What It Means to Be First

When I walked across the stage at U.C. Berkeley as an English major — when my first language was Spanish — it was a milestone no one in my family had reached before. I was also the first in my family to receive a master's and a PhD, both from the University of Texas at Austin in Social Cultural Anthropology.

Being first is not a simple triumph. It is layered with survivor's guilt, imposter syndrome, and a particular kind of loneliness — the experience of straddling two worlds fluently enough to function in each but fully belonging to neither.

It is also an extraordinary gift.

Being first means you carry a door with you wherever you go. You have crossed a threshold that was once closed to your family, and now you can hold it open. Every student I mentor, every policy I champion, every lecture I give is an act of holding that door.

What institutions often get wrong is the assumption that getting students in is enough. Admission is not belonging. A scholarship is not a community. A first-generation student who arrives on campus without mentors, without financial literacy support, without a single professor who looks like them — that student is set up to struggle in silence.

When I returned to SJSU as faculty, I made a decision: I would be visible about where I came from. I would tell my students that I was the first in my family. That I almost left in my sophomore year. That the professor who kept me was a Chicana woman who called me into her office and said, you have something important to say. Don't go.

Representation is not a buzzword. It is a lifeline.

To every first-generation student reading this: your presence in academic spaces is not accidental and not charity. You earned your place. And more — you are changing what those spaces mean, what knowledge they honor, and whose futures they shape.

The first opens the door. But we were never meant to be the last.