After years of working toward a career as a tenure track professor, Sylvia left this path in academia under duress. And getting her Peruvian parents to understand her decision also proved challenging. And Dr. Michelle Espino Lira, who studies Latinos in higher education, speaks with Juleyka about connecting our bold acts of self-advocacy with the grit and resolve our parents modeled for us.
Featured Expert:
Dr. Michelle M. Espino Lira is an assistant professor of higher education, student affairs, and international education policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Espino Lira investigates the individual, organizational, and community factors that affect educational attainment and career pathways for racial/ethnic minorities. For the past few years, her work has focused on Latina/o/x student and faculty experiences. Her research engages in the following lines of inquiry: (1) advancing critical theoretical and methodological approaches that enable scholars to conduct meaningful and rigorous educational research; (2) analyzing the interplay between educational institutions and racial/ethnic factors, exposing the social inequities that undermine individual motivations to study and work in colleges and universities; and (3) offering critical perspectives that counter traditional deficit-centered representations of racial/ethnic minorities and promote assets-based strategies. In 2019 Dr. Espino Lira launched “Latinx Intelligentsia” a podcast dedicated to uplifting Latinx/a/o students, scholars, practitioners, families, and communities as they journey to and through higher education. Learn more about her work and research here.
If you loved this episode, listen to Taking a Break from Grad School, Then Telling Her Parents and Is Tenure the End or the Beginning (from our sibling podcast, How to Talk to [High Achievers] about Anything.
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Juleyka Lantigua:
Hi, everybody. Today we're so happy to have Sylvia on the show. Sylvia was passionate about a career as a university professor, and her Peruvian parents were always her biggest supporters. But once in academia, Sylvia faced significant challenges that left her discouraged and confused. When she had to make really big and really risky career decisions, it was hard to explain to her family why she needed to move on from her dream job. Let's get into it.
Sylvia: My name is Sylvia. I'm a first generation Peruvian American, and I was born and raised in Miami, Florida. I call my parents mami and papi. Growing up in my family, my parents worked really hard, multiple jobs to send my sister and I to private school. Education was definitely prioritized in my family. Early on in my graduate training, I knew that I wanted to become a professor, in particular, pursue a tenure track faculty position. I was fortunate to be able to accomplish that, and it was essentially my dream job. That's what I pursued my PhD for and I was very excited that it happened.
When I think back to the challenges that I experienced in the tenure track faculty position, the one that kind of really hit hard for me was when it came time for me to apply for tenure. The way it usually goes in most programs, including the program that I was in, when you apply for tenure, you also apply for a promotion. It usually goes kind of hand in hand. When it came to end of my fourth year, fifth year, I was getting ready to submit my application and essentially I was told that I could only apply for promotion, not tenure. The reasons I was given was that they were working on the tenure policy and updating it and it wasn't ready to be finalized, and so I had to wait.
I was shocked. That's not what my understanding of the procedure and the policy was. There were several meetings that I had with the chair and eventually it got to the provost. It just became clear that I was probably not going to have the opportunity to apply for tenure in a near future. I decided it was time to move on and decided to do a job search and look for other positions. When I shared with my parents that I was leaving, they were definitely supportive in my decision, but at the same time, I could sense sadness in that, sharing it with my dad, his initial response was, "But you've put in so much time. You've put in so many years."
It was hard. It was hard to hear that. I always think of my parents when I make these decisions and when I have these opportunities, because they came from the sacrifices that they made. I ended up going a different route and I went into academic medicine, which, to be honest, initially was not what I wanted to do. That's not why I pursued a PhD. And that really didn't hit me until I started this new job and I started seeing patients. it was just a, wow, this is not what you want to do. It turned into first disappointment and sadness, and then I got angry. Although I could never get the tenure status that I would've wanted, I knew that there was an opportunity to create change.
To me, that involved changing the system. The best way to do that was filing a lawsuit against this university for what I experienced as being blocked from applying for tenure. When I was explaining the reason behind why I was filing a lawsuit to my parents, I really emphasized the aspect about the systemic inequities. I definitely did not use the word inequities because I didn't even know how to translate that directly. I don't even know how to say it in Spanish. That was hard for my parents to understand. They ended up in a community that's very Latino, so they're surrounded by Latinos. Many of their providers are Latinos, physicians, nurses.
I had to break it down and remind them that that wasn't the case in all my academic spaces. I was the only Latina for the most part in my graduate program, only Latina in my fellowship, and then also the only Latina in my junior faculty position. But in addition to that, I was usually the only person of color, and that was something that I don't think my parents had ever thought about nor realized. They saw it like, "Well, you and your sister pursued graduate school and you were able to do it and you "made it" so others can do it." But they didn't realize that that's not necessarily the case.
I was very fortunate that I had a mentor in my undergraduate years that took me under her wing when I joined her research lab, and she helped me figure out how to get into graduate school, reviewed my essays, told me about the GRE. I would've not known how to navigate all that to get into a PhD program. And then I brought up the statistic about faculty being tenured, and that's around 5% of Latinos or Latinas are tenured faculty. That kind of lens they never saw. I eventually decided to end the lawsuit for personal reasons.
It was absolutely one of the hardest decisions I had to make, and also it was really hard to share that with my dad in particular because he was my biggest cheerleader in this whole process. The part that still continues to be hard for my parents to understand is that yes, I had this significant event happen in my first tenure track faculty position. Unfortunately, that's not the only one. There's other challenges that have happened since then. When they have happened and I've shared them with my parents, there's still kind of a surprise like, "Oh, I can't believe that happened." To me, that shows that they haven't fully understood that this is common.
This is common for people of color. This is common for Latinas, common for Black women or many others of color. We have a long way to go, and I think my parents still have a little bit of ways to go to fully understand that as long as I stay in academia, there probably will be these other bumps. And that's just part of choosing to be in this space.
Lantigua: Whew! That was tough. I really, really feel for Sylvia, and I feel for her because I've been there. Five years ago when I decided to leave a very long and very successful career in media to start my own company, I had the hardest time explaining it to my mom. Of everyone that I wanted to explain it to, she took the longest. And that made sense because she had worked so hard to put me and my siblings through college, to make sure that we were professional and prepared, and most of all, that we would be able to take care of ourselves. How do you explain walking away from all that security, walking away from years, sometimes decades of effort put into a career?
That's what we're going to talk about today. Many of us, especially through and after the pandemic, have looked at our jobs and our careers with fresh eyes. Some of us left unfulfilling roles or walked away from workplaces where we felt undervalued or downright discriminated against. But explaining these decisions to our parents can be nearly impossible, especially when to them, it may seem like we're walking away from something that we and everyone in the family worked so hard for. How do we do it? To help us figure it out, I called in an expert.
Espino Lira: I'm Michelle Espino Lira. I'm a professor and I study Latino, Latina, Latinx pathways to higher education.
Lantigua: You are the right person to talk about this. Tell me what you heard in Sylvia's story as you listened.
Espino Lira: Oh my gosh, the first thing I just guessed, it makes me so sad that we could very well have missed a wonderful intellectual scholar who I think in many ways was sabotaged. That was the first thing, I wanted to empathize with her journey. Unfortunately, it's the journey that many Latinx, Latina, Latino faculty experience in higher education. It can be a very toxic work environment, and then for her to have to explain to her family about moving on from a job that seems stable, seems safe when it's really not that safe.
Lantigua: Tell us, what does your research reveal about these types of situations that Sylvia was in?
Espino Lira: There has been so much work through decades of research in higher education about the experiences of Black, Indigenous, people of color, Latinx faculty. For some reason, we still can't seem to get it right. There is extensive racism, microaggressions that people experience, these kinds of slights or indignities that people have, that people sometimes think to themselves, "Now what did that mean? Did I hear that right?" They spend so much energy trying to make sense of messages that they receive in person or through the policies.
They spend so much energy doing that that they can't focus on the work of doing the scholarship. They don't have mentorship, and that is a huge issue that I hope Sylvia did have, but it's very possible that she may not have had mentorship, which created this challenge about four or five years into her career.
Lantigua: In a way, it's kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy and deficit, that if we don't have enough faculty of color who can then mentor faculty of color, the institutional barriers and the sociological injuries that they experience run them out the door.
Espino Lira: Early.
Lantigua: It's just incredible. But I do want to talk about sort of like it's a double jeopardy situation that she's in. Already there's an implicit risk that she took, especially when she decided to file a lawsuit. It's huge risk. And then there's the compounded risk of having to explain why you're doing this to your parents who helped you to get here. Please help me unpack this.
Espino Lira: Oh gosh, sometimes I feel the same way. As a first generation college student, my dad came from Mexico, the messages that we have grown up with of honoring our families by doing well and being successful. It's really hard to explain that it's not just about the work. It's about being in environments that are affirming and validating for us. That it isn't just about a job, but that she really felt connected to her identity and how she feels about the kind of work that she wanted to do. It's really hard to explain that to say, "I don't want to work in an environment that isn't going to help me to flourish," when our families are used to taking whatever job they could to help us however they could, right?
Lantigua: The lawsuit, definitely my eyes popped open, because we are in a very litigious society, but Latinos are, I would say, with no facts to back me up the least litigious, complaining people in this country. It's interesting because there's this research tank called Ekis Labs and they've come up with this term that I love. Latinos have what they're terming the guest complex. Even though we've been here generation upon generation, we still feel like we're guests. Because we feel socially, politically, economically that we're guests, we never ask for anything. We never ruffle any feathers. We never complain about things.
To me, when Sylvia had to go and tell her parents, part of the reaction was like, "Well, wait, why? Why would you do that?" How do we get our parents earlier, right? Because fighting lawsuit is radical. But I'm sure throughout her educational experience, there were other ways that she experienced injustice and prejudice and biases. How do we begin earlier to have a conversation with our parents so that we can grow their understanding? Because it is true that it gets more pervasive and more subtle the higher you move socially and economically. That's just a fact.
And that is not to say that our parents did not experience these things because they did and they actually experienced them really brazenly in many instances, right? But it is very different the higher you climb.
Espino Lira: First gen, we're living in multiple worlds. We've been translators for our families our whole lives, and now we're having to translate the professional world in many respects and navigating in these elite spaces yet again. There's never a time where we're not translating. I don't always think that it's a skill that we think of as an asset. I think it's really hard for parents, and there is this kind of sense of guilt on both sides. I can see where parents can feel, "Wow, I've worked so hard to help my child to be successful in these spaces, but then they're not finding fulfillment or they're not happy.
I think it's really hard to prepare families because you're going through it as well, but I do think it's important to continue that communication because at one point it will start to make sense or they'll start to see the realities of what you're experiencing.
Lantigua: She also recounts the conversation in which her parents essentially said, "But you and your sister made it so others can too." I mean, that is an iceberg of guilt right there. What do we do with that?
Espino Lira: That I think is the resilience and the resolve. It's something that we do learn from our families, and yet that isn't always something that's pointed out to them either about how much that that struggle inspired us to struggle too, but also to understand that there's limitations to that now. To struggle in our lives all the time, it's just overwhelming. We know that there's like health issues that result in that. If they're fighting for us to have a better life, that includes a quality of life. That also means standing up for what we believe in and saying, "I wasn't raised to be treated in this way."
Lantigua: How can people listening to you today and thinking about starting or continuing or stopping an academic career, how can they strengthen themselves? How can they find support? How can they create pathways to success if this is what they want to be doing?
Espino Lira: First and foremost, it is possible. You can do this. The biggest thing is to ensure that you have people not just in the institution to help you, because often we are the only ones, as Sylvia shared. It's important to develop a network, a national network and international network, of people that believe in you and trust in you and validate who you are as a person and not just as a scholar. I call them my brother, sister scholars. They're very important to me. They are my ride or dies. I meet them at conferences. I network. That's really important. It's about developing friends within the academy. I think the other thing is, is understanding that these institutions were not built for us.
They're not in intended to be built for us. We have to make that room and we have to tear down some of these barriers and so that the next one coming after us can have maybe a smoother path. This is not easy. I think for me, what drives me the most, it's the fact that I am... As many Black women scholars have said, we write ourselves into existence. That's the research. For me, it's research about our hente and helping Latinx, Latina, Latino communities to see the assets that their families bring to them. That's the research that I do. It's a calling that I'm doing. The institution can be the institution, but I'm writing for our people, and that's what matters to me.
Lantigua: I love that answer. Honestly, your audience is not the institution. Your audience is the people whose work you're elevating, the people whose lives you're understanding better, the people who you're bringing evidence about. That's your audience. I think that a lot of us, because we spend years, sometimes decades striving to get to certain places, the arrival on the place itself feels like it's the audience, but it's really not, right? I love that you said that in this context because I believe it's really applicable in all kinds of contexts. If you figure out who the intended audience for your work is, it will be so clarifying. You're a gem. Thank you so much for coming on. Please come back.
Espino Lira: Thank you.
Lantigua: Okay, here's what we learned from Michelle. Connect to their efforts and goals. Your parents worked really hard so that you would have a better quality of life. When you need to explain major shifts, point out that advocating for your highest quality of life is exactly how you honor their hard work and sacrifice. Embrace the translator role literally and figuratively. You will probably always need to interpret some aspects of your world for your parents. Be patient and use this set of skills to keep the conversation going. And remember, focus on your purpose and your audience.
Stay connected to the work you're doing and who you're really doing it for. This will give you clarity as you make difficult career decisions and discuss them with your loved ones.
Monica Lopez:
Thank you for listening and sharing us. How to Talk to Mami & Papi About Anything is an original production of LWC Studios. Virginia Lora is our show's producer. Kojin Tashiro is our mixer. Elizabeth Nakano mixed this episode. Manuela Bedoya is our marketing lead, and Juleyka Lantigua is the creator and host. I'm senior editor Monica Lopez. On Twitter and Instagram, we're @talktomamipapi. Bye everybody. Same place next week.
CITATION:
Lantigua, Juleyka, host. “She Walked Away from Her Dream Job, Now Needs to Explain Why”
How to Talk to [Mamí & Papí] about Anything,
LWC Studios., October 17, 2022. TalkToMamiPapi.com.