Beyond Affirmative Action: Reframing the Context of Higher Education

4. The Graduate School Experience: Ethnicity in Transformation

4 The Graduate School Experience Ethnicity in Transformation My identity depends on who I’m talking to. It depends on which setting I’m in. If I’m writing, I call myself a Chicana. If I’m in a group of people who are in the community, who are the people who really are involved in community affairs like arts, those kinds of things, writers, literary people, Chicana is what I use so it’s more politicized in those circles. At home and talking to other people I would say Mexican American , and with people who speak Spanish I would say Mexicana. Within the university, Hispanic, so these terms are used all the time. Marta, an administrator from California My interviews usually started with a nostalgic tour of the subjects’ past. Where did their families come from? What were their early educational experiences? I continually searched for clues to what may have sparked their interest in pursuing graduate work and, when appropriate, an academic career. When we shifted to graduate school issues , the participants’ moods sometimes changed, or the tension increased noticeably. It was the first time that some had examined that part of their lives, and reliving it even briefly surfaced a variety of emotions. Anger and pain were evident in some of their expressions. These memories brought a few to tears, yet all wanted to share their story to help others. The interviews revealed that completing graduate school, especially with a doctoral degree, was a complex transformational process that began during the undergraduate years. I knew many of my subjects would find the interview difficult, but their level of intensity surprised me. By the end of my study I had concluded that many Latinos and Latinas undergo at least two different transformations in graduate school: one is learning to become a scholar or an academic; the other is preparing for entry into the professoriate. Many interviewees can describe the difficult steps one must endure to obtain an advanced degree and become a scholar—the graduate school experience. This is the process most educators study and analyze. Few of us describe the personal and less obvious transformations some must make to become members of the faculty. For some Latinos and members of other ethnic groups, this means learning to subordinate, rather than culturally blend, one set of identities for another in order to succeed in academia. Unfortunately, few of us write about the painful process of exchanging ethnicity and/or gender for membership in the academy. Here I begin with an overview of conditions in primary and secondary education, followed by research findings related to undergraduate circumstances , and, finally, graduate school conditions and the adjustments a minority student makes to adapt and survive in a majority culture. I intend to show how much these identity transformations define the educational process for Latinos and Latinas. Preconditioning for Success in Graduate School For Latinos school plays as important a role as the family in determining an individual’s educational expectations (Cuádraz 1992, 32). Although this statement sounds obvious, it carries significant implications. For instance, high schools are important arenas for acculturating Latinos and others from high-context cultures into an educational system dominated by a low-context culture. Many Latinos first encounter different class values and other ethnic cultures in predominantly Anglo or middle-class public schools. But a definitive factor in their success is how well they acquire the different modes of learning and perceiving the world. In most cases Latinos must absorb learning skills that may be antithetical to those skills they learned from their family or community. In these schools Latinos and other ethnic populations either learn how to become multicontextual and work effectively within the dominant low-context culture , or they gain admission to college ill prepared to succeed. Thus, Part II. Latinas/os in Graduate Education and Beyond 82 people from high-context cultures need to learn more in our public schools than just middle-class values or low-context thinking skills. They must learn how to communicate and associate with people who evaluate the world through predominantly low-context cultural criteria. For Latinos that entails learning and integrating the less obvious low-context characteristics into a repertoire of their own behavioral patterns, or “scripts” (Ford 1992), while maintaining their ethnic identity and customs for interacting successfully at home. This process is more complex if our...