UCLA

The purpose of this study was to uncover the role of family in shaping the educational aspirations and trajectories of Latina/x college students. This study focused on interviews with 10 Latina/x first-generation students and 8 of their family members. Several theories helped to guide the framing and analysis of findings including LatCrit in Education, community cultural wealth, and Chicana/Latina feminism. Findings revealed that family members (i.e., parents, siblings, aunts/ uncles, cousins, and grandparents) played an instrumental role in passing along positive messages about education and college. For parents in particular, these messages were often a direct reflection of the messages they themselves received as children (e.g., the importance of formal education and the morals/values they learned in the home). Parents held high aspirations for students to be someone in life and shared their own education and migration stories to motivate children to pursue their education. Furthermore, participant narratives revealed a number of ways that family members and students simultaneously supported one another throughout students’ educational journeys. For family members, this support often took the shape of providing transportation, emotional support, encouragement/moral support, financial, spiritual/religious support, and the act of “showing up.” In the same vein, students supported family members by passing along the navigational and social capital they had acquired from being the first in their family to traverse the U.S. higher education system. Additionally, they provided family members with emotional support, encouragement/moral support, job related assistance, translation support, taking care of bills/paperwork, and looking after their parents’ health. Findings also nuanced research on Latino families by revealing the tensions, challenges, and contradictions that were simultaneously faced by students. Such examples included misunderstandings about mental health, tense relationships, expectations to fulfill household chores, and feelings of disconnection from parents about what it took to get into college and what college was like. Overall, these findings offer a number of implications related to research, theory, and practice. In particular, there are a number of tangible ways that K-12 educators and higher education professionals can outreach to family members as findings revealed just how important students’ families were to their academic success.