Concordia and NHI: A partnership that goes back more than 40 years

Even without the Texas LDZ, Concordia University Texas played a pivotal role in the early history of the National Hispanic Institute.

In 1982, the three-year-old nonprofit organization, under Ernesto Nieto and Gloria de Leon’s leadership, was offered the opportunity to rent space on its Central Austin campus just north of the University of Texas, just as it was beginning to articulate its vision for developing leaders for the Latino community. That year, Nieto and de Leon oversaw a program for a group of Austin students that included a demo for what would become the Lorenzo de Zavala Youth Legislative Session.

They knew they wanted to incorporate the Texas State Capitol into the first-ever Texas LDZ in 1983, but needed a college campus as a home base for students traveling throughout the state. Looking around their own home base — at the dorms, the chapel, and the newly-built Woltman Activity Center — they realized Concordia could provide what the program needed.

“I can tell you for a fact that I was nervous,” Nieto said, recalling that first LDZ. “And the night before the program, I couldn’t sleep at all. I kept asking Gloria if she thought we were going to get the numbers we were after. We were after 200. And she kept saying not to worry about that; they would come. And I remember getting up early in the morning, taking off for the airport. A plane had just landed. I walked into the airport and there was a bunch of kids from El Paso waiting. It made me feel good.”

And then, throughout the day, as more than 180 high school students from across the state converged on Concordia, Nieto realized, “This is actually going to happen.”

After the program, de Leon says the students recognized LDZ was something NHI needed to continue. “The kids admitted they carried biases about their own community. They realized they were wrong to dismiss or categorize Latinos as disinterested in going to college. Instead, they realized that at the LDZ, they were in the midst of young people who were just like them: intelligent and ambitious and forward-thinking.”

“It was really that deep recognition that something special had happened and that they had found their community,” she added. “It was validating, feeling that confidence of ‘I’m not alone out here’ … that they do have a lot of people, a huge network, that is going to actually be there for a lifetime for them.”

Concordia’s link to Latino students

While the Texas LDZ has worked with a number of host institutions since the first one, it’s now back with Concordia University Texas, which moved to its current Northwest Austin campus in 2008. According to the university’s Vice President of Student Services, Cindy Melendez, 36% of Concordia University Texas’ entire student population identifies as Latino, across its undergraduate, graduate, and online programs.

She sees some commonalities between Concordia University Texas as a Hispanic Serving Institution and National Hispanic Institute as a nonprofit committed to Latino leadership education. Those include:

• A commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. Melendez said, “We are dedicated to safe spaces that continue to foster collaboration, learning and community. As a host institution for LDZ, we are committed to fostering our future community leaders, particularly within the Latino community. This commitment is entrenched in our institutional values of faith and learning.”
• An emphasis on the empowerment of individuals to take on leadership roles. She noted, “In line with NHI’s important work engaging youth in community-based roles, CTX empowers students to lead lives of critical thought, compassionate action, and courageous leadership — all important components that we see represented in NHI’s work.”
• Understanding and valuing the diverse backgrounds represented in its students. She observes, “Therefore, it’s important that we collaborate on efforts that highlight the importance of community and working together.”

Daniel Guerrero, an NHI alumnus and former mayor of San Marcos, Texas, now chair of Concordia University Texas’ Master of Business Administration (MBA) program, feels that partnering with NHI gives his school an opportunity to continue to show what it’s truly about.

“I think, for Concordia, it’s a sense of here’s an opportunity to connect with a community that’s a big part of Austin, Travis County, Central Texas, all things in between. And we want to be a part of that. I think one of the aspects of when I first came on as full-time faculty and now as a program director, an administrator, is that sense of the university putting its money where its mouth is and saying, ‘Hey, we want the faculty to be reflective of our student body … those students need to see somebody that looks like them, talks like them, has a similar story to them. Not just at the front of the classroom but also leading our programs. And so I think that’s a big part of this of this program is trying to demonstrate and emphasize our commitment to diversity, our commitment to the Latino community.”

Guerrero also finds his school offers Latino students something exceptional.

“We have a really unique community,” he asserts. “I mean, we’re one of two universities in the entire country that are adjacent to a green space. And so just to be in that environment, to have that natural setting, and that beauty and to kind of see that, hey, you know, you don’t have to go to a 60,000 or 70,000 enrollment school to get a good education and to meet people. You know, we’re a smaller school. We’re not that far. But there’s a tremendous value to being part of that experience.”

Why the Texas LDZ has endured

When NHI launched its first Texas LDZ, de Leon was struck by a figure she still remembers to this day: “We came across a report from the Department of Education that predicted that for every 100 Hispanic children that were entering kindergarten in 1980, four out of every 100 would be lucky to graduate from high school, and only one out of every 100 would graduate from college. So I know for me, I never forgot that it shocked me … we needed to have a sizable number of students going on to college.”

“The most important part,” Nieto recalled, “is the shift that took place in the work of the Institute, shifting attention from reporting the poverty, the humility and the problems and the issues, which was a popular thing to do, and then taking the spotlight and placing the promise, the talent within the potential of young people … What we wanted to do is amplify the promise of the future to these kids into being excited about themselves and their purposes.”

Nieto and de Leon have worked with many higher education institutions since the first program at Concordia, and those early years helped them understand what they were doing was needed.

“We were stunned at how many colleges and universities came, and then they reaffirmed that these kids were different, that they were the kind of child that could compete at any university,” de Leon recalls. “So there was a lot of affirmation and things that we did from the get-go, the first year, that we just were able to build upon.”

And yet, it all started with one institution’s belief.

“Concordia was the first university that stepped up and believed in us and started something that now, and I want to say that we’ve done over 150 LDZs nationally and internationally. We’re glad to be back as partners with them.”

The 2024 Texas LDZ will be held at Concordia University Texas and the Texas State Capitol from July 21-28, made possible in part by Walmart.