By 6:15 p.m. last Friday night, the private dining room in Adams House was already packed.

Mesa, a weekly event for members of RAZA, Harvard's Latino/Mexican-American student group, starts at 6 p.m., but undergraduates looking for a chance to unwind and have dinner with friends after a long week kept trickling in well past 7 p.m.

Mesa, a tradition that preceded RAZA and helped lead to its formation, also helps keep the group strong 25 years after several Harvard undergraduates were inspired by the civil rights movement to found an organization for students of Mexican-American heritage.

"The students began with the small organizational attempts of meeting once a week for the ever-popular Mesa," Rosa Rosalez '01, the group's representative to the Harvard Foundation, told RAZA members last term as they celebrated their 25th anniversary. "In doing so, they began to grow as a group and stretch the legs of a newfound collective identity."

But while RAZA may have been formed with a Mexican-American constituency in mind, the group has expanded over the last 25 years to encompass Latino students on campus as well.

And as the group has grown to be the largest Latino organization on campus--with about 50 active members and an e-mail list of 200--RAZA has been challenged to provide a community to students who might not otherwise find an ethnic home to turn to.

In the Beginning

The civil rights movement was not the only impetus for RAZA's creation, says Gonzalo C. Martinez '98, president of RAZA last year.

The need for a group for Mexican-American undergraduates became clear in 1972, Martinez says, five years after the first class of Mexican-American students from western and southwestern United States were admitted to Harvard.

The Mexican-American experience that led to RAZA's formation was reflected in the group's original constitution.

"We will support each other socially, intellectually and morally both in and out of the organization in order to survive the impersonal education process and transform our stay here into a more meaningful experience," it reads.

Still, Martinez says from the beginning the group's founders embraced Latino students on campus, if only because they knew there were few other alternatives.

"Regardless of its 'official' designation as a Mexican-American group, [RAZA] has always been a meeting place--a crossroads, if you will--of Harvard Latino and Latina students," Martinez wrote in an e-mail message.

RAZA's constitution today-which says its members are "determined to define [their] Mexican and Latino roots in the American political and social context"--is more explicit in defining its dual identity.

"We are Latinos at the same time we are Mexican-Americans," says Monica M. Ramirez '01, who is the group's academic affairs representative to the Harvard Foundation.