UC Santa Cruz

First-generation Latina graduate students navigate multiple and often contradictory expectations and experiences across different settings (e.g., academia, home life). For example, while graduate education can create opportunities for professional growth and future possibilities, it can also position students within settings that privilege dominant ways of knowing and being while devaluing their own cultural knowledge, familial relationships, and lived experiences. These contradictory experiences can create tight spaces that foster emotional turmoil and fragmentation while also creating opportunities for reflection and transformation. To understand these experiences, I draw from Gloria Anzaldúa's (1987) Borderlands theory, which examines how individuals navigate multiple, often contradictory social, cultural, and political worlds. Anzaldúa also theorizes that through the seven-stage process of conocimiento, individuals critically make meaning of these contradictions, ultimately developing a nepantlera consciousness, or an awareness that enables them to move between worlds, embrace contradiction, and reimagine more integrated ways of being. In this dissertation study, I explore three research questions. First, from a conocimiento framework, what contradictory or paradoxical messages, beliefs, and expectations do first-generation Latina graduate students identify as they navigate the academy? Second, what are the psychological experiences and discomfort that emerge from these tight spaces? Finally, how do these women draw on their nepantlera consciousness to respond to and/or resist their tight spaces, and what barriers do they encounter in that process? To explore these questions, this dissertation research examines the experiences of 12 first-generation Latina graduate students from diverse academic fields and disciplines. Data consisted of initial participant testimonios. After the testimonios, I conducted two rounds of plática sessions. From this data, I explore participants’ experiences across their home and academic worlds, paying particular attention to the tight spaces that emerge as they navigate the borderlands across these settings. I analyzed the data using three distinct but interrelated phases and reflexive thematic analysis to identify four themes illustrating how participants engaged conocimiento and their developing nepantlera consciousness to make meaning of contradictory expectations and determine their resistance response. The results are organized into four themes. The first explores how participants negotiated separation from and connection to their home and academic worlds to sustain themselves. The second examines how participants questioned expectations of the "good Latina daughter" imposed through gendered norms embedded within family dynamics and broader society to embrace more authentic selves. The third illustrates how participants rejected academic cultures of hyper-individualism by centering community care and accountability. The fourth shows how participants redefined their worth beyond dominant academic definitions of success. Together, these findings demonstrate that resistance was not uniformly practiced but rather shaped by participants' conocimiento journeys, positionalities, cultural wealth and available sources of support. This study extends Borderlands scholarship by illustrating how conocimiento functions as a dynamic process through which first-generation Latina graduate students transform contradiction into opportunities for resistance, wholeness, and more expansive ways of being.