Vision: The BEST Research Center will be a hub of creativity, critically and socially transformative decolonial and impactful research in Ethnic Studies, sustainable relationship building, and place-based learning with all New Mexicans. 

Mission: The BEST Research Center is emerging from a recognized need for services oriented toward empowerment, healing and reconciliation, community building, and bridging information and knowledge gaps with Ethnic St Ethnic Studies, and place and relational learning in New Mexico. The BEST RC is motivated to support social justice causes through research informed by critical place inquiries, decolonial praxis, programmatic efforts, policy advocacy, sustainable and equitable partnerships, and critical social practices.  

The BEST Research Center’s mission is to co-create knowledges rooted in place and Borderlands histories to generate practices of justice, love, and liberation based on relational ethics answerable to people and place. It is dedicated to promoting understanding and awareness of the New Mexican experience through a concerted effort in five areas: K20 education, community engagement, scholarly research dissemination or accessibility, social justice advocacy and activism, and policy analysis.  

The research center opens space to collaborate with stakeholders, policymakers, educators, and community members to transform the Ethnic Studies and critical place and relational learning landscapes (curriculum and pedagogies) of New Mexico. Promoting decolonial-thinking collaborations, knowledge co-co-creation efforts will amplify cultural and linguistic inclusivity, foster critical thinking toward imaginative learning and future-thinking citizens, knowledge co-creation efforts will amplify cultural, and linguistic inclusivity, foster critical thinking toward imaginative learning and future-thinking citizens and give rise to the reclamation and dissemination of place-based knowledge and solution-making.  

Research: Decolonial research breaks away from normalized Western/colonizing ways of knowledge production. Instead, decolonial research is based on anti-colonial knowledges and lived experiences from the borderlands, global south, and Indigenous peoples. Decolonial research approaches/methodologies are guided by relationality, deep trust, radical love, and desire for harmony. They aim to co-create a praxis of living an "Otherwise" beyond colonial logics and practices. Potentially, decolonial research methodologies include land and place-based studies, analysis of colonial systems, research-based art/art-based research, and so much more!