HACER keeps name after student vote

By Sarah Knowlton     4/9/24 10:55pm

The Hispanic Association for Cultural Enrichment has voted to keep their current name after announcing that it would be changing in October. Club members voted on different name options throughout the semester, culminating in a final vote alongside HACER’s executive board elections, co-president Melissa Cantú said.

“We had [the voting form] spread out in a bunch of different places, and we got a lot of name submissions,” Cantú said. “We figured that if we included a name change election along with the E-Board election, it would get the most participation.”

Although the organization did take alumni comments on the change, Cantú said that the vote was intended to best represent the feelings of current HACER members.

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“People from the boomer generation think that Mexican-American or country-American is still the most appropriate, or Chicano,” Cantú said. “We have people from the millennial generation that think Hispanic is good or even Chicano, and then there’s people from our generation that think Latiné, Latino [or] Latinx is the more appropriate term for including people of all genders, and also including identities that may have been excluded by the terms like Hispanic or country-American, like indigenous people or Afro-Latinés or even people that are undocumented.”

Valeria Aguirre, the club’s other co-president, said that she hopes that the club may consider a name change again in the future.

“I think that change is hard to come by, especially in our community,” Aguirre said. “I think this is definitely just a first step in having this discussion more widely known on campus and having it be a more relevant topic of conversation.”

Cantú and Aguirre attributed the results of the vote to the fact that HACER was one of three options on the ballot, so the votes of those that wanted a new name were split between two options. 

Despite HACER keeping its name, Cantú said she does not consider the initiative a failure.

“I think that this was just an experiment,” Cantú said. “There was absolutely no downside to just experimenting and seeing what the Latiné community feels at this moment.”

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