Corey Hoffman

ASUO President Prissila Moreno on the steps of Johnson Hall after ASUO met with UO President Karl Scholz to request commitment to building a Latinx Cultural Center. The meeting was held on April 23, 2026. (Corey Hoffman/Emerald)

The University of Oregon has claimed to be supportive of its students of color, with various emails and statements being sent out, but it remains one of the few institutions in the Big Ten that does not provide a dedicated space or service for Latiné students. Latiné students currently make up the second-largest ethnic group at UO, and, under the Latinx coalition, many are calling for institutional changes to improve services. 

The Latinx coalition was created over the winter to organize an effort to establish a designated Latiné Cultural Center on campus, similar to the South Asian, Southwest Asian and North African Center introduced last year. However, the road to meeting with administrators and sharing information with staff has been unfruitful.

“It’s one thing for (Scholz) to claim ignorance about an issue and say he doesn’t know how to address them,” Prissila Moreno, the ASUO president, said. “It’s another thing to have students in the room telling you exactly what they need and still refusing to (take action).”

Moreno has been a vocal advocate for this center and has spent weeks trying to get a meeting with the administration to discuss these concerns, and only succeeded after countless emails on April 23. Administration was unable to confirm support for the Latiné Cultural Center and instead proposed another task force. 

“I would have really liked to see the university recognize the political moment and find a way to support our community through a tangible center,” Moreno said. This was in relation to the prolonged response to ICE alerts and official campus-wide statements for threats on immigrant students and those with immigrant families. 

The Latinx coalition has been meeting every Friday to discuss next steps for the Latiné Cultural Center; the group includes ASUO, Latiné Male Alliance, MEChA de UO, Muxeres and UO YDSA. They have arranged conversations with Oregon legislators to build statewide support for the center as well, and have reached out to other institutions within the Big Ten Conference to learn about the logistics of building a Latiné Cultural Center. 

“Just to get into that room and to be told that our coalition starts and ends with conversations about how nice it would be to have a center, whereas an administrator’s job is to bring the doers into the room, is extremely disheartening,” Moreno said. “We have been the doers and we will continue to be the doers.”

LMA interns conducted a financial feasibility study and found that the building cost would be approximately $200,000. They drafted a proposal to allocate that amount from the over-realized ASUO fund; the proposed funds would cover staffing, infrastructure, programming and community-building investments for the center. 

“I went to visit Oregon State’s Centro Cultural César Chávez, and I saw how welcoming the staff was, and the communal ground where people can share their cultures. While I was happy to see that, of course, I felt jealousy, envy and disappointment – not at Oregon State, but it’s like ‘why aren’t we doing that?’” Giovanni Bazan-Espain, the president of LMA, said. “Why not? Why can’t we have one?”

In a past statement to the group, University of Oregon President Karl Scholz said, “I can almost guarantee there will be no commitment” to funding a Latiné Cultural Center. The most recent meeting prompted some consideration, but it ultimately failed to secure commitments.

“We just saw that UO needed to implement ICE notifications because of a mandate – it took them a government mandate to actually protect their students,” Bazan-Espain said. “The time to fight is now; we need to get to work now.”