I want it for me': 1st-generation College Student Beats COVID Barriers to stay in School

This in-depth account of college student, Guillerminia Gutierrez Martinez' struggles, with getting through college provides a good sense of what many immigrant families are coping with in the context of the current pandemic. 

If navigating college is hard in normal times, one can only imagine just how difficult things are for them now. Most positively, it points to the resilience, intelligence, aspirations, and dogged determination of students that emanate from among the most marginal sectors of society.  

I so admire them. Thanks to Jorge Haynes for sharing.

-Angela Valenzuela

Lindsay Schnell, USA TODAY

Published 5:20 PM CDT May. 20, 2021 Updated 4:35 PM CDT May. 21, 2021

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Guillermina Gutierrez Martinez picked at her cuticles and let out a shaky breath. Her left leg bounced nervously as her right foot nudged the accelerator. She balled up her fist and pushed away a tear, clearing her vision of the road ahead. 

Will they think I’m a failure? Will they lie to their friends because they’re ashamed?

Crammed into her 2007 Ford Fusion were remnants of her life in the University of Washington dorms: A king-size grey Mexican blanket, storage containers bursting with winter clothes, a suitcase stuffed with textbooks and a camera. This is what she’d packed two years ago when she left her hometown to chase a college education, the dream of so many first-generation Americans and their parents. 

It was May 2020. Two months earlier, COVID-19 had exploded just 13 miles from UW, shuttering campus and moving classes online. Guillermina thought the extra free time meant she could take on more; while enrolled in 15 credits she doubled her work hours from 20 per week to 40 at the downtown Seattle Target, desperate to help her family as the economy cratered. But the dueling responsibilities crushed her. She fell behind on homework. When she discovered she could withdraw without financial penalty in the seventh week of a 10-week spring term, Guillermina dropped out.
Guillermina Gutierrez Martinez talks about her upbringing while driving around Mount Vernon, Washington, her hometown. A keychain replica of the Fearless Girl statue on Wall Street is pictured hanging on her keys. The souvenir from New York City reminds Gutierrez Martinez to keep pushing herself.BRIAN MUNOZ, USA TODAY

One week later, she was hurtling backward: back to her house, back to parents she couldn’t look in the eye. 

She sniffed and wiped her nose with her sleeve as “Breathe,” from the “In the Heights” soundtrack, filtered through her car speakers: 

When Guillermina first heard that song in high school, she made a silent promise to herself that she’d get out too — to get an education, a profession, her own home. 

Continue reading here.

Beautiful piece in The Hill by my colleague, Dr. Rebecca Callahan.  It dovetails perfectly with my earlier post on how to combat hate like what we witnessed recently in Pittsburgh.  Key quote:

 [C]hildren of immigrant parents have demonstrated higher than average participation in America’s democracy.

Research also suggests that bilinguals and children of immigrant parents show significantly higher levels of empathy than monolinguals. As colleagues and I have argued elsewhere, this empathy is a critical step toward civic investment. By definition, children of immigrants, who comprise one in four children in our public schools today, have grown up navigating two perspectives: that of their parents, and that of larger society, including their school and teachers. This ability to recognize others’ perspectives is essential to becoming an active, engaged citizen. A true democracy thrives when it embraces diverse perspectives and experiences.

Let's also remember that vast numbers of recent immigrants emanate from Latin American countries with strong democratic traditions. 
 
We should therefore not only not scapegoat the immigrant community, but we should actually have an asset-based approach.  In the classroom, this should translate into inclusive, equity-based, and culturally sustaining pedagogy and curriculum.

Great job, Dr. Callahan! Keep up the great work!

Angela Valenzuela

Immigrants and their children can save our democracy and revive our country; they always have

 

BY REBECCA CALLAHAN, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 10/30/18 01:30 PM EDT

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

Getty Images

With the November midterms quickly approaching, many Americans believe 

that our democracy is under siege. Yet it may just be the children of 

immigrants, those young people whose parents are so frequently maligned 

in public discourse and in the press, who can save it. It is these young 

bilingual citizens, the children of immigrant parents, who are one of 

democracy’s greatest social assets — future voters, civic organizers, and 

political leaders.  

A half century ago, in the midst of the War on Poverty, President Lyndon 

Baines Johnson signed the Bilingual Education Act into legislation. 1968 

marked the federal government’s first attempt to address equity through 

language instruction in the schools, and bilingual education emerged as a  

weapon in the war on poverty, enabling bilingual, biliterate students, 

primarily the children of immigrant parents, to become contributing 

members of Johnson’s “Great Society.”

Continue reading here.

 

America's Top High School Science Students Are the Children of Immigrants

A lesser known, and for some, counterintuitive fact, is the astounding achievement of many children of immigrant youth who make, and have always made, our indicators look good.  This despite recent changes to H-1B visas as noted below,  in addition to a recent, unfortunate change as noted in a February 23, 2018 news report in USA Today, that the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) dropped the specific language of being a "nation of immigrants" to describe our country.  These changes, of course, are in the context of the persistent demonizing of immigrants by the Trump administration in our country by a president who is himself the grandson of an immigrant and whose wife is an immigrant.  Such hypocrisy, narrow-mindedness, and meanness from the top echelons of power.

-Angela

America's Top High School Science Students Are the Children of Immigrants

By ROB WILE

March 14, 2017

Courtesy of Society for Science & the Public

If the children of immigrants somehow disappeared from the U.S., America would suddenly be in a serious science talent deficit.

That’s the conclusion that can be drawn from a new report from the National Foundation for American Policy, a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to public policy research on trade, immigration, and education.

The organization found that 33 of the 40 finalists of the 2016 Intel Science Talent Search–the leading science competition for U.S. high school students, run by the Society for Science & the Public and now known as the Regeneron Science Talent Search–were the children of immigrants. Specifically, 30 out of the 40 finalists had parents who worked in America on H-1B visas, the option that is no longer available for expedited processing due to a recent policy change from the Trump administration.

“The science competition has been called the ‘Junior Nobel Prize,'” the Foundation says. “These outstanding children of immigrants would never have been in America if their parents had not been allowed into the U.S.”

Their ranks have been steadily increasing since 2004, the Foundation showed.

Here were the countries of origins for the 2016 finalists’ parents: India was No. 1 at 14, followed by China at No. 11.

And of the nine winners of the 2016 competition, seven were the children of immigrants.