Las voces nuevas: Emerging scholarship on Latinas in leadership

It has been our pleasure as a team of CEDER editors and reviewers at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, a designated Hispanic-Serving Institution, to first make this call and now humbly present the body of work produced by Las voces nuevas. The scholarship that moved us initially was a body of dissertations produced by our own Latina doctoral students, all of whom live, work, and lead in public schools in the Rio Grande Valley, serving majority Latina/o students living in poverty. Being incredibly honored to call them our colleagues, as well as inspired by and in awe of the enormity of their work and impact on students in the border region, we not only felt their struggles and heard their pain as they lead in their current roles but were implored to illuminate their work. Their studies are based on numerous pláticas (Guajardo & Guajardo, 2013) with and testimonios (Beverly, 2005) of Latina leaders from South Texas, as well as several studies specifically from the geographic border region of Texas and Mexico. Yet, we were impassioned to further broaden the call, inviting voces nuevas from across the country. We are incredibly pleased to include this cacophony of new scholars’ voices. As noted by Martinez and Mendez-Morse (2021), the field is overdue in welcoming and embracing the insight, passions, and perspectives of Latina leaders, which must be unearthed from unpublished dissertations and laid bare on the landscape of this critical transformative period in education.