After dropping out of college and eventually returning to school, Kelly had a hard time explaining to her Puerto Rican parents why she needed them at graduation. And Rosemary Perez, a professor of higher education, shares strategies for asking loved ones to support our career and educational goals.
Featured Expert:
Dr. Rosemary (Rosie) Perez is an Associate Professor in the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan. Her scholarship leverages the strengths of student development and organizational theories to explore individual and organizational learning and development in collegiate contexts. Across her program of research and her teaching, she explores the tensions between structure and agency, and how power, privilege, and oppression affect individuals and groups within higher education. Her research interests include the development of self-authorship, intercultural learning and development, social justice training and education, and the professional socialization of graduate students and practitioners. Learn more about her work and research here.
If you loved this episode, be sure to listen to Taking a Break From School, Then Telling Her Parents and She Has a Ph.D, But Papí Still Wants Her to Serve Him.
Juleyka Lantigua:
Hi, everybody. Today, we welcome Kelly. Pursuing higher education was really important to Kelly, but she had a difficult time explaining to her Puerto Rican family why this mattered to her so much and asking them for the support that she needed in achieving her academic dreams. Let's get into it.
Kelly: My name is Dr. Kelly Alvarado-Young, I use her/ella pronouns, I'm a Latina, a mamí, a scholar, a yoga practitioner, and so in my family, we call our mami and papi all sorts of things, "mamí", "ma", "mother", Gloria, and for papi, we'll call papi, "papi", "pa", "dad", "daddy", just depends on what it is that we're trying to communicate, but most times I will call them "Ma" and "Pa".
Mamí and Papí came over from Puerto Rico in the late '70s separately, and then they ended up finding each other on Long Island, New York, where I grew up.
Kelly: When I decided that college might be something I'm interested in, it was heavily influenced by the experience of my high school. I was in honors courses, and I hadn't thought about any of it, but my white counterparts were going on college visits with their families and the only campus tour I ever took was with my friend who let me tag along with her to Wagner College on Staten Island.
I applied, I got in, and then I had to have that conversation with Ma and Pa about these schools. Staten Island was too far. Cornell? Hell no. Hella far. Stony Brook, which was a 45-minute drive away and I wanted to stay on campus and they're like, "Nah, you don't stay on campus. You stay here at the house. You never leave the house until you're married." And I was like, "All right, well, I guess this is it." And I compromised. My first three weeks at school, I commuted and I had no friends in large amphitheaters with 500 students. I would have to barcode scan myself into class. Even though I was academically prepared, I was not socially prepared for the transition. Within the first six weeks, I ended up dropping out.
I was so ashamed to have to tell my parents because I knew what was coming. The, "I told you so. Why did you spend your money on that? What a waste. ¿Pa’ qué hiciste eso? . Because you already got a high school diploma, you can get any job you want." And I wanted something more and I didn't know what that more was.
Kelly: So after I ended up dropping out of college, I really listened to the voices, implicit and explicit, about my role as a Latina woman in a Puerto Rican family, which was to get married. I married my high school sweetheart at 18. He was in the military. We were stationed in upstate New York, he was in the field all the time, I was by myself, there was a local community college and I ended up getting an AAS, an Associate's of Applied Science, in office technologies and double-majored in business. I did all of that on my own for the first time ever.
When Ma talked about what it was that I was doing, she had no idea. She just knew I was going to school and working. And I would just tell her that, I'm like, "Yeah, at school today, I learned this, y esto, y eso" And she would say, "How is that different?" And I'm like, "Ma, it's different. Don't worry."
My partner, upon his return, ended up getting stationed out in Washington State, so when I went out there, I ended up choosing to start pursuing my degree, my Bachelor's. My partner was starting to struggle with substance abuse and alcoholism. Emotional violence started kicking in. I realized that I could not stay in this relationship. I would work all day in Seattle, drive down to Tacoma to go to school from 5:00 PM to 10:00 PM, and then I'd go home, and I'd do that four days a week, and I didn't earn my degree until I had separated and gotten divorced.
When I talked to Mami and Papi and said, "Hey, I need you to come out to Seattle to come to my graduation." That graduation was not about earning the piece of paper. It was me choosing to have my educational goals fulfilled, me choosing to start over and start to live into the expansiveness of who I knew, in my heart of hearts, that my ancestors had given me the gifts, the talents and the strength to be. But I didn't know how to say that to Ma and Pa. I just said, "You got to come because everybody else's parents are coming."
"I need you." I have never been good at saying that to Ma and Pa because it's always been the opposite where they say, "Oh, I need you, Kelly." "Kelly, I need you to do this." “Kelly, llámame a esta gente." "Kelly, go figure this out." And this was the first time that I was asking them to be there for me and they didn't get it and I didn't have the words to say it because I was still in that space of, "I'll be whatever my parents need me to be."
So in compromise, they sent Pa and Pa was reporting back on everything, photos and videos and everybody back home, AKA my mom, was like, "Wow, I didn't know it was such a big deal." And I'm like, "I told you it was a big deal, but you didn't want to come." It was interesting to have that conversation with my mom afterwards, where I was like, "Ma, I needed you there."
Lantigua: Like many first-gens who are also the first in their families to go to college, Kelly had to navigate the admissions process and adapting to higher education while she was also translating those experiences so her loved ones could understand what she was going through. How can we first-gens ensure that in doing all of that, we also get the support we need from our families to succeed? To help us figure it out, I did what I always do - I called in an expert.
Rosemary Perez:
My name is Rosie Perez, I use she/her pronouns and I'm an Associate Professor of Higher Education in the School of Education at the University of Michigan.
Lantigua: So you listened to Kelly's story. What stood out to you?
Perez: Oh, there was so much and I'm really grateful for Kelly's willingness to share her story with us, that's such a gift. Some of it is how sometimes, if our parents haven't had the same experiences as we have with school, right? How do our parents or our loved ones, our dear ones, try to understand the differences between school as a physical place you need to be versus learning? School is a place where you go and it's required, versus Kelly's deep desire to learn, moving beyond what was required, and deep interest and understanding, and if school has only been framed as something you need to do, it's really hard for people to understand why you would want to go beyond that.
Lantigua: I was really struck by a theme that comes up over and over in our conversations with first-gens, which is the idea that if you have a job, if you have some level of training, if you already have some stability, why would you mess around with that? Why would you go and explore other things? Why would you go and get more training and more education? Right? And it's really amazing how far she's gotten despite having to continually explain and reexplain and reexplain this idea. Is this something that you see in your research? Is this something that you have noticed, sort of, among these intergenerational conversations that are happening around higher ed?
Perez: Yes. I've had lots of conversations with students around social class. And what does it mean to work? Like what is "work"? What is labor, right? And so if you come from a family in which labor is, and work is something that's physical, it's something that is...that you demonstrate your worth through doing, often physical or manual things. The idea of sitting in a chair or going somewhere and thinking a bunch is completely disconnected to how you think about how you show what you can do, right? Like, "What does that do for anybody?" "Do you see the results of that?" "What are you producing?" "Is sitting in a chair and thinking really a job?" And you're like, "That's not all I do." Right?
And so it's a completely different form of labor that might be... You know, your family has the capacity for it, but it might not have been rewarded or encouraged. Where I've spent some time talking to students is around, how do we talk to our families around different kinds of work and helping people understand the value of the work, even if sometimes it doesn't produce something right away or it's something where the result might be something where somebody's learned something or understands themself better, like that is a kind of labor that I think is really difficult for people to understand, the labor of teaching and supporting folks. People might not understand, but it might even be just trying to help and think alongside people about work differently than we've talked about it before.
Lantigua: Yeah. Kelly said, "I was really prepared academically, intellectually, I felt like I could handle it", but socially, she really did not feel like she arrived prepared. So can you talk to me a little bit about what some of the social challenges are that first-gen college students might face and subsequently their families might face?
Perez: There's so many. And I'm thinking about the fact that Kelly... The expectation, often, in coming to college is that you're going to integrate into the life of the college. You're going to go to classes, you're going to participate in activities, you're going to go talk to faculty and people who work at the university to understand what happens.
Most students don't know that that is designed to help you succeed, right? But if you're commuting and you're working, that is really difficult, right? Like if you got bills to pay and you have to spend more time working, you don't get to integrate into the life of college, so that inherently, there's kind of two layers of challenge, so there's one that there's all these unspoken rules about what you should know to do to succeed, and then the second one being some folks just have quite literal constraints on time and financial resources that prohibit them from doing all of these activities that we know, in general, help students succeed, which is participating in activities, getting connected to faculty or staff, like those things are empirically demonstrated in lots of higher education research to promote retention and success. But if you don't know you should be doing those things or you want to and you can't... Right? There's lots of other layers of challenges that have nothing to do with you being academically prepared for college.
Lantigua.: What are some of the ways that you've seen families support their first-gens as they learn more about the process of being in an academic setting in the United States?
Perez: Yeah. Kelly had talked quite a bit about, she was always the one helping, right? And so particularly for children who are the eldest or the eldest girl who are expected to take care of younger siblings or to provide additional support to parents or elders, sometimes I've seen from students, when their families understand that they actually need time, where they might lighten that load. Or they might say, "Oh, you don't need to come home and do this. We want you to focus your energy on school." That that's not detracting from your ability to be with family, it doesn't mean you don't care about this, that your success is also our success. So sometimes there is an acknowledgement that this can also help all of us, not just you, and not that these adults need permission, but sometimes you do need permission to invest in yourself.
Lantigua: But I want to ask you the other side of that question, which is that, especially for daughters, it is so hard to ask for what you need, and even Kelly had a hard time just saying, "Be in my graduation, this is so important to me. I need you here." So how can we practice and how can we get better at asking for what we need?
Perez: Yeah. That is so tough, because I think, as a woman of color, I'm still trained to give without asking in return, right? Part of it is, I think, learning that we deserve that. So how can you ask if you have not considered that you might be worthy of the kind of support you are so willing to give of others. And I do think, somewhere along the way, if you build relationships with trusted friends or mentors or other folks, I have found that it is easier to ask for what you need when folks start to help you reflect and prompt on, like, "What's not working here?" Or "What's stopping you?" Because sometimes nobody said, "You can't do that", but you haven't imagined yet that it's a possibility, and so I find that talking to others and sometimes practicing, I think that is so…That sounds kind of silly sometimes, but if you've never done it before, and particularly talking to your parents, if you're just not sure how they're going to take it, I might talk it through with folks who know them. I know I've talked things through with my sibling before, like, "Let's do a run-through, let's see... If I were to do this, how do you think this would go?" And they're like, "I don't know. I might say this a bit differently or I might start with other parent first, start with Dad first, he'll give you the gentle, 'wink, wink' when we're talking to Mom and it's going to go."
I don't think there's a deep formula, right? But I do think there is a part of wrestling with the fact that, frankly, women are often told we just aren't allowed to do that. The cultural expectations are such that compliance is rewarded and there are gentle ways to lean into... It's not non-compliance, but it is trying to say that reciprocity in relationship matters, and so that's one way to show is by asking, if I'm giving, one way to demonstrate care is sometimes you have to tell folks, because they just... They think they're showing you that they care, and they are in their way, but that way of demonstrating care isn't always what we need. And as we figure that out, sometimes we have to tell folks, because they just are doing what they've been doing and it seemed like it was working, but maybe it wasn't and people just didn't know any better.
Lantigua.: Yeah. I taught at a community college for six years where my students were all commuters, they all had jobs, many had families, many had all the responsibilities, and when I would sit with them during office hours, before I even got to talk to them about their work in my class, I would ask them things like, "When do you study?" "Do you block out your time?" Because I needed to understand how they fit school, which was clearly a priority, but how they fit it into all of the other demands in their life, and often, they had not even thought about some really simple ways that they could ask people in their household for support. It's so difficult to untrain people from being self-sufficient to an extreme. I think that happens to us a lot. How else can we recognize that and try to apply it in other parts of our lives so that then we get more practice, as you were saying?
Perez: Yeah. That is such a good question. And I'll say, I'm still unlearning that, right? Like I'm a hyper-doer.
Lantigua: Same.
Perez: I'm a hyper-doer who is not good at asking for help. What I have found, as part of my undoing, some of those lessons, has literally been finding other hyper-doerd... Like, people like me to talk it out with, and they will literally just go, "Girl, why are you doing that? You literally have people who can help you." And when I can't give them a good answer... I have no answer, right? Other than, "I'm just used to doing it myself." That's not a good answer. It just perpetuates the problem. So I think if we find friends or other loved ones who we trust and who lovingly will tell us, like show us ourselves, that matters, that's vital to practicing.
I think the other thing I'm thinking about, Juleyka, is you were talking about being a professor and we put so much responsibility on students to figure this out.
Lantigua: Yes.
Perez: And the reality is institutions have responsibility to the students we admit. We owe our students so much more than we give them, and there are lots of folks out there trying to change the game, and I hope that we can humanize this experience, right? I can't help but think how Kelly's early experience might have been different had somebody cared enough to check in and ask, "Hey, it seems like you're struggling in these first six weeks."
Lantigua: Preach. You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. Rosie, thank you so much. It has been so lovely to talk to you today. Thank you for making time.
Perez: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It was joyful to connect with you.
Lantigua.: All right. Here's what we learned from Rosie today.
Find a mentor. Find a trusted friend or mentor who can help you see what's not working and help you imagine the possibilities that are available to you.
Practice. Once you figure out what you need to communicate to a parent, do a trial run with a sibling or other family member to find the best way to get your message across.
And remember: Spell it out. People want to help, but sometimes they need you to be really explicit about how they can help.
Thank you for listening and for sharing us. How to Talk to Mamí and Papí About Anything is an original production of LWC Studios. Virginia Lora is the show's producer. Kojin Tashiro is our mixer. Manuela Bedoya is our marketing lead. I'm the creator, Juleyka Lantigua. On Twitter and Instagram, we're @TalkToMamiPapi. Bye, everybody. Same place next week.
CITATION:
Lantigua, Juleyka, host. “Unable to Ask Her Parents for Emotional Support”
How to Talk to [Mamí & Papí] About Anything,
LWC Studios., March 7, 2022. TalkToMamiPapi.com.
CITATION:
Lantigua, Juleyka, host. “Unable to Ask Her Parents for Emotional Support”
How to Talk to [Mamí & Papí] About Anything,
LWC Studios., March 7, 2022. TalkToMamiPapi.com.