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research that focuses specifically on classroom engagement processes in higher education and more specifically in community colleges serving our most diverse students (Deil-Amen, 2015). Increasingly, "non-traditional" community college students who do not reside on campus have become the more normative college students (Deil-Amen, 2015; Stevens, 2015). Community college students, unlike campus residing peers, often do not participate in extracurricular activities, have limited time to take advantage of campus services (Saenz et al., 2011), have varying degrees of academic preparation, and face 675726E PAXXX10.

Various inequities and challenges facing Latinx students in community colleges continue to be documented. Yet, less documented are the challenges associated with advocacy efforts to support Latinx and other underrepresented Students of Color within the community college sector. There is not often pause to consider: who advocates for Latinx students? When and how does this advocacy take shape? In this article, we offer Chicana testimonios as institutional research (IR) professionals to highlight ways we experience, respond to, and challenge institutionalized racism and systemic obstacles to advocate for Latinx students in the California community college system. We situate our testimonios within a critique of the pillar of neutrality associated with the institutional research profession and argue for a critical examination of the ways in which IR may play an active role in the perpetuation or the dismantling of educational inequities in California community colleges.

This chapter describes the importance of students’ conceptualizations of race, defined as the abstract ideas that students have about race as well as how they express these ideas as influencing their own experience or that of the social identity group(s) to which they belong. Empirical findings from a study of racial conceptualization among Latino male community college students attending a 2‐year Hispanic Serving Institution in Southern California are presented. Implications of racial conceptualization for programmatic interventions and curriculum development are discussed.

The campus climate literature obscures the complexity of individuals' perspectives in relation to multiple dimensions of the broader learning environment. Unexamined are the ways students from marginalized backgrounds may respond to oppressive dimensions of the campus climates in unique ways that moderate observed outcome differences. To fill this gap,