9

Out of Thin Air

When One’s Academic Identity Is Not Simply an Extension of One’s Family Identity

With Emily Lyons

Academic identity—students’ beliefs about themselves as learners, beliefs about themselves as belonging to particular educational institutions, and beliefs about the importance of schooling for their futures—plays an important role in shaping students’ educational trajectories.¹ Transitioning to college comes with many challenges and shifts in roles and responsibilities; having a strong academic identity can help students persevere when challenges and failures arise.² Several factors influence the ease with which students maintain strong academic identities during the transition to college. One of these is the coherence among students’ multiple identities.

As discussed in chapter 2, we all have multiple identities that become more or less salient, depending on the context.³ When our multiple identities cohere, growth in one identity domain can strengthen and facilitate growth in other domains. For instance, a student who enters college with a strong activist identity could strengthen this aspect of her identity as she furthers her academic identity as a political scientist. Conversely, when there is conflict or tension between identities, growth in one domain can weaken other domains. For example, a student who enters college with a strong religious identity could feel tension between this identity and his emerging academic identity as a physicist. Maintaining conflicting identities is most challenging when the conflict occurs between two or more highly salient aspects of one’s sense of self.

Along with introducing new tensions between different aspects of one’s identities, the transition to college and associated changes in social context for racial-ethnic minority students often increases their exposure to social identity threats—experiences that challenge the value, meanings, or enactment of some aspect of one’s social group identifications.⁴ Exposure to social identity threats can lead students to adapt in ways that result in changes in the meaning of the threatened identity, how openly they express the threatened identity, and even restructuring how they perceive the salience of the threatened identity to their sense of self.⁵ As illustrated in the comments of one Latinx female student attending Urban PrivateU-North, these social-identity-threatening experiences are often subtle, but they have meaningful consequences.

Research on racial-ethnic microaggressions shows that although these experiences are relatively infrequent, they have lingering effects, causing marginalized students to question themselves, question the motivations of others, and question their belonging.⁶

The identities that students take on as college students and as members of their family are two aspects of the self that students described as being central to who they are. For many students, tensions between their academic and family identities are moderate to none. For first-generation students, however, the very decision to enroll in college may mark a divergence from their parents’ trajectories and the trajectories expected of them. This is because schooling plays a large role in socialization, and college plays a particularly large role in shaping people’s beliefs, habits, preferences, and behaviors.⁷

First-generation students often have a difficult time explaining their academic obligations and responsibilities to their families, particularly when these conflict with family responsibilities.⁸ Likewise, professors, who hold idealized assumptions about what an undergraduate’s life is like, often demonstrate insensitivity to students’ responsibilities and obligations outside the classroom. Consequently, first-generation students often find themselves having to “live simultaneously in two vastly different worlds” in order to succeed academically.⁹

Living in two worlds requires constant code-switching—being one person on campus and another with family. Elizabeth Aries and Maynard Seider describe how lower-income students compartmentalized the aspects of themselves that showed up at home and those they presented on campus. Only by keeping these aspects separated could their conflicting identities coexist.¹⁰ This separation of home and school can result in an extremely disjointed lived experience.¹¹ Students often work to assimilate on campus by censoring the aspects of their off-campus life that would highlight differences, or they overcompensate by attempting to get perfect grades. At home, these same students may minimize school and censor any aspects of their identities that relate to their lives on campus.

Some first-generation students, however, are able to express more adaptive behaviors at home by modeling positive academic behaviors for younger siblings. Bringing aspects of their academic and family identities together in this way helps bring coherence to students’ lived experiences and also plays an important role in supporting younger siblings’ emerging academic identities. As will be highlighted in the next chapter, having an older sibling to guide them through the college process can substantially improve outcomes for first-generation college students.

First-Generation, Latinx, Female Students in Immigrant Families

The Latinx female first-generation students in our study reported particularly sharp tensions between their academic and family identities. Familismo, “a [Latinx cultural] pattern that privileges family interests above those of the individual,” leads to one’s place and role within the family being an especially salient aspect of the self.¹² Accordingly, research shows that family connections and responsibilities can support the educational success of Latinx women, but many Latinx women also report feeling conflicted about who they are expected to be within their families and the identities they are expected to take on to be successful students.¹³

In this chapter, these identity and role conflicts will be described through the first-year transition experiences of Kara and Cindy, two first-generation, Latinx, female college students with immigrant parents. The similarities in their experiences illustrate how “trying to live simultaneously in two vastly different worlds” can lead to feeling marginalized in both contexts. The differences in their experiences illustrate how ideological counterspaces can facilitate more adaptive coping.

Most have heard about machismo in Latinx culture—strong or even aggressive masculinity, which in the context of familismo corresponds to men’s feelings of strong responsibility toward family, such as being the breadwinner and decision maker. There are corresponding cultural expectations for women called marianismo. Modeled on the Catholic Virgin Madonna, the cultural expectations of marianismo call for women’s humility, spiritual purity, and prioritization of family. Familismo, coupled with marianismo, “creates an expectation that the ‘good Latina woman’ will always prioritize family needs above her own individual needs.”¹⁴ As Roberta Espinoza notes, education can be seen as helping Latinx men fulfill the expectations of familismo because it can improve their ability to provide for their future families. For Latinx women, however, familismo often dictates prioritizing a caregiver role over educational advancement.

This cultural expectation is in sharp contrast to the expectations of college faculty, who often assume that students can set aside all responsibilities and commitments beyond classes to focus on college.¹⁵ This assumption is unrealistic for many individuals of any gender or cultural group, but for women like Kara and Cindy, these assumptions are so far removed from their reality as to be damaging for their sense of self. For Latinx women whose identities and sense of belonging are tied to close family connections and whose academic identities are tied to their sense of personal accomplishment, tensions between family and school can create what Roberta Espinoza terms the “good daughter dilemma.” This dilemma places Latinx women pursuing higher education “in a cultural bind between meeting the demands of their individualistic-oriented school culture and their collectivist-oriented family culture.”¹⁶

As Kara’s experiences illustrate, tension between being a good daughter and being a good student can be especially pronounced when family members express ambivalence about going to college. Yet, as Cindy’s experiences show, even if one’s family unambiguously supports going to college, there can still be a substantial gap between family and academic expectations. The juxtaposition of Cindy’s and Kara’s stories also shows that there are actions faculty and administrators can take to make it easier or, conversely, more difficult for students to integrate their family identities within their growing academic identities.

Kara’s Story: Gendered Familial Ambivalence

Kara lived at home with her parents and two younger brothers her first year of college and commuted about an hour to Urban PrivateU-South, where she was pursuing a degree in marketing. As noted in chapter 8, attending Urban PrivateU-South had been Kara’s dream since she was a little girl, partially inspired by an alum who was a close female family friend. Although Kara received a full scholarship from a different school, she chose to enroll at Urban PrivateU-South despite receiving limited financial aid. This meant that in addition to commuting, she worked more than thirty-five hours a week to pay for school.

Kara had found high school easy to navigate. She got good grades, took several AP classes, played soccer, and still had time to spend with friends and family. Likewise, she found the academic aspects of college easy to navigate. She describes herself as always having been “school smart.” By objective measures she was academically prepared for college, entering her first year with several AP classes already under her belt, a high school GPA of 3.35, and an ACT score of 25.

For Kara, as for many first-generation students, the decision to pursue a college degree means, to some extent, defining herself in opposition to others in her family. “I’m gonna be my first girl in my family to go to college. I’ve always been kind of school smart. I know some people in my family, they just really hate school. So I’m like, well I should go to college, and I really want a better living standard when I grow up.” As is too often the case for first-generation college students, Kara cannot turn to her family for college advice or support.

Research shows that parents without college degrees hold high educational aspirations for their children.¹⁷ But tensions still exist. These tensions are exacerbated when parents are ambivalent about their children’s college enrollment.

For Kara, her parents’ ambivalence is tied directly to expected gendered roles and responsibilities at home. Although she would be the first female in the family to attend college, she had college-educated uncles. “It was mostly they saw it as a man thing to go to college.” But, she added, “I can go to college. Just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean I can’t go. That I shouldn’t go. I want to have the same education like they did.” Kara’s father was particularly ambivalent. He didn’t exactly object, Kara said, but yet, “It’s a similar mind-set but not completely like, oh, don’t go to school… . It’s not that strong, but there’s still a little bit of ‘Oh, you shouldn’t be doing this. You shouldn’t be out going to the city every day on public transportation because you’re a girl.’ Stuff like that.”

Despite Kara’s perception that her family would have been more supportive of her college aspirations were she male, today Latinx women are more likely to enroll in and graduate from college than their male counterparts.¹⁸ Sarah Ovink, who studies the sociology of higher education, found that whereas college-age Latinx men expressed “a sense of automatic autonomy” regardless of whether they earned college degrees, Latinx women sought college degrees “as a means of earning independence.”¹⁹ The women Ovink interviewed saw obtaining a college degree as essential for “achieving independence and avoiding traditional patriarchal power structures.” Given this, Latinx parents may experience ambivalence about their daughters’ college aspirations and may see their daughters’ gains as their losses.

For Kara, her parents’ lack of college experience, coupled with their ambivalence, translated into receiving limited instrumental or emotional familial support and involvement in her college experiences, beginning with her applications. “My parents weren’t really involved in that,” she said. “They didn’t actually go to [Urban PrivateU-South] until I had decided, and they [the school] invited us to go for the Homecoming event or something like that. So that’s the first time my mom went to campus. My dad actually hasn’t been to campus yet.” Although her parents may not have been able to offer large amounts of financial support—her father works as a manager at a factory, and her mother works in a restaurant kitchen—Kara believes they could have done more to help and probably would have been more willing to extend themselves financially were she male. In Kara’s view, her parents are making a choice to focus on other financial goals, leaving her to take full responsibility for paying for college. “I have to take out another loan,” she said, “but it has to be under my name, because my parents won’t take out a loan.” This unwillingness to contribute to college costs created challenges for her interactions with the financial aid office, because based on her parents’ incomes they were not meeting the federally determined expected family contribution. As Kara noted, “Even though my parents’ incomes count, they’re not helping me pay because they’re paying for other things. All they look at is, just what your family makes.”

Family financial support is not just about reducing students’ stress about bills; it also functions as a signal to students that their families value their ambition and efforts to obtain a college degree. As Douglas Guiffrida notes, this could be as small as “money for laundry … which [symbolizes] the family’s support and willingness to make sacrifices for them.”²⁰

During her first year, Kara struggled mightily to fulfill both familial and academic expectations. Although her parents did not charge rent, she was expected to work and contribute to family expenses in addition to covering her college expenses. As Roberta Espinoza states, it is not uncommon for Latinx parents to expect their daughters to continue to contribute to the family while pursuing higher education. Indeed, the cultural value of marianismo “creates an expectation that the ‘good Latina woman’ will always prioritize family needs above her own individual needs.”²¹ For Kara, this balancing act created a lot of stress and was a barrier to becoming involved in campus life.

Her parents’ limited understanding of the academic demands made her feel alienated from her family. During the most stressful time in her first year—finals week—she had no one to turn to who understood. Her father, in fact, was “on me” for being away from home too much.

On top of it all, Kara’s employer required a minimum of twenty-five hours a week to maintain her employee benefits. And she commuted an hour to campus.

Alienation from Both Home and School

Kara’s parents offered little support, but neither did her academic advisers and professors, who were either unaware of or insensitive to her off-campus responsibilities. Research shows that this feeling of alienation from both home and school is common among first-generation students.²² During her first two years, the only time Kara met with a professor outside of class was when it was required for her English literature class. This one meeting left her feeling criticized for working at her job too much when she asked the professor to be more flexible about potential meeting times to accommodate her work schedule. “So, she just told me, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t be working a full-time job while you’re in college. And you have to make time for your studies, and to meet with your professors if you want to do well in college.’ I was like, ‘OK, well I’m trying to pay for college in the first place.’ ”

As a result, she seldom sought out assistance from professors, or she hid details about her off-campus life. “After that I was just like [I] kinda don’t wanna speak about working another job … cause I know … you’re gonna tell me the same thing or you’re just gonna be like, ‘Well, you should really take care of school more.’ ”

Kara also felt that her academic advisers were not being sensitive to how her needs differed from those of traditional college students. She had seen an academic adviser only twice. “I don’t wanna say they’re not helpful, ’cause they do answer my questions,” she said, “ but I feel like sometimes they could be more helpful as far as trying to relate to like, oh, what I’m doing, instead of just making it seem like, OK, you’re just like all the other college students here living on campus. You have the same situation. So I feel like it’s not as understanding as they could be.” What Kara needed was answers to questions that she did not know to ask, as was implied in her response to being asked what her academic advisers could do to be more helpful: “I don’t know, I feel like there’s some things that I kind of figured out by talking to people where I wished they [the advisers] could have assisted me more with that, ’cause I know the advisers know a lot more about what I can get in school to help me out. And the school obviously has a lot of connections that could probably get me to, I don’t know, assist me as far as like progressing in my career.”

As we will see in Cindy’s story, institutional agents can and should help students bring their whole selves to campus. This is made possible when academic advisers use their insight and foresight about what it takes to be a successful college student to fill in missing information, recognize and validate students’ off-campus lives, and help them navigate competing demands.

Cindy’s Story: Family Emotional Support Coupled with Institutional Ideational Support

The challenges of balancing family and academic identities arose even for Latinx women whose parents, like Cindy’s father, were extremely enthusiastic and supportive of their daughters’ college aspirations. This was in part because, unlike students whose parents attended college, first-generation students must expend considerable energy trying to communicate and explain their academic responsibilities to family members, particularly when those responsibilities conflict with family responsibilities.

Cindy attended high school in a suburb that was nearly all White and located about an hour outside Chicago. She believes that being such a racial-ethnic minority in that community was a reason for the lack of support she received from her guidance counselor.

This is guidance that she desperately needed, because, like Kara, Cindy had a father who was unable to offer instrumental support. “My dad, we’re really, really close, but he just doesn’t know. Even now, I’ll call him and tell him things, and he just doesn’t understand, either how big they are or how little they are. He just knows I’m going to school, and that’s pretty much it.”

Cindy arrived on campus prepared for both the academic work and the independence after years of being a “motherly figure” to her little sister and becoming “an extremely independent-do-everything-by-myself person.” She enrolled at Urban PrivateU-North, moved into the dorm, majored in accounting, and was “loving” her new life in the city.

Like Kara, Cindy frames her decision to pursue higher education as, to some extent, defining herself in contrast to her experience growing up. Continuing-generation students often talk about going to college to provide the same type of lifestyle for their own future children that they had growing up. Conversely, similar to many of the first-generation students in our study, Cindy talked about going to college as a way to provide a lifestyle that would be different from the one she had growing up.

Although many argue that this transactional and utilitarian approach to college is problematic because college is supposed to be about self-development, others highlight that a career-oriented perspective enables first-generation students to undertake the considerable leap of faith and economic risk that college entails.²³

Familial Emotional Support Is Not Enough

Cindy and Kara are also similar in their doubts about whether college will indeed pay off in the end. “I’ve done more than both my parents have done in their entire life, on an academic basis and on a career basis, and you sit there and think, should I, can I keep going, is it going to work,” Cindy said. The first-generation students we interviewed expressed notable ambivalence. They believed that they had to obtain a college degree to have a chance at a financially stable adulthood but doubted that obtaining their degrees would guarantee them a good-paying job. Some mentioned fears of becoming that iconic college-educated barista at Starbucks.

Unlike Kara, Cindy had the benefit of an older sister in college and an incredibly supportive father. His unambivalent emotional support contributed to her academic success. Her father reminded her of the harder road ahead because she was Hispanic. He told her she would have to put in “three times the effort just to be looked at as an equal” and that she would have to give it her all, “because they’re gonna scrutinize you and look at you critically because of who you are.” As a result, she said, “I always keep that advice in the back of my head. I always give everything my all.”

Cindy also knew that if she ever had financial difficulties, her father, despite meager financial resources, would do whatever he could to help. Nevertheless, her father’s enthusiasm about having daughters in college did not protect her from experiencing tension and strife when family and academic obligations conflicted. Indeed, Cindy says that the conflicting identities were the most challenging part of her first year. “You get so involved in school and in classes and in things that you’re this whole different human on campus, and then you forget that there’s a life back home and you still have family.”

When she would forget to call her father, he would FaceTime her, and “he would be like, ‘Why aren’t you calling me anymore? Do I not exist to you anymore? I’m still alive.’ ” She didn’t intentionally blow him off, she said, but “trying to juggle between giving a lot of time and effort into school and also remembering that my family is still a thing and calling them, I guess is probably one of the most stressful things. And my dad likes to call me. I’m the child he goes to, to talk about all of his, just his feelings and emotions and whatever is going on in his life. I’m his confidant.”

Balancing a new life at school while maintaining connections to one’s old life at home is a challenge that all college students face. Much of the early research on this issue suggested that to succeed at college, students must separate from their families and fully engage themselves in campus life. However, more critical research that allows for racial-ethnic and other group differences has found that students differ in their need to stay closely connected to family, as well as their family’s need for them to stay close.²⁴

The tensions between family and academic responsibilities are intensified for Cindy because of the maternal role she assumed toward her younger sister after her parents divorced. She continues to feel responsible for her younger sister’s well-being.

Unlike Kara, Cindy did not have to negotiate the balance between home and school each and every day. Because Cindy lived on campus, she had more control in responding to her family’s expectations and was able to immerse herself in campus life. However, she did have to help her father with expenses at home when he had “no idea how [he was] going to pay rent.” She was quick to say that he did not expect her to pay the rent, but she nevertheless felt an obligation. She gave him money for rent because “I didn’t need the money at the time.” However, she added, “I could’ve saved that money for the following year for school or whatever or other expenses that would’ve eventually come up.” But in the end, she said, “that’s my dad, that’s my family, and I want him to have a roof over his head obviously.”

Cindy also gave generously to her younger sister. “She’s like my baby, my child really. So if I know there’s something that she wants like school related, … or, you know, something to help her progress academically, or just for her development in general, and I don’t mind helping her out with stuff like that. She doesn’t ask a lot, but when she does I do.”

This experience of giving rather than receiving financial and other material supports to family is not uncommon among first-generation college students. Research shows that first-generation students feel guilt and selfishness when they are unable to contribute to their family’s financial needs.²⁵ This violates the traditional expectation of a one-directional support relationship between students and their families.

Cindy did not compartmentalize her family and academic identities entirely. Instead, she sought ways to bridge these two important parts of herself, bringing aspects of her family and culture to her college campus and sharing details of her college experience with her family. Unlike Kara, who did not talk to her family about what was going on at school, Cindy did not see her father’s lack of knowledge of college as a reason to keep silent about what was going on in her life on campus. Instead, she found that, at times, her father’s limited experience with college was a plus when it came to dealing with academic stressors.

Perhaps because Cindy lived on campus and did not feel the stress of negotiating daily the conflicting demands of family and academic identities, she was able to share more about her experiences as a college student.

Institutions’ Role in Helping Students Bring Coherence to Conflicting Identities

Cindy’s experiences also illustrate how what universities do can aid students in integrating seemingly disparate aspects of themselves. Cindy spoke of the importance of campus cultural organizations and the programming that targeted the needs of first-generation students in navigating the challenges of adjusting to college and bridging home and school.

Equally as important in allowing Cindy to bring aspects of her family and cultural identity into her life as a college student was having professors and academic advisers who cared about her off-campus life and were able to recognize the unique challenges that she might be facing. “I love all the professors,” she said, “[but] my physics professor … he goes out of his way to help you out in the classroom… . I go in there and not only talk about physics, but my life in general, and he sits there and listens to me talk, and he’s just a listening ear.” She described a time when she had been sick and missed class and felt lost before a test. “He sat there with me and did every single question on that study guide and didn’t go home until I finished,” she marveled. Professors on campus, she believed, went out of their way to keep her on track and even more, so “that you’re happy in the classroom and you’re happy in the environment that you’re in, which is really cool.” They also made personal connections and made the time for students, which was important to her. This contrasts sharply with Kara’s experiences with inflexible and somewhat oblivious professors.

The physics professor’s mentorship and support is an illustration of an ideational counterspace, in which “two or more people come together for a specific purpose over time.”²⁶ Counterspaces are defined by the ideas, supports, and resources shared through interpersonal interactions. It is simply that these identity-validating and supportive interactions are more likely to occur when marginalized individuals of a particular social identity are brought together in a physical space. The support and mentorship Cindy received from her professor provided a counterspace within her classroom experiences—a sliver of space for Cindy to experience localized belonging that she then extended to how she perceived all other faculty on campus.

Furthermore, in contrast to Kara’s experiences with academic advisers who did not go beyond the formal requirements of their role, Cindy’s academic adviser went out of his way to recognize and validate her experience and obligations beyond academics. “Oh my God! I absolutely love, love, love, love my academic adviser. I cannot express how vital he has been to my success here. He is just so supportive.” After her father lost his job, Cindy feared she might not be able to return to school the next year. Depressed at the prospect, she didn’t want to tell anyone, but she broke down in her adviser’s office. “I just started crying and sobbing … and he sat there and cried with me.” Together, they devised a plan, him running interference with the financial aid office or finding out the correct information for her. “I don’t know what that experience would have been like for me if I didn’t have [him] as my academic adviser… . I just am so grateful to have been blessed to meet an individual like that and even more so to have him available to me as a resource for four years.”

Enabled by supportive ideational counterspaces, Cindy enhanced and further integrated her family and academic identities, which allowed aspects of one identity to inform aspects of the other. Lacking supportive counterspaces, Kara minimized both her family and academic identities and relegated each to separate spheres of her life.²⁷

It is important to highlight that despite the unique challenges that first- generation, Latinx, female students in immigrant families faced in negotiating academic and family identities, they did not need formal counterspaces exclusive to students with those exact social status characteristics. The women we interviewed found support in a variety of counterspaces that broke with the hegemony of the idealized unfettered college student, free of all concerns other than fully immersing one’s self in the college experience. They found this support in physical counterspaces dedicated to Latinx students, first-generation students, and Black students. They also found support in ideological counterspaces with non-Latinx and non-female institutional agents who first listened and then responded with advice that validated how their off- and on-campus lives differed from those of the idealized college student.