They hear the news and entertain their fantasies: the fancy new car, the big house, the pool in the backyard. No more working in the fields. No more getting down on one’s knees to scrub the floor in a stranger’s house. No more daydreaming while breaking one’s back.
The dream is here, baby — the 21st century has landed. Their child, born in the United States, is going to get his doctorate in English language and literature.
He’s going to be somebody.
They rejoice, my undocumented, farm-working, Mexican father and my poor Puerto Rican mother. They see our ancestors’ long-unheeded prayers finally coming true. They see an end to our poverty upon the conferral of my advanced degree.
But people like my parents don’t understand today’s academic job market. They don’t understand how you can take all the highly specialized courses, attend conferences and publish papers, write a dissertation, receive a degree, and still be unable to acquire a job that offers financial security and health insurance. They can’t grasp how academe, the place they were told was the pinnacle of achievement and access to the good life, generates an ever-growing pool of impoverished, exploited, and precariously employed scholars and teachers with next to no hope of upward mobility.
As I approach the end of my doctoral work, there seems to be no language in which to express to them that, after keeping us out all these years, after all these centuries of researching and experimenting on us, academe will not house us. They don’t understand this most banal dilemma of being a doctoral student in the 21st century.
They don’t understand, and their not understanding feels like my undoing.
Still, I try to explain. On FaceTime, they both look at me, confused. “Stop being so negative,” my mother says. “You have been working hard for so many years. You deserve this.”
So many deserving people, so many unfulfilled dreams — how do I convey this painful reality to them? How do I convince them that my fears are more justified than their hopes?
My parents still believe in the ideal of meritocracy — that if you work hard, get the highest degree possible, and do everything by the book, you will make it in America. They believe this creed the way so many of us have been taught to believe it. Because to believe it is to hope the same hope that carried our ancestors across the centuries: that someday one of our own would “make it,” and all the sacrifice will have been worth it. I couldn’t live with myself if I extinguished that hope. But, honestly, it’s not up to me.
Throughout graduate school, I’ve heard professors say that they try to be as honest as possible about the job market to prospective students. The consensus of warning is kind enough: Tell those considering grad school that most folks get caught in a loop of unsustainable adjunct teaching. Rhetorically, though, this warning only serves to justify the rugged individualist notion that those who aren’t tough enough will be weeded out — only those who really, truly want it will make it.
But how do we know who really wants it? Or, rather, who can even afford to want it that badly?
I remember, back when I was applying to doctoral programs, sitting across from one of my white tenured professors. They tell me that I am not ready for graduate school. They say this after I tell them that I want to be a literary critic — but that I’m also terrified. Terrified because I do not know what will be expected of me, because no one in my family has ever gone to graduate school — my mother never completed high school, and my father has never had a single day of schooling, period. Terrified I will not be good enough.
After keeping us out all these years, after all these centuries of researching and experimenting on us, academe will not house us.
I say all this, and the professor responds plainly, authoritatively, that I should reconsider my plan — because, they say, graduate work demands the best from us. I leave the office frustrated and dwell on those words for months, for years. I dwell on them now, still.
What this professor didn’t warn me about was the fact that universities’ ever-increasing demands for, and exploitation of, contingent labor imposes significant hardships on people of color. Illness, poverty, and the need to take care of family can become a deciding factor in one’s success. As someone who has financially assisted his parents for years, using my stipend money, fellowship award, and a meager adjunct salary, all while trying to check off the requirements for landing a full-time job (presenting at conferences, publishing, etc.), I am already dangerously close to entering even deeper, possibly inescapable poverty.
Yet even as students of color like myself struggle, diversity initiatives are ubiquitous. Diversity is good for branding, after all, and diversity helps departments get more funding. Slap a student of color on the website, take pride in the increasingly diverse cohorts, and boom. Still, there’s little, if any, support to address the particular financial, emotional, and intellectual hardships that first-generation students of color go through once they’re actually in their programs. This is not something many academics want to talk about.
In a recent workshop on writing pedagogy, for instance, another white academic in a tenure-track position eagerly discussed their research into the writing practices of students who use Spanglish and African American Vernacular English, but they were quite reluctant to discuss how white supremacy shapes writing pedagogy. I can never forget biting my tongue while having to listen to someone tell me about their innovative and original research about students who were, well, me, as if I were some immaterial, far-away thing to be studied. Always an artifact, never a peer.
But the fact of the matter is academics of color are here; we’ve been here. We are interested in pursuing doctoral work, teaching and researching, and working with students like us. But the current university structure is not built to sustain us.
Graduate students of color will continue to fill diversity quotas, teach large survey courses in their discipline, and assist senior scholars, all the while being directed into alternative careers outside of the university. Those lucky few who manage to land tenure-track positions will be worn out by all the demands on them.
One demand that all of us are forced to reckon with is explaining to loved ones how becoming a doctor is no guarantee of full-time employment. Loved ones who believe the prestige of being in the ivory tower is something to aspire to, and something that will, ultimately, save us.
My parents FaceTime me. They’re eating dinner, and I’m working on my laptop. “Siempre estás trabajando,” my father says. “Tienes que descansar la mente.” My mother nods in agreement with him.
I tell them what I have told them for years: I’m resting, eating well, don’t worry about me. I recite this well-rehearsed line knowing it’s a lie, knowing I’m stressed over money, knowing I’m tired of worrying about finding full-time employment to help them pay their bills and keep them alive.
I’m tired. Tired of the whole thing. And I’m tired of being unable to communicate why I’m so tired, which is itself very tiring.
To be a first-generation graduate student of color is to constantly negotiate, translate, and filter one’s experience across different audiences. On one end, I cannot tell my family about the unending imposter syndrome or racist microaggressions accumulated through the years as a doctoral student, because telling them would confirm that I don’t really belong here, that I never really belonged in academe in the first place. On the other end, I do not tell professors or colleagues that my parents’ survival hinges on my attaining a full-time job because that would break with academic professionalism and affective decorum. I am the only one who knows the full story.
Bearing the full story alone is a burden that makes succeeding in academe even harder for marginalized people. On top of doing our scholarly work, we must account for the various audiences that demand from us particular performances of self. We must continuously uphold guises of gratefulness and friendliness. We must always assure others we are working hard and deserving of the opportunities given us. Above all else, we must never let on that we are not OK.
I look at my parents through our video calls; I see the dispossession and forced migration, generational poverty and hard labor, centuries-long colonial trauma of trying to make it in the Americas. And they must look back at me, thinking I will be their Moses guiding them out of all this, letting them live at least the last few years of their lives with a little less stress, worry, and woe. Or maybe they look through the screen and pity me — pity their little boy who chose to be a writer and teacher instead of an accountant or a medical doctor, pity their American dream who chose the more idealistic path.
I linger over the last part of my father’s sentence, a sentence he’s said before and will say again: tienes que descansar la mente. My parents, there in pixels, recognizing me as a person who thinks critically and imaginatively, as an intellectual. They’re telling me to rest the mind, hijo, the mind that works too much, the mind that has been thinking for far too long. I linger there, in their affirming nudge, the command I will not heed, dreaming of the day they and I can rest our minds for a little bit, dreaming of the day we can finally rest our bodies a little while.
