After 123 credit hours, countless cups of coffee, and unmeasurable amounts of learning, here I am, finally graduating. For so long, I have tried to imagine how this moment would feel, and honestly I did not expect the overwhelming amount of celebratory emotions. Maybe this is because of the fact that unlike the trajectory of many students, my path to graduation has been planned for over thirty years.
In 1985 a young boy left his tiny town in the middle of a Central American war-torn country and traveled 2,700 miles north to the United States. His journey included many life-threatening risks; crossing through three countries with little money and being kidnapped by a cab driver. A few years later, he met a young woman he did not know would embark on the same journey north, except she would walk days through the desert with little water and protection. The young man and woman are my parents, both whom left their families and home to find refuge in the U.S., and pursue “The American Dream.”
Unlike most American families, pursuing higher graduation is a relatively new concept amongst Hispanic-Americans. Interestingly enough, the Pew Research Center reported that “the share of Hispanic high school graduates enrolled in college immediately after high school surpassed whites in 2012,” the year in which I graduated high school and enrolled at Kennesaw State University.
Despite the strides made by Hispanic-Americans enrolling in college, the low rates of college completion across the country amplify many of the barriers Hispanic-Americans face. According to a report by Excelencia en Education, “20 percent of Latino adults (25 and older) had earned an associate degree or higher, compared to 36 percent of all adults,” signaling a 16 percent gap between Latinos and the rest of the U.S. population.
There are also the individual experiences of being a first-generation college student as well as the first in a family to be born in America one cannot explain through statistics.
During my first semester at KSU, my political science professor assigned the class a 15 page paper on the U.S. Federal Court System, brutal for your first semester, I know. Because I knew from grade school that the language barrier prevented my mother from being closely involved with my education, I hardly explained to her my school assignments. Nonetheless, she always asked me how I was doing in school and my first college semester was no exception to her interest.
I expressed to her my confusion and stress over the political science paper to which she responded tearfully and helplessly, “Solo échale ganas mijo, yo se que tu puedes (Try your best son, I know you can do it.).”
At this moment, other parents who have gone to college in America might have directed their child to the class syllabus, writing center, or professor’s office. However, although I knew she wanted to give me this advice, she could not, she did not know how.
For my parents and many others with first-generation college students, “The American Dream” is not manifested through the white-picket-fence-two-children-husband-wife family illustration or its variants, but through the culmination of their struggle.
To my parents and other Hispanic and Latino parents, sending their children to college and watching them graduate is the reward to their struggle. The struggle entails having to endure the journey of migration, long work hours, language barriers, cultural barriers, wage-exploitation and being undocumented in America.
For my parents, their American Dream became real here, at KSU and through me–their first college graduate. With all of my heart, I can finally say, “¡Mama, lo hice! “Mama, I made it!”
