MONTOYA NAMED INTERIM DIRECTOR OF UNM'S SHRI

June 27, 2003

MONTOYA NAMED INTERIM DIRECTOR OF UNM'S SHRI

University of New Mexico Vice Provost for Research Terry L. Yates has announced the appointment of Margaret M. Montoya, UNM Professor of Law, to serve as interim director of the Southwest Hispanic Research Institute (SHRI).

Montoya succeeds Felipe Gonzales who will return to his full-time position as professor in UNM's Department of Sociology. UNM Provost Brian Foster earlier announced that UNM will conduct a national search next academic year for a full-time director of the Southwest Hispanic Research Institute. Montoya will serve as interim director during that time and will help with the national search to identify a new director.

She will also coordinate the national conference of the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) to be held in Albuquerque next spring. The conference will draw about 1,500 professors, teachers and students to Albuquerque for a three-day agenda of research presentations, keynote speakers and national awards.

This summer and early fall, SHRI will collaborate with the UNM School of Law to sponsor a series of meetings with professors, judges, lawyers, academic administrators, public policy makers, alumni/ae and the media to explain the Supreme Court's decision in the Grutter and Gratz affirmative action cases. Montoya is part of a national coalition of civil rights organizations and activists that is preparing an immediate response to the decisions by the Court. They are preparing and will distribute materials within one week of the decision.

Montoya is also working with UNM School of Law Dean Suellyn Scarnecchia to have a coordinated public response about the case soon after the opinion is released. She has begun organizing some of the meetings with the Hispanic Bar Association, the Black Lawyers and Indian Bar Associations, as well as key figures in the judicial system.

Montoya is a graduate of the Harvard University Law School. She joined the UNM School of Law faculty full-time in 1992. Before that, she was an adjunct and visiting assistant professor in the law school, and special assistant to former UNM President Gerald May on affirmative action and diversity. She is an accomplished author with articles in several law and academic journals on topics related to affirmative action, critical legal studies, Latinas and the law and Chicano school segregation.

Gonzales headed the Institute for seven years where he generated funding and secured resources for a variety of interdisciplinary research and educational outreach projects. Among them was sponsorship in 2000 of the New Mexico portion of El Río, one of the Smithsonian Institution's primary public programs in Washington, D.C., and featuring the folklife of the culture region along the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo River basin.

In 2001 the Institute organized Tradition and Destiny, a symposium which reviewed the current status of Hispanic land grants in the Southwest. One of the Institute's ongoing projects involved La Frontera: Una Concepción Nueva, a yearly collaboration with La Universidad Autónoma de Baja California Sur, La Paz, Mexico, that brought together scholars from Mexico, the United States, France, Belgium and Argentina for symposia on border issues in general.

# # #