Two Latino groups unite

Latino student groups Chicano Caucus and Accion Latina y Amigos are in the process of consolidating into a single club called Princeton Latinos. The merged clubs will operate as a single entity in the spring semester after the election of an executive board.

The new club will consist mostly of the two groups’ existing membership. Chicano Caucus and Accion Latina y Amigos leaders said the two groups decided to merge because of the increasing overlap of their events and membership. Chicano Caucus president David Munguia Gomez ’14 explained that consolidation would simplify coordination by placing all operations under the direction of a unified leadership.

Princeton Latinos’ new format will allow for increased member participation by creating committees in charge of focus areas such as politics, culture and community service.

Some members of the board were elected through an online process on Thursday and Friday. Rebecca Basaldua ’15 was elected to serve as co-president, among other results. The club intends to hold another round of elections for those positions that have not been filled.

“Members wanted to see more interaction between everyone,” Gomez said. “They wanted more avenues of participation.”

At the beginning of the fall semester, the two groups’ presidents began to discuss the possibility of consolidation. Gomez noted that though the two clubs were established with very different missions — Chicano Caucus aimed to facilitate Latino political activism, while Accion Latina promoted Latino culture — they are now serving similar purposes and often have the same attendees at their events.

“Lately we have been working more together. We have almost the same members for the two listservs,” Accion Latina y Amigos president Silvana Alberti ’14 said.

Both presidents said they were also concerned that most non-board members only participated in the clubs by attending events, rather than by planning events and becoming involved in other ways.

In response, they developed a plan to restructure their clubs to allow for increased involvement by all members. Latino Graduate Student Association undergraduate liaison Julio Herrera GS assisted in the consolidation process by sharing advice from his experiences working with a unified Latino club as an undergraduate at Columbia University.

“It only made sense for them to become one group so long as they organize the leadership in a way that you can still keep some of the traditions of the clubs that existed previously,” Herrera said.

He added that Princeton Latinos will increase involvement and coordination with the LGSA in the upcoming year.

To gauge interest in the consolidation idea, Gomez and Alberti then created a survey and sent it out to their respective listservs. Of the 60 respondents, 94 percent indicated they were in favor of the plan. At a town-hall style joint meeting of the two clubs in early December, current members also expressed support for the plan, Gomez said.

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Gomez and Alberti said they believe that the merger will result in easier event planning and coordination and wider participation and event attendance within Princeton’s Latino community.

“When you have two groups of people who are committed, that will breed an even stronger group that will propagate that energy into the broader campus to attract more people toward the event,” Herrera said. “That is what I wish for the club.”

Once the executive board is established, “there is freedom for them to see what people want and make their own events,” Gomez said. Many of the previous clubs’ executive board members will apply for the new leadership positions, Alberti noted.

According to Gomez, the Colombian Student Association and Friends will also merge with Princeton Latinos but has not yet begun logistical talks.