Irma Zamora

Jasmine Hilton
Thu, 30 Apr 2020 02:23:04 +0000
Hilton-SP2020

Irma Zamora, a Ph.D. student in the Department of English and member of the Latinx Space for Enrichment and Research — a community of Latinx students and scholars engaged in expanding their presence in higher education, according to its website — is on a track to achieve her dream of becoming a tenured professor in Latinx literature. Along the way, she has faced struggles such as homelessness and working overtime to support her family back in California.

“I was born and raised in Santa Ana, California, which is a predominantly Mexican city in Orange County, Southern California. I come from a mixed-status family, so both of my parents are undocumented, but me and my sister were born here. We do come from a low-income family.”

“You don’t realize how poor you are until you go through certain processes. I was homeless for a bit, and I remember by the time I was in high school, my parents had a good kind of job, and we lived in an apartment. It was a one-bedroom apartment for the four of us, but I had food. I had a home. I didn’t have to sleep in a car. I remember being like, ‘Well, we made it. We’re fine!”

“But then, when you go through the FAFSA process, and then you have to write, ‘Zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero,’ when you have to physically put in and look at all the zeros, it’s when you realize how poor you are.”

“Even going through the process, like having to apply to the fee waivers, is hard. But also, even knowing that you have to apply to the fee waivers is a whole ’nother monster. If I didn’t have the counselors that I had, and if they didn’t know the population they were working with, I would not have applied to the schools that I applied to.”?

“Knowing that there’s fee waivers, even having access to that knowledge, is a lot. Some people didn’t know that there were fee waivers, even with the SAT and ACT.”

“That aspect of being low income is especially frustrating. I'm the oldest in the family. I only have one sibling, but I’m the oldest even with my cousins, and so knowing that if I mess up, it’s a lot of pressure.”

“It was really tough for my parents to be like, ‘Yeah, go to college.’ I tried to explain that I’ll be out for four years, but then I’ll come back and bring more wages. It’s so difficult to explain when the need is so urgent, in terms of money. We need this wage coming in this house. Otherwise, we’re not going to survive, like you’re literally living paycheck to paycheck. How do you tell your parents or how do you tell people in your community this is a good idea?”

“I remember I ended up crying for a couple of days. But they were so incredibly proud of me because I was the first one in the family to make it to college.”??

“I went to undergrad at Amherst College in Massachusetts. I got there because of this program called Questbridge. It supports a lot of underrepresented groups, specifically low-income folks. Through Questbridge, I was able to go to Amherst with a full scholarship.”

“When I got there, I had to go by myself because my parents couldn’t fly. Everybody else was there with their family. It was hard to go through this big transition without my mom, who I’m really close to. That was really hard.”

“I remember my first year, I didn’t think I had that strong of an accent, but people around me thought that I did. Every time I said my name, my name’s Irma, people couldn’t say that. I had a professor who was like, ‘Where are you from?’ And when I said my name, he said, ‘That name doesn’t sound Californian to me.”

“Thankfully, my roommate was really understanding of all this and she always said my name right. We were really supportive of each other. If I hadn’t had my roommate and some of my other friends there too, it would’ve been really hard to be at this elite, white institution, like navigating through all of that. It was still really rough, but I don’t know what I would have done without other people supporting me.”

“Throughout my whole four years there, I worked at least two jobs. One semester, I ended up working four jobs, and that was ridiculous. If you don’t work, you’re not going to have extra money for smaller, essential things, like toiletries and supplies. I was living away from home, so I had to buy clothes for the winter, too.”?

“My mom got sick my junior year, and I remember stressing so much about that. ‘How am I going to do it?’ Which is why I had four jobs that semester because I needed to send some money back. Having to worry about if they can’t pay that bill, and I can’t go back yet because I’m still in the middle of the semester. ‘Do I just drop out? What’s going to happen?’”

“My sister, who was going through community college at the time, had to be working two part-time jobs that were not on campus. I was fortunate to be working on campus, but she was not. She had to drop out of college because it was too much, and she wasn’t keeping up with the work in school.”

“If you come from a middle- or upper-class family, if you drop out, you still have access to things. Your dad might be working for a company, like ‘OK, you’re an intern.’ or ‘It’s fine, I’ll support you for now. You can go ahead and do that.’ You still have access. Other people, like me, who are from working-class, low-income families, if we drop out, what do we have access to?”

“We just have to keep pushing forward. Now that I’ve made it to grad school, all thanks to the support of my family and my community, I know for sure I’m going to succeed. I’m going to make it. After this, I will have access to a job and hopefully be on a tenure track as a professor. Every time I move up, it means security for my family now and to come.”