I'm Not Allowed to Complain, But I Will Anyways

This is an opinion piece I wrote for my J2 final Spring 2022. I didn't manage to get it published anywhere, but I'm still proud of it and hope someone can get something from it.

One evening when I was a high school senior, my mom and I attended a workshop for first-generation college students. I’d been attending an after-school college-readiness program since the fourth grade, and now my counselor, Rene Jimenez, was giving a presentation. Nearly 90 percent of low-income, first-generation students, he said, don’t graduate within six years, and a third drop out within three years. I scoffed. Loudly. What was the point of a presentation dedicated to describing how much harder it would be for people like me to succeed?

Jimenez, with whom I’d grown close over the years, argued that students of color attending predominantly white institutions (PWI) feel as if their schools are not doing enough to make their campuses inclusive. First-generation low-income students, many of them BlPOC, feel that being admitted to top American universities is not enough. Once admitted, the price tag impedes several of these students from making the move to pursue a degree. The handful of students who do enroll into these schools may find, when they arrive, a student body that is culturally diverse, but diversity within campus falls short of the definition.

Students stick to their cultural cliques and make little to no effort to mix. Students who may tick several boxes across underrepresented populations feel like they can only fill one of these roles while identifying with many. This creates feelings of isolation, stunting academic achievement.

Maybe, I thought. But that wouldn’t happen to me. At the time, I had a strong sense of independence and capability. I was enrolled in all AP classes at Woodside High School, a Silicon Valley public school. More than half of the students were Latino, but I was proud to be one of the few brown faces in those classes. I was excelling academically and mixing well socially with every race. I’d even developed a bit of a superiority complex for my ability to assimilate and code-switch my way from being a young broke Mexican girl who didn’t know a word of English to becoming the sports and broadcast editor for my high school paper.

I knew Jimenez had to be wrong because I’d figured it out in high school and experienced first had it was possible to put those figures behind me and infiltrate Silicon Valley’s old money and nouveau riche society to reap the social benefits that I believed separated me from the 89%. 

My egotistical satisfaction with my socioeconomic infilitration grew still. Learning I was one of thirteen first-generation low-income students to receive a full scholarship at a top-ranked university, I was elated and grew even more arrogant. I thought I had it made. Now all I had to pay for was my flight and bar tab.

***

Into my first two weeks at Northeastern, I went through a breakup with my two-year long girlfriend from high school. In retrospect, I don’t know why I believed a long-distance relationship would work, but at that time I felt like a big part of my identity was suddenly lost and invalidated. I had to present the best version of myself to make friends and participate in class; simultaneously, I was putting all the blame on myself for losing someone I loved.

I didn’t stay cocky for long. During my first semester I found myself struggling to make any real connections with people in my dorm. I felt isolated in a culturally diverse city, and I failed to contribute to class discussions. Rene’s statistic began to loom larger and larger every day. In my bewilderment, the confidence I once had in high school was gone. What was it that made college so much more difficult—and less rewarding—for students like me? 

“Do I want to blend in with [rich white students] Or do I want to be something different? And I feel like that’s something that I’ve very much struggled with,” Alexia Huerta, a second-year nursing major, said. Huerta is a first-generation Mexican-Guatemalan student who comes from a predominantly Mexican neighborhood in northern Chicago.

The posh elitist culture at a school like Northeastern was more than I had been used to back home. Sixty-five percent of Northeastern students come from the top quintile of Americans with a median family income of $150,900, according to the New York Times. 

Meanwhile, less than three percent of students came from families making less than $20,000. Growing up in a similar socioeconomic bracket, I recognized at a young age that this didn’t have to stop me from hanging with the top 20%. But the problem wasn’t that I couldn’t hang; it was that they didn’t take me seriously. Or at least I felt like they didn’t.

I began to sense resistance from classmates that didn't look and speak like me . It soon became clear to me that the way I spoke, the slang I used, and the way I dressed wasn't on brand with the typical Northeastern student. Many students had the simplistic business-like collegiate essence that I obviously lacked when I pulled up to class in ripped baggie jeans, fitted caps, and hoodies with urban insignias. This had never been an issue before, but when I started to see other students in the same class casually talk about their weekend dinner plans in the North End or recap of last weekends hockey game at Mathews Arena, I started to question why I wasn't having similar interactions. I tried not to take it personally, but ending semesters without meaningful acquaintances—we didn't even have to be best friends—I found it hard not to question how I fit into the student populous. 

Unsurprisingly, I made better friends with other scholarship students and Boston locals my age who didn't attend university because they didn't have an interest or lost their interest because of barriers to entry. 

On top of being a class-based minority, I was also an ethnic and national minority. Establishing any sense of cultural connection was against the odds. I went from living in a city where nearly half of the total population identified as Latino to a city with only a tenth Latino population. At Northeastern, only 6.7% of the undergraduate student body identifies as Hispanic or Latino. And because Puerto Rican and Dominicans make up a large portion of the Latino population in Boston, my strong Mexican nationalist sentiments quickly set in. This exposed rifts among the Latino community for me, but this is a conversation for another time. Nevertheless, witnessing such cultural divides within the "Latino" label showed me how even then we may not fit in the place they put us. 

“I have such a loss of culture. Such a loss of family being over here,” Huerta said.

I felt like I couldn’t blame my cultural disconnection on the university. They supported student-led clubs like the Latin American Student Organization, the Northeastern Black Student Association, and the First-Generation Low-Income Student Union. According to Northeastern’s Cultural and Spiritual Life website, these centers’ primary goals are “advancing freedom, promoting justice, building relationships, facilitating inclusivity, educating across difference, and empowering our communities.” 

In hopes to feel more connected to my campus, I thought that attending the Latino cultural center would help me overcome this newfound fear. However, after attending some meetings, the cultural aspect felt forced. I felt like there was a Latino role I was cast to play. In no way was this the fault of other members. I knew some of them from my scholarship and casually hung out with them. But it felt like everyone was over emphasizing their identity as a Latino during group meetings to meet the defined cultural theme. I felt like I was only allowed to be a Latino—not even specifically Mexican—and nothing beyond.

And according to research, clubs like these don’t always “facilitate inclusivity.” In fact, it can have the opposite effect. “While ethnic-oriented student organizations on PWIs have been known to positively impact minority retention and graduation rates, these groups can also foster greater racial tension among racial groups and stifle social integration,” writes Dr. James Sidanius, a professor of psychology and African American studies at Harvard University, in his book “Diverse Challenge: Social Identity and Intergroup Relations on the College Campus.”

Why was I failing at something I thought I had figured out? I didn't feel like I was missing the class content, but was I actually academically inferior? Was it something more personal? What do I have to change to be in with these people? 

Ultimately, I blamed my cultural disconnection and my feelings of academic incompetence on myself. This was the source of my loneliness. The pressure to fulfill my role as a minority at a PWI with few means to do so was suffocating. The imposter syndrome set in and my participation in academics and campus life declined.

***

Higher education’s efforts to admit more diverse student bodies has improved since the issue first gained national attention in the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke Supreme Court case.

Since then, schools have had a moral and legal obligation to diversify student bodies on campus and create the avenues to promote a welcoming campus environment for students of all backgrounds.

“The ethnic-specific groups created on predominantly white campuses are necessary to combat the sense of isolation that many [minority] students feel ,” says Dr. Jarvis Sulcer, director of the Level Playing Field Institute which dedicates to educate universities and workplaces about equity and inclusion.

Students of color across elite universities have campaigned for cultural spaces where students of similar background can connect, express culture specific challenges, and support others who may be feeling the same pressures.

So, it’s not to say that cultural centers are counter-productive, but schools cannot completely rely on these centers to fix a problem that began at the admissions office.

While top schools have worked since Bakke to admit students that didn’t fall under the rich white male demographic, a New York Times report found that Black freshman enrollment at elite universities has seen little change since 1980. Since the same year, more Latinos attended elite universities. However, this increase in attendance is unproportioned to the growing Latino population.

Furthermore,“the benefits of diversity do not spontaneously arise merely from the presence of a varied student body,” writes Ronald Shaiko, Senior Fellow and the Associate Director for Curricular and Research Programs at Dartmouth College in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“It makes me feel real defensive and puts me in fear, fear of feeling incompetent or like I’m not able to articulate myself,” said Henry Natonabah, a second-year nursing major who is a member of the New Mexico Navajo Nation. “I think it’s the university’s fault for trying so hard to be diverse. They just end up segregating people deciding to stay with what they recognize. Now, you have all these different groups and people are left out.”

Not only is a diverse student body crucial to end this intrinsically occurring segregation on college campuses, but also a diverse faculty that can understand and sympathize with the problems students are facing. Universities’ failure to employ faculty that recognize social and economic issues specific to low-income students poses a threat to students who don’t have the same resources as other students.

“Sometimes, you need to have someone tell you, ‘Yo, you’re fucking poor. You’re here. So, like, get your shit together,” Huerta says. “We need advisors who realize that because now I have to talk to so many different advisors […] and not having any answer to what my question was. They need to focus on us a little bit more because I can’t be focused on this the same way someone who pays $70,000 tuition.”

Creating programs for low-income first-generation students is vital in preventing them from falling victim to Jimenez’s statistic. At Florida State University they initiated the Center of Academic Retention and Enhancement (CARE) which works with students like Huerta and Natonabah with proactive advising support. Since 2012, the program has helped 100% of their pre-collegiate students graduated high school and achieved graduation 92-98% rate among their college cohorts.

Chanie Datus, a third year combined political science and business administration major who is also a recipient of the Torch Scholarship, says that some faculty members are tasked to help guide these students going above and beyond to offer aid because they understand how much support they need. However, Datus expresses frustration when these “rare gems,” as she describes supportive faculty, feel unsupported by the university to offer significant guidance for students.

“They want to leave. They hate leaving the students, but they end up leaving to find a community that not only supports them in their efforts to support students, but that also supports students. The school that was supposed to be their support system was non-existent and it made it harder for them to do their job,” Datus said.

Datus also expresses her struggle with her mental and emotional health correlated to her experiences as an underrepresented demographic on campus. She talks about seeking therapy through Northeastern’s on-campus University Health and Counseling Services but was unable to find any meaningful help due to the slow and bureaucratic nature of Northeastern health services. It took her a month since beginning the process to speak with a counselor.

“It took me a long time to seek out help again, because if I’m going to go through all these hoops just to talk to someone and air out my problems and feel shitty about it during the process, just to feel better, why go through all this?” she said.

In one study, researchers found that first-generation women reported more depression symptoms than non-first-generation women. Additionally, they found that first-generation participants reported “less social support from family and friends, more single-event traumatic stress, less life satisfaction, and marginally more depression symptomatology than non-first-generation participant.”

First-generation students not only carry extra economic and racial baggage, but also mental ones. It is unfair to expect students who already carry so much to also carry their institutions short fallings. Universities must adapt and improve their systems to help both multi- and first-generation students. If academic success and recognition is so important to institution, and enjoin in the "brownie points" when marginalized demographics reap accolades for hard-work, they need to recognize systemic and historical challenges these individuals endure in order to support them in supporting themselves. 

***

After my first year, the social and academic pressures naturally faded away. I was able to go home and forget about my otherness on campus. I thought I would be able to go home and reconnect with all my friends, families, and community who would help me feel normal again.

Upon returning to me retail job at a Bay Area centered sports store, hanging out with my cousins, and seeing friends who had stayed away from pursuing a degree, I still felt out of place. I was no longer some kid from Redwood City trying to make it big by going to college, I was the kid who wasn’t paying a nickel to attend an elite university in Boston, a place foreign and irrelevant to many of their lives. Too many times did I watch my mom tell her friends I went to school in Boston and hear them ask where that was in the first place.

It felt like I was held to higher social status than everyone else, and anyone who found out what I was doing during school months suddenly felt like I was an intellectual looking down on their nine to five lifestyles.

I remember when my cousins threw me a surprise homecoming party at my cousin Ivonne’s apartment. My cousin Esme and Joanna picked me and told me we were going to Chick-Fil-A because that was always what we did. Then they suggested we visit Suzzie instead, though I found it strange that they didn’t call her beforehand to make sure she was home. When we arrived at her door the lights were off and was extremely bashful when everyone yelled "welcome home!"  

At that moment, I felt like myself again. Even better because all my cousins and some of their friends were there which is rare since we all suck at organization and punctuality.

I was talking about life in Boston and complaining about how hard it was, how I felt outcasted, and how I just wish I could stay home. Things took a turn then.

One of my cousins who was the same year in college as me at a UC, told me to stop complaining because at least I didn’t have to pay the full price tag like she had to pay. I thought she was probably right and when no one protested her comment, I couldn’t help but believe that everyone else agreed with what she had said.

Everything I felt at school I felt then. And it wasn't a new feeling I experience among family and friends at home. Growing up, and especially in high school, I was always thought of as white-washed for the way I talked, my good grades, and my masterful code-switching that slowly turned into my real tone.

Too white here, too brown there. I could never met anyone's expectations. I genuinely don't know how to act around people anymore.

I was not allowed to complain because of the extraordinary opportunities presented before me.

***

Solving intrinsic campus segregation is a communal effort. Overcoming imposter syndrome is something I have yet to solve for myself. And while my journey leading up to Northeastern has been anything but easy, I realize now that I owe more credit to myself than I have allowed myself to acknowledge.

It is because of my resilience that I managed to earn a fully comprehensive scholarship to a 6.7% acceptance rate school. It is because of the “work harder” mentality my Mexican culture is built own that I can recognize this journey wasn’t supposed to be easy in the first place. How could I have expected it to be easy? There has been a generational effort in my family to ensure I had the opportunity to seek a degree. Administrations and multi-generational college students need to recognize this when they see brown faces in white spaces.

But ultimately, it is up to me to show myself what I am made of and take no shit. 

Leroy S. Jackson, scholarship academic advisor for Northeastern’s Opportunity Scholarship and Outreach Program, said, “I was always taught you got to reach the standards. We’re not going to feed you. We will show you where to go get your food. We’re not going to keep feeding you so you can learn how to do things by yourself.”