As a first-generation Mexican immigrant woman, who stands at just 5 feet tall, I knew navigating academe would be difficult.
I immigrated to the United States when I was four years old with my parents and four siblings. Although my parents lacked formal education and had very limited English skills, they knew they had to apply to legalize our status through the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.
How in the world did they know of the importance? How did they navigate the bureaucracy and legal paperwork? How were they able to gather the amount of money needed to legalize the status of all 7 members of my family on just a $16,000 annual salary? How did they know how to do all of it? I have asked them many times and their response is always the same: “we just knew we had to.”
Why is this relevant to my identity as a Latina mami scholar? Well, it forms the basis for my ability to legally reside within a country that has recently outright declared war on all immigrants. I am where I am today due to the Amnesty of 1986, my ability to effect change in the classroom, to contribute to society and to prepare educators to serve students all goes back to the opportunity granted to 3 million immigrants. Yet, it was only recently that I have begun to celebrate my intersecting identities – in particular that of being a Mexican born immigrant.
I live a complicated identity given my family unit is racially and culturally diverse, I self-identify as a critical scholar, and I am non-apologetic about being a #LatinaMamiScholar. My desire to effect change in the classroom is fueled by the numerous, deep, oozing, painful cuts inflicted upon me by a society that will never fully see me as an American. Then, I think about the term American and I have no connection to it, so why is it that I want to belong to a group that has outright excluded and violated so many of my intersecting identities?
The cognitive dissonance makes me dizzy, I don’t know what the answer is but I do know how it feels to live in a perpetual state of not being enough. I have forever dwelled in what Gloria Anzaldúa termed the borderlands. Not American enough, not Mexican enough, not academic enough, not critical enough, not … not … not … and the list goes on.
Yet, contemporary social political issues have jolted me into a constant state of alertness. As a Latina faculty member, I sense the weight and feelings of inadequacy many students are forced to withstanding every-single minute of the day; that has kicked into high gear the moral and ethical responsibility to center my academic-mother identity.
