With support from the Spencer Foundation, this project examines Latino graduation ceremonies in American higher education, rituals designed for students as they finish their postsecondary degrees. The inquiry focuses on six Latino graduation ceremonies, across three different institutional types and two different states, illuminating the power of rituals to transmit cultural values, norms, and beliefs about the social institution of American higher education.The racial/ethnic affiliation of these particular ceremonies is significant in that Latinos represent the fastest growing minority group in the US, yet are not transitioning to college proportionally. Also significant is the evolution of Latino graduation ceremonies as alternatives to mainstream institutional commencement exercises.
Latino graduation ceremonies reconfigure the commencement ritual, potentially transmitting transformative cultural values, norms, and beliefs about higher education. An anthropological perspective will benefit scholars, policymakers, and practitioners by providing understandings of how the purposes and values of higher education are actively being re-constituted by and for the changing demographics of Twenty-first century America.