Hard Work and Heart Work: First-Generation Undocu/DACAmented Collegians, Cultural Capital, and Paying-it-Forward

ABSTRACT

This critical ethnography highlights how first-generation Latinx undocu/DACAmented collegians who are members of a social and advocacy student organization at a public, historically white institution in the Southwest, U.S.A develop a scholarship and peer-mentoring program for other students with liminal legal statuses. The theoretical connections that guide this study are social and navigational capital and seek to answer how these collegians use these forms of cultural wealth to develop different campus support services for their peers. The findings from this study reveal how these organizational members use their cultural capital to organize and network with various stakeholders to develop a scholarship for undocu/DACAmented students, in addition to applying for and obtaining grant funding to commence a peer-mentoring program. This study highlights the agency exercised and assets these first-generation collegians bring to college and offer institutional agents recommendations to support them better.

KEYWORDS:

• Advocacy
• activism
• cultural competency
• extracurricular involvement
• first-generation
• identity
• Latinx

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge and work to honorably write this article on the ancestral Native territory of the Seneca Nation, a member of the Haudenosaunee Six Nations Confederacy. I am grateful to respectfully live and work as a guest on these lands with the Indigenous Peoples who walked here before me and those who still call this home. Further, I thank all of the Latinx undergraduate undocu/DACAmented student collaborators who invited me into their lives and powerful spaces. You all are my heroes.

Notes

1. In 2001, the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM Act) legislative proposal was introduced to the U.S. Senate and House. If passed, it would provide a conditional pathway toward permanent residency and citizenship for undocu/DACAmented persons brought to the U.S. without authorization by their parents (Gonzales, 2010; Nguyen & Serna, 2014; Schmid, 2013). Over the years, there have been many revisions of the DREAM Act, with little bipartisan consensus and never successfully passed (Borjian, 2018; Cebulko, 2013).