Race on Campus

A three-hour commute seen as a privilege

The barriers students of color face in earning a degree can overwhelm administrators and advocates alike. Which do you tackle first? How do you scale up? How do you handle the forces outside your control?

Last week The Chronicle published a short documentary by the freelancer Emily Kinskey — produced by our senior web producer, Carmen Mendoza — that demonstrates how one university set up its program to best serve its students and community.

Viviana Mitre lives and grew up in Juárez, Mexico. At the urging of her mother, she used her American citizenship to pursue her undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of Texas at El Paso, or UTEP, just across the Rio Grande.

“The most beautiful part of being from the border,” Mitre says, “is that you get to experience both sides of different cities — countries, literally — and then you get to make your identity both. You get to be an American, you get to be Mexican, and then you just merge them and make yourself.”

Mitre’s grandmother and mother both dreamed of pursuing degrees but stopped short in order to work full time.

“Seeing all my grandchildren graduate, that’s my dream,” says her grandmother, Norma Alicia Carranza. “We normally say that’s the inheritance that we can leave our children. That’s the gift: for them to study, to prepare themselves, so they wouldn’t have to struggle in the future.”

Though Juarez is just 10 miles from UTEP, heavy security at the Mexican border means Mitre sometimes sits in up to three hours of traffic each way.

“You have to just schedule your day around the line,” Mitre says. “It’s a little overwhelming, and you feel tired. But I think it’s more privilege and benefits that you get from it, and that you feel from it, rather than the bad parts.”

At the university, she enrolled in a social-work program that trains its students to serve the unique needs of other “borderlanders” in the El Paso region.

Many professors in the department are also “borderlanders.”

“You know, I look at Viviana and I remember my story being a borderlander like Viviana, living in Ciudad Juárez, commuting daily,” says Eva Moya, interim chair of UTEP’s social-work department. “And so to have our department have a focus on social work in the border region, and to have Viviana’s exposure to understanding systems in both countries — it’s a gift. It’s a very special talent. And how I wish that more students would have that opportunity, because it makes you twice as resourceful.”

Mitre’s inherited determination, her professors’ empathy, and the department’s framing of her dual identity as a “special talent” proved to be a successful formula. She is set to graduate in May.

“Education is that powerful, powerful process and growth that no one can take away from you,” Moya says. An education “grounded in communities that you are a part of” gives you “an additional set of tools and expertise to do for the world the things that need to be done.”

Play Now

The Borderlander

Do you have an idea about race and higher education you think we should write about? Feel free to email me at daarel.burnette@chronicle.com.

What I’m reading …

• The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, by Manisha Sinha, describes the failure of a biracial democracy created by a new federal commitment during Reconstruction, Fergus M. Bordewich writes in a Wall Street Journal book review.
• The New York Times’ s Wesley Morris writes about why O.J. Simpson was an earthquake and why we’re still living with his aftershocks.
• Tennessee’s conservative legislature killed its anti-DEI bill after the Knoxville Jewish Alliance wrote a letter detailing how the legislation would snuff out the University of Tennessee’s support for Jewish students, according to The New York Times.