2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The homogenization of all Latine people has rendered the Latine Indigenous diaspora
invisible in discussions about education and engineering in the United States. For the past 50 years there have been several interventions to support the increasing number of Latines in engineering, however these efforts have not adequately represented all Latines. Without acknowledging the unique backgrounds within the Latine community, we contribute to silencing the voices of the Latine Indigenous communities and erasing their identities. Engineering contributes to this erasure through its objective nature, often isolating students’ culture and identity, which is essential for student success. The field of engineering can learn from existing literature on diasporic indigenous students in other spaces and disciplines (K-18 education, sociology, psychology, etc.). Therefore, the purpose of this literature review is to synthesize what has been done in other fields and identify opportunities in which engineering can explore the needs of the Latine Indigenous diaspora within this field. This literature review will be guided by the following research questions 1) What research has been conducted on diasporic Indigenous students in U.S. education? 2) How does this review contribute to engineering education discourse about Latine students? This work has broader implications by providing a platform to study the diverse perspective of the Latine Indigenous diaspora, which can serve as a model for understanding other diaspora communities.