Narrating cultural citizenship: oral histories of first-generation college students of Mexican origin.

• Date: 22 December 2002
• Author: Benmayor, Rina
• Published date: 22 December 2002
• Author: Benmayor, Rina

When I was in high school, I worked in the summers. Not because my parents made me...it was me, I wanted to do it. I wanted to have money for myself and to help them out. It was in the summer that I got a letter from ETS [Educational Talent Search], asking me to come to a program called FOCUS. It is a mini bridge program preparing us for college....(1) I did it for a week and then I went back to work in the broccoli fields in Greenfield. All of a sudden, I got a call on the walkie-talkie. I was putting the boxes of broccoli together in the trailer. It was my supervisor's brother. He said "Pedro, I got some news for you." He hands me the walkie-talkie. [My supervisor on the other end] told me he got a call that I got accepted [to the university]. I was pretty happy! I told my mom. She started screaming! She was packing broccoli. She stopped and said she was very proud of me. It was good. All she could do was smile. She was so happy. Her dream for me to go to college was going to be complete (Student interview, Gonzalez, 2000).

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THE "BROCCOLI STORY," AS I HAVE DUBBED IT, 15 ONE OF MY FAVORITES AMONG more than 80 hours of oral histories with first-generation college students on our campus. In a graphic and poignant way, Pedro Gonzalez captures the pride and hope that going to college represents for so many Mexican-origin (2) students and their parents. I always think of this story as I drive through the patchwork fields in the region. How many of the women and men I see stooping over this green gold are dreaming these dreams for their children?

Pedro's story also reminds me of why I joined the founding faculty of California State University. Monterey Bay (CSUMB). This new university was envisioned specifically to serve the historically underrepresented in higher education--low-income, working-class students from ethnic, racial, and im/migrant backgrounds. Given its geographic location at the edge of the Salinas Valley in California, I knew that many of my new students would be the daughters and Sons of migrant mexicana/o farm workers, who work the fields to put food on our tables every day. Young women and men of Mexican heritage comprise 25% of our student body, and most of them are the first in their families to attend college, sometimes the first to graduate from high school. (3) The opportunity to combine professional and political purposes in one coherent effort remains very seductive.

Along with its emotional force, the "broccoli story" draws me in with its subtexts, interpretive possibilities, and theoretical potential. The story is about a personal and collective dream of achieving a college education. It makes a point of affirming a strong sense of responsibility to family, which for students often takes the form of continued contributions to the family economy, as well as role modeling, paving the way to higher education for younger siblings. These commitments shape Mexican-origin students' goals and aspirations in very significant ways. Pedro was not in the fields when telling this story. He was at the university library, constructing his account. He could tell the story because at that time he was living it.

How do I, as an oral historian, faculty member, and informal ethnographer on my own campus, interpret this story? Does it merely assert the culturally gendered role of the independent male provider? Or is the story really about how first-generation students of Mexican origin construct and fulfill that educational dream? How do they negotiate the transformative experience of higher education? Are they "losing their culture" to upward mobility, as some studies would claim? Do they experience college as a process of deracination? Or are they negotiating multiple cultural worlds in integrative ways, venturing into the unknown world of higher education to bring new resources to their cultural communities? What do they say about the university's support of their commitments and needs?

My oral history students and I have been asking these questions for several semesters, interviewing first-generation students of Mexican origin on our campus. Students have published their collectively authored research findings in two extensive Web pages (Oral History, 1998; 2000). Nourished by my students' interpretations, much secondary literature, and by the interviews, I now reflect on these questions, proposing that the narratives of first-generation Mexican-origin students on our campus express emerging claims for cultural citizenship (Flores and Benmayor, 1997; Benmayor, 1997; Benmayor et al., 1997). (4) Applied to our campus context, claiming cultural citizenship means affirming the right as Mexican-origin students to receive quality education, to be on college campuses in significant numbers, and to be appropriately supported in their academic and career development. In other words, it is the right to first-class student status. More important, students of Mexican origin want to be valued for the cu ltural "assets" they bring to the 21st-century university, such as bilingualism, cross-cultural knowledge, and transnational experience. Instead, they find that traditional frameworks of assessment often stigmatize bilingual and bicultural students as academically deficient. Students of Mexican origin want to help shape the curriculum, the values, and the multicultural life of the university. They want the university to acknowledge and share their commitments to family and community, as well as support their personal goals and dreams.

The stories of first-generation students on our campus challenge hegemonic arrangements of meritocracy. At the same time, they affirm a subjectivity shaped by what Henry Giroux (1997: 125) calls "different cultural logics"--logics that are counter-hegemonic and affirm different epistemologies, cultural standpoints, and historical experiences. (5) The stories of first-generation Mexican-origin students at CSUMB articulate a cultural logic in which the value of education is measured not by individual class mobility or increased economic power, but by the collective advancement and well-being of their subordinated communities. Cultural citizenship becomes a particularly useful framework for analysis, then, as it articulates specific cultural logics and practices with collective claims for cultural rights, empowerment, and full belonging.

Why Cultural Citizenship?

Cultural citizenship refers to "the ways people organize their values, their beliefs about their rights, and their practices based on their sense of cultural belonging rather than on their formal status as citizens of a nation" (Silvestrini, 1997: 44). (6) Framed in opposition to hegemonic legal citizenship, cultural citizenship describes "the claims of social, human, and cultural rights made by communities which do not hold state power and which are denied basic rights by those who do" (Inter-University Program, 1988: 2). Claims for cultural citizenship often go beyond those rights already enjoyed by "first-class" citizens. Disenfranchised, racialized, subordinated, and excluded peoples become what Stuart Hall and David Held (1990) call "new citizens," creating new rights, often not formally recognized by the law. Based on ethnicity, race, class, gender, sexuality, and other defining social identities and binding solidarities, claims for cultural citizenship question, disrupt, and re-map national projects, c reating new rights and new ways of practicing citizenship itself.

In his introductory essay to Latino Cultural Citizenship (Flores and Benmayor, 1997: 37), Renato Rosaldo cautions that "too often social thought anchors its research in the vantage point of the dominant social group and thus reproduces the dominant ideology by studying subordinated groups as a 'problem' rather than as people with agency--with goals, perceptions, and purposes of their own." Cultural citizenship places at the center the ways in which subordinated groups perceive, affirm, and claim their rights and their cultural responsibilities. Drawing on their distinctive cultural assets, subordinated communities struggle to affirm equal inclusion and new rights to reshape civil society in more egalitarian, democratic, and creative ways. Going beyond pluralism, then, cultural citizenship destabilizes the essentialized idea of a unified "American" cultural logic and instead presents a cultural dynamic in perpetual tension.

A borderlands paradigm, cultural citizenship converses with liberation philosophies in education (Freire, 1972, 1973; hooks, 1994; Giroux, 1997, 1992; McLaren, 1997). Education has always been fundamental to the formation and reproduction of citizenship in the modern nation-state (Bourdieu, 1977; Banks, 1997; Aronowitz, 2000). Similarly, education and language have long been primary sites of cultural contestation and new citizenship for Latinas/os in the United States. (7) Chicana/o scholars have produced considerable research and writing on the experience of Latina/o students in higher education (Olivas, 1986; Rendon, 1992; Valdes, 1996; Cuadraz, 1996; Solorzano and Villalpando, 1999, among others). Though this body of scholarship does not explicitly use the framework of cultural citizenship, it speaks to the critical importance of cultural standpoint and what Moll and Velez-Ibanez call funds of knowledge (1990). (8) Moving beyond old immigrant-based paradigms of assimilation and social integration, this sch olarship calls for a consideration of ethno-cultural values and practices, racialized histories and experiences, and complex gender roles as critical factors in understanding how minoritized students experience college. Solorzano and Villalpando propose, for example, that for students of color, marginality is not just a site of domination. Citing bell hooks (1990: 153), they frame marginality as a site of resistance and empowerment (1999: 304). Cultural citizenship captures this nexus, as it describes the...