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New Face, Same Place
face, NEW place SAME In Boston’s changing demographics, UMass Boston faculty see echoes of the city’s past—and a continuation of the university’s mission
BY ANDREA KENNEDY \ Additional reporting by Vanessa Chatterley
When Jaffna-Rose Innocent ’24 and her family emigrated from Haiti in 2010, they landed in Florida. The six-year-old, the only Black child in her class, was bullied relentlessly because of her accent and uncertain English. At the urging of family friends, they soon moved to Taunton, Massachusetts, where there were more opportunities. So later, when Innocent was looking at colleges, the diversity she found at UMass Boston was part of the appeal. Today, Innocent serves as a mentor for other immigrant students through the Student Multicultural Affairs office, reveling in the human variety she encounters at the university. “You don’t really see one specific type of person,” she said. “We generalize diversity in terms of race, color, religion. I feel like we shouldn’t make it as broad as that. Diversity is ‘Who is an individual person?’ You can find someone who is the same ethnicity as you are, same race, same cultural background, but they’re still so different from you.”
AN ONGOING MISSION
Innocent’s experience is increasingly common at UMass Boston, where students currently hail from 138 countries. Between 2008 and 2018, the proportion of students of color among new enrollees grew from 45 to 56 percent. The student body has had a Black, Indigenous, and people of color majority since 2016.
This makes UMass Boston the third most diverse four-year college in the country, said 24/7 Wall St. in 2020. By that publication’s definition, UMass Boston is the only large four-year public school in America with a greater than 80 percent chance that two randomly selected students would have a different race, ethnicity, or U.S. citizenship status.
Has this change made UMass Boston a different place? In some ways yes and in some ways no. At the level of mission, UMass Boston Chancellor Marcelo Suárez-Orozco’s answer is a resounding “no.” It’s not new; UMass Boston was founded in 1964 with the intention of “providing our students equality of opportunity,” according to its original Statement of Purpose. At the level of the students it is serving, most definitely the answer is “yes”—the student body of UMass Boston reflects the new demographic complexity of Boston.
“Educating diverse students,” Suárez-Orozco said, “is both our history and our destiny.”
CITY OF IMMIGRANTS
That destiny is serving a changing city. Boston—and UMass Boston by extension—is in the midst of a profound transformation. In 2020, for the first time, census data revealed that the majority of Bostonians identified as Black, Asian, Native American or Pacific Islander, Hispanic, or mixed race. According to the 2019 Boston Foundation/ UMass report “Changing Faces of Greater Boston,” every city in Greater Boston saw a growth in residents of color between 1990 and 2017—an astonishing 245 percent increase over just 25 years. More than 90 percent of this growth is due to the immigration of families like Innocent’s.
But Boston has always been a city of immigrants, said Suárez-Orozco, a renowned scholar of human migration. The share of the foreign-born population in Boston was much higher a century ago than it is today (36 percent in 1910, versus 28 percent in 2020).
“The grammar is the same,” he says. “In the past it was the Irish working class, the Italian working class, Syrians and Lebanese searching for a better life in our city. Now it’s Chinese, its Dominican, it’s Haitian, it’s Cambodian. The spirit that drives the immigrant journey is the same. New faces, same story.”
The current explosion in numbers of people of color is coming from immigration, he noted. Greater Boston’s Black population, once fed by the Great Migration from the American South, is 38 percent foreign born today, with significant populations from Haiti, Cape Verde, and other Caribbean and African nations. Massachusetts’ Asian American population is now almost 70 percent foreign born. Thirteen Asian origin nations have more than 2,000 immigrants living in Boston today.
“Within each of these groups, you have the whole universe,” said Suárez-Orozco. “In Boston, we have something never seen before: the whole world thriving in a city that has a population that is 1/13th the size of New York City.”
Of course, cultures have clashed in the past in Boston, said Lorna Rivera, director of UMass Boston’s Mauricio Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy. But bussing riots and other dark chapters are not the city’s whole story. “If you look at our history, yes, there’s that ugliness,” she said. But communities have also come together to solve problems. In the 1960s, Irish and Puerto Rican communities banded together to fight the construction of the Southwest Corridor expressway in the South End. Today, the Rian Immigrant Center (formerly the Irish International Immigrant Center) provides resettlement services to newcomers of all nationalities.
“There are real, strong alliances, historically and to this day, in welcoming immigrants,” Rivera said.
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE …
The details may have changed over the decades but the students themselves have not, said Steven Neville PhD’17, assistant vice chancellor for student affairs.
“These are students who have aspirations of doing what students have done all along, and that is to better their lives and create opportunities for themselves through the higher educational process,” he said. “That’s always been UMass Boston’s bull’s-eye. It’s just that the students are coming from different communities now.”
The university’s commitment to its students is ongoing, he noted. The faculty and administration continue to develop programs that support the unique needs of immigrant and first-generation students.
The university has also invested considerable resources in both understanding and serving Boston’s major ethnic and racial groups, notably through its Collaborative of Asian American, Native American, Latino and African American Institutes. UMass Boston is one of only two universities in the U.S. to have freestanding research centers dedicated to studying the Asian American, Black, Latinx, and Native American experiences. The Chancellor notes, “not surprisingly, the other university is UCLA,” where he served as dean
and distinguished professor before returning to the commonwealth.
An increasingly diverse faculty is also a vitally significant change on campus.
“My father is Nigerian, my mother is American. So, this idea of two cultures coming together is something that I grew up in and also something that I carry with me,” said Bodunrin Banwo, who joined the faculty in fall 2021 as an assistant professor of leadership in education. “To be able to interact with a more diverse student body—students whose life experience is similar to mine—is really powerful.”
THE POWER OF DIFFERENCE
Serving a diverse student body makes UMass Boston stronger, say university faculty and administrators. That’s true on a stability level—students from immigrant families are making up an increasing share of overall college enrollments in the U.S.— as well as for the university’s educational and research missions.
“I see the transformation in my own students in my classes,” said Paul Watanabe, professor of political science and director of UMass Boston’s Institute for Asian American Studies. “The interchange of students from different countries and different places and different backgrounds is thrilling to see.”
The research has shown that diversity brings innovation and new ideas, said Professor of Biology Adán CólonCarmona, who studies how students from underrepresented groups learn and succeed in STEM fields. “That’s where the diversity piece is really important. And that’s exciting, because it means the potential that UMass Boston has, it’s enormous.” As Boston’s population continues to evolve, providing educational opportunity for the public—whoever that public is—will remain a foundational value for UMass Boston.
“UMass Boston has tried to serve that particular mission no matter what the makeup of the student body has been,” said Watanabe. “And that commitment is one that serves everybody. It lifts everybody up.”
Innocent is testament to that.
“Everyone has their own unique experiences that they can bring to the table,” she said. “UMass Boston really embraces those differences.”
Read the “Changing Faces of Greater Boston” report
Jaffna-Rose Innocent ’24
