Tamari Jenkins, M.A.
Tamari Jenkins has worked as an educator for 29 years. She has mainly taught Spanish language and literature courses and is a tenured member of the faculty at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, CA. More recently Tamari has transitioned into a leadership role in faculty and professional development and she currently serves as Chaffey’s Faculty Success Center Facilitator. Prior to her position at Chaffey, Tamari taught at other area community colleges in the Inland Empire such as Riverside Community College, San Bernardino Valley College, and in the private college sector at Claremont McKenna College and at the University of Redlands. She is a graduate of Pacific Union College where she received her B.A. degree in Spanish and she attended the University of California Riverside, where she received her M.A. degree in Spanish linguistics with an emphasis in dialectology.
Tamari’s students would say she has a gift for breaking down the mechanics of language but she is passionate about teaching culture, specifically Afrolatina culture, which has widely been diminished and in some cases erased from the history books of many Latin American countries. Tamari also loves to mentor her students who are serious about attaining language fluency and to advise them on study abroad opportunities and connect them with various resources to help them achieve their goals. In 2005, Tamari co-founded a networking organization called African American Linguists and she has been continuously active in efforts to create a sense of community for other African American educators and students who are highly underrepresented in her field. She has facilitated and presented at dozens of professional conferences on equity, diversity, and inclusion as it relates to the world language field and to higher-ed administration. She recently co-authored an article that was published in The Language Educator magazine entitled, “Increasing Black Representation in Languages: Lessons from the Past and Present.”
Outside of Spanish teaching, Tamari has a variety of other interests and endeavors. When it comes to health, she has a holistic approach and strives in the pursuit of balance between mind, body, and spirit. Since January of 2023, Tamari has done health and weight management coaching for a respected wellness program. She has helped about a dozen people in pursuit of their health and weight loss goals. Tamari and her husband Raymond have two children, ages 19 and 11. Their youngest child was adopted into their family as an infant and since then Tamari has served as an advocate for adoption and foster- care, with the specific goal of inspiring more Black families to adopt and help mitigate the
disproportionate number of Black children in foster care systems. Tamari loves travel, yoga, hiking, genealogical studies and all things related to Black familial history and identity around the world. She is deeply honored to be a Healthy Heart Nation Ambassador as she has the utmost respect for the leadership, mission, and vision behind this movement.
