On Being Indigenous, Mexican, and a Professor

When I introduce myself to a new class, I say: My name is Maria E. Cruz, PhD. I am a First-Generation Indigenous Mexican Latina from the Bay Area. I am the first in my family to go to college. And I am here because the educators who came before me held the door open.

Every semester, at least one student comes to my office hours afterward and says some version of: I didn't know professors could say that.

They can. They should.

The academy has long rewarded a particular kind of self-presentation — one that brackets identity, that performs a kind of universal neutrality, that treats embodied knowledge as a liability rather than an asset. I was trained, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, to soften my identity in professional spaces. To lead with credentials and footnotes and jargon. To let the institution confer legitimacy rather than bringing it myself.

I unlearned that.

Not out of defiance, but out of clarity. The research I do is shaped by who I am. The questions I ask about Indigenous women's pedagogies, about bilingual schooling, about first-generation student experience — these questions come from my life. To pretend otherwise would be to produce scholarship that is less true, not more.

My Indigenous Mexican heritage carries with it a way of knowing that Western academic traditions have systematically devalued: knowledge held in community, passed through relationships, accountable to the people rather than to the institution. I bring that epistemology into my classroom not as an artifact but as a living framework.

For my students who are Latinx, Indigenous, mixed-race, undocumented, first-generation: you are not here despite who you are. You are here because of who you are. The university does not do you a favor by admitting you. You do the university a favor by bringing the knowledge, the questions, and the community wisdom that its walls were never designed to hold.

Your identity is not an obstacle to rigorous scholarship. It is the source of your most important intellectual questions.

And the classroom — our classroom — is a space where those questions belong.