic (insider) and etic (outsider) perspectives as derived from our experiences to identify omissions and inconsistencies to contribute to the robustness of this study.

Findings

Interviews with 22 faculty and 14 students generated three salient, culturally relevant themes: borderland community, borderland languaging, and borderland consciousness. These themes were drawn out from questions asking participants to describe how they understand and experience servingness in the context of a fronterizx HSI. Each theme is described below.

Borderland Community

Situating UTEP at the U.S.-Mexico frontera was central to how faculty and student participants defined what it meant to serve a Latinx majority student population in the context of the fronterizx HSI as evidenced in the following excerpt.

We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us. That’s a huge part of who we are. That’s our pulse, our heartbeat of the university. It’s our students and the context we’re in (Jim, a White pre-law assistant professor).

However, the significance of the border to the HSI and serving was more than just a geographical one, it was directly related to student and faculty participants’ view that a central feature of the mission of the university was to serve the region. In this way, servingness entailed being responsive to both the needs of the students as well as those of the community. To this point, participants often described the institution’s commitment to students as interdependent with a commitment to the community. For example, Carolina, a Latina professor in physical therapy, shared, “[F]rom the very beginning, I was acculturated that serving our community was part of our [the university] DNA and so it’s sort of the natural thing that if we’re serving our community, which is a Hispanic majority of students, that all those things go together.” In this sense, servingness entailed not only advancing Latinx student success, but doing so in ways that simultaneously expanded the well-being of the community. About this, Dan Lee, a mixed-race professor in physical therapy, shared:

We created tutoring and mentoring opportunities, so that they [Hispanic students] can be mentored by somebody who looks like them. . . we are trying to contribute to the diversity of our profession…. The other thing that we look at is the patients that don’t see healthcare providers that look like them, that have poor health outcomes, so we’re proud of the fact that we’re contributing to the Hispanic physical therapist’s population to create better opportunities for our patients.

A border-rooted paradigm provides a lens to understand that reshaping broader deficit narratives about the border to center the place-based needs and asset-based experiences of Latinx students and communities was integral to what it means to serve in the context of this fronterizx HSI. To this point, participants highlighted the importance of cultural ties, social links, and economic dependence between local, regional, and national features of the borderland. In one example, Esthela, a Latina professor in social work, shared:

Borders are not only relationships between countries; borders are relationships across countries…. We tell the students that the border is the metaphor of coming together between countries, city lines, different cultures, and so if you’re able to practice in a community as rich as ours, where we have the greatest mobility, we’re cutting between this dichotomy of pressures and push forces.

For participants, the borderland represented the potential for economic, linguistic, cultural, and educational connection between the U.S. and Mexico, including the experiences of those who migrated or practiced specific cross-border activities.

Hence, the theme of borderland community recognizes indicators of servingness at the fronterizx HSI in the different ways in which faculty and students connected the HSI to needs of the local cross-border community, including but not limited to curriculum and programming that provided students with linguistic, cultural, and ethnic representation among faculty and that was focused on educating students to serve the health and well-being of the borderland community. Related, this theme also demonstrates that the institutional culture, which reflected the view that the HSI belonged to and for the people of the region, fostered a place-based sense of belonging to shape experiences that were validating because they validated the borderland community.

Borderland Languaging

Borderland languaging refers to the language practices of the borderland region, which were reflected in indicators of what servingness means in the context of this fronterizx HSI. More specifically, the theme of borderland languaging situates Spanish-English bilingual meaning-making practices, a core feature of the daily lives of the participants and the wider borderland community, as both a structure and an indicator of servingness in the context of the fronterizx HSI. In keeping with the border-rooted paradigm, borderland languaging transforms higher education to represent and respond to the linguistic practices of the predominantly binational, bicultural, and bilingual population. Indicators of how borderland languaging shaped servingness were evidenced through the institution’s creation of curricular programming that promoted bilingualism and translanguaging. To illustrate, Abner, a Latino undergraduate student in education, shared:

I have like two or three classes, we speak Spanish, or we can do English. . .They give you the privilege or the freedom to either/or, or to turn in your assignments in English or Spanish, so I like it. I have three or four classes with some professors that are bilingual, which is good.

The ability to translanguage and complete coursework in English or Spanish enabled students to engage in learning that positively impacts academic outcomes. It also served to validate the linguistic practices of the region and to foster a vital sense of belonging to the fronterizx HSI among students and faculty.

Student participants also pointed to university-wide communications, which incorporated bilingualism as an indicator of what it means to serve. As one representative example, Ivan, a Latino undergraduate student in engineering, shared:

UTEP is trying to advocate towards the Hispanic community, not only in English, but also in Spanish. It’s very good that the university can communicate information in both languages because, a lot of times, people that are mostly Spanish speaking really enjoy looking at information and reading it in Spanish…. I feel like a lot of students. . .feel more encouraged seeing information in their language, as well as to see that their heritage, their ethnicity, their background is welcomed at the university.

Receiving communication from the fronterizx HSI that represented the linguistic practices of the borderland community validated student’s linguistic and cultural identities, created a sense of belonging, and connected the mission of the fronterizx HSI with serving the borderland community.

Faculty participants similarly shared how they valued the bilingual languaging practices of the institution. For example, Michael, a White emeritus professor in engineering, shared, “[W]e have created a community in which Hispanic students feel at home. (. . .) you hear Spanish spoken all day long, everywhere, every corner of this campus, it permeates our institution.” Whether a faculty member could or could not partake in borderland languaging, the practice was widely acknowledged and respected. Bilingualism was viewed as an asset that borderland culture fostered and a facet of servingness. As Jeff, a White bilingual faculty member in geological sciences, shared, “fostering language in both English and Spanish here at UTEP is an important feature of how UTEP serves the people of this region.” Erin, a White faculty member in physics, similarly shared:

We can look straight across the border and it’s amazing, it absolutely inspires. If it wasn’t that way, we wouldn’t be teaching in Spanish. Because we’re right here, where Spanish is so prevalent, it has informed everything that I know about servingness.

Accordingly, the theme of borderland languaging represents an institutional-wide, asset-based approach to language practices that recognized and invited students to use their full linguistic repertoire to advance academic and non-academic outcomes. Participants pointed to language as one of the unique ways in which the fronterizx HSI mirrored the language practices of the local community to foster borderland languaging and in turn, a sense of belonging and empowerment. Moreover, borderland languaging, as a facet of servingness at the fronterizx HSI, aimed to prepare graduates to address the needs of the borderland region and the broader growing Spanish/English-speaking citizenry.

Borderland Consciousness

The third theme, borderland consciousness represents the shared awareness and recognition that servingness is inextricably tied to the border and the borderland community, reflecting the significance of place highlighted in the border-rooted paradigm. Going further, borderland consciousness is a collective awareness of the border as a place and space where transborder social relations and practices are central to what it means to serve at the fronterizx HSI (Barraza, 2024; Villarreal, 2022). For instance, Yesenia, a Latina, bilingual geological sciences graduate student shared:

It’s [the university] right between the metroplex of the Juarez-El Paso region. . . Because of who we serve, you can’t separate the two communities, we’re so intertwined. Servingness should be used to build on that relationship between Juarez and El Paso. I’m studying ground water, it doesn’t stop at the border.. . . Our research, our community events should not stop [at the border]. Like water, it should flow into both communities to bring both communities together.

In this instance, borderland consciousness is expressed as a multi-state awareness according to which research in the context of the fronterizx HSI should create confluence between nation-states for the benefit and well-being of the borderland region. Extending indicators of servingness to include the impact of research on the community further signals the value of a place-based approach to contextualize servingness at HSIs. In a related example, Amanda, a mixed-race, science graduate students shared:

I think that we are given a precious opportunity here because of our unique geographical setting. . . If you combine all the economy on the border. . ., it’s a huge economy, it’s a huge influence, and I think politically too. We’re facing issues that need to be addressed, and I think it’s a beautiful opportunity because we are an international community here. We do hear Spanish all the time. We do have a unique population and culture here that should be fostered and understood.

Participants consistently highlighted the uniqueness of the place and people rooted in the borderland region and reflected within the institution. The economy of the border did not pertain to a single location on either side of the border but rather encompassed both sides to address the interdependence and broader issues of a transborder community. This situated interdependence cultivated a borderland consciousness for participants.

Robert, a White undergraduate student in liberal arts, signified the salience of place to the fronterizx HSI, offering another representation of how this space invoked the potential for borderland consciousness to transform higher education:

[i]t’s [the university] basically in no man’s land, on the periphery of Mexico, but also on that of the U.S. This unique in-between location that can at least culturally go back and forth between the two, to bridge that gap. An opportunity on both sides of the border (. . .) it’s also one of those things that could inform servingness in other contexts.

For participants, the borderland was not a fixed point at which the movement of remittances, goods, information, and capital stopped, but rather a dynamic place and space where cultures intersected and informed its predominantly bilingual, transborder population. Kathy, a White professor in education, similarly shared:

The location [of the university] is identified in the university discourse as an asset. I really appreciate the clear articulation of this location as an asset, and the sort of systems and programs to support students who either cross for classes or students who need work Visas. That is a really important component of what we do that is informed by our location. When the border was closed a few times, the messages coming directly from the Provost saying “you need to be accommodating” were so important.

Recognizing the unpredictable disruption of vehicle and pedestrian traffic flow between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, and the many issues associated with border closures, participants described how borderland consciousness required an awareness of the salience of place to the fronterizx HSI to proactively offer resources and support to address the lived realities of borderland people. Consequently, borderland consciousness did not reside in the mind of the individual but lived in the social fabric of the fronterizx HSI at the intersection of the borderland community. In this way, serving the community also meant recognizing the borderland as a transborder space where people on both sides of the border were socially integrated as evidenced in the values and the practices of the fronterizx HSI.

Discussion and Scholarly Significance

The findings from this paper contribute to the existing literature on servingness by shedding light on the place-based features of servingness in the context of the fronterizx HSI (Barraza, 2024; Villarreal, 2022). Three themes-borderland community, borderland languaging, and borderland consciousness-emerged to highlight the significance of place as crucial to understanding indicators and structures of servingness. Central to participant perspectives was the shared view that the core mission of the university was to serve the region. In this sense, serving the student population also entailed a commitment to serving the community. By acknowledging the salience of the borderland community to the HSI, faculty presented indicators of servingness, that is, curriculum, programmatic objectives, and research, which were developed in response to place-based assets and needs to serve students and the border region. These findings reflect the idea that within predominantly Latinx communities where the student body reflects the region, serving the local community is a crucial feature of the Latinx-serving identity of the HSI (Garcia, 2016).

The importance of acknowledging, appreciating, and implementing borderland languaging is another important finding. Borderland languaging, which reflected the linguistic practices of the borderland community, was represented as a valued meaning-making resource and a key indicator of servingness as evidenced in examples like, messaging across campus, programming, recruitment, bilingual classroom assignments, and curriculum which sought to prepare future professionals to mirror and address the linguistic needs of the broader English/Spanish-speaking community was another. As such, promoting languaging practices that reflect those of the broader community is a core component of servingness efforts (Barraza, 2024; Villarreal, 2022), which seek to empower students (Cisneros et al., 2025) and to enhance their linguistic identity and social interactions (Contreras Aguire & Cason, 2024) in the context of the fronterizx HSI.

Another contribution of this study, borderland consciousness, points to the shared awareness and acknowledgement that the local border community shapes and is shaped by student and faculty place-based understandings and experiences of servingness. For example, place-based research drew on border-rooted assumptions to connect fronterizx HSI research with servingness to address pressing transborder issues like water and to build cross-border economic partnerships. In this way, indicators of servingness involved a shared awareness of the border as a dynamic space where people and problems on both sides of the border were not separate but interdependent. Borderland consciousness as an indicator of servingness also surfaced in the administrative response to and support for transborder students, which sent a clear message to all members of the institution to validate transborder experiences by supporting post-secondary education (Contreras Aguire & Cason, 2024).

In sum, our findings contribute to servingness by highlighting the significance of place to indicators and structures of servingness grounded in a contextualization of the HSI. In our study, servingness, which was inextricable with the borderland community (Barraza, 2024; Villarreal, 2022), involved acknowledging the multi-dimensional assets of students and the community as evidenced in culturally responsive curriculum and programming. In this way, our findings extend servingness to recognize and respond to not only the assets and needs of students but also to those of the community. Related, our findings extend servingness to center bilingual languaging practices as both a structure and indicator of servingness. This was illustrated in a variety of ways, for example, campus-wide information and announcements were in both Spanish and English, bilingual curriculum and courses were offered, and advocacy for translanguaging to support student learning was wide-spread. Finally, our finding, borderland consciousness broadens servingness to the dimension of a collective awareness and corresponding ethos that resides in the social fabric of the HSI.

Implications for Research

Broadly, future research should contextualize servingness and the HSI. Additionally, and more specifically, future research should explore placed-based perspectives and experiences of servingness at the intersection of the borderlands not only among student and faculty but also other institutional members as well as community members. Future studies should also attend to the heterogeneity of student and community composition, for example transfronterizx students and Indigenous students and communities whose histories and contemporary lived experiences are frequently erased from border-specific research, especially in the context of the HSI. More in-depth case studies of fronterizx HSIs could contribute to a fronterizx HSI identity which would expand the existing HSI typology.

Implications for Practice

We recognize that most borderlands are considered peripheries within their states, characterized by geographical marginality and large proportions of Indigenous populations or ethnic minorities. In this article, we have described the nuances of place-based servingness at the U.S.-Mexico border for predominately Latinx populations. For some institutions, particularly those for which a sense of place resonates, our findings may seem like a good fit. However, we recognize that for other institutions where Latinx and other minoritized students come not from the surrounding community but from across the United States and the world, a placed-based contextualization of the HSI and servingness might seem impossible to reconcile. Thus, we urge HSIs to consider what “place” and belonging to such a place mean for students when they come from elsewhere. This entails considering the ways the institution adapts to students regarding relational and linguistic values, and not just the ways the students assimilate into institutional culture or traditions.