STORY BY TARA GUAIMANO
ILLUSTRATION BY JANINE PULTORAK
Katy Rivera sat in her first college calculus course in 2016, the equations on the black board seemed to blur into meaningless figures. In that moment, years of socioeconomic inequalities she’s faced surfaced once and for all — she was a mathematics major, and she realized she never learned simple multiplication.
“I was like I swear to God I can do calculus — but I don’t know how to multiply or divide,” Katy said. “I made it here because of something, but I didn’t know what it was.”
Katy, a first-generation college student who grew up on the border of El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, has seen the effects of inequalities manifest throughout her life. Growing up in one of the most underdeveloped parts of the US, she was forced to grapple with substantial challenges that came alongside her personal identity.
“Growing up in a border community is so unique,” said Katy, her tone of voice echoing her brain’s seemingly effortless connection between emotion and reason. “You feel it when you’re in it.”
Her brain analyzes endless outcomes and possibilities in every room she sits. She’s taken a powerful grasp of her experiences, and today, she is a senior political science and mathematics double major at Marist — committed to using her complex craft to harness social and economic inequality with nuanced context.
She’s spent time working with high school students from migrant families in the Mid-Hudson Valley to develop leadership skills through the arts. She’s also interned with a former US representative for Texas’ 16th district, Beto O’Rourke, at home in El Paso — consequently making a substantial impact on every community she touches.
Thus, Katy discovered an overbearing sense of imposter syndrome. She went home to El Paso for winter break, questioning if going back to Marist for the spring would perpetuate this feeling of displacement from her hometown.
When she met her honors program mentor, former For The Record 2017 recipient Julia Parris, and Dr. Lee Miringoff at the Marist Poll — things changed. She realized other students had felt the emotional effects of feeling like she didn’t deserve this great education, just because of who she was. She also realized Marist could help give her the tools to go back to El Paso and empower her own community.
“Having that solidarity and having an immigrant woman of color come to me and say, ‘It is so hard to be here, and feel like you belong and feel like you deserve this.’ Some people are just here by virtue of who they are and how their lives ended up — you are not any less deserving because of what you can and what you can’t do.”
However, the search came with challenges. It’s a horrifying sense of identity searching — where a sense of place and belonging had now disintegrated in both of the communities she belonged to.
“Then you have to go home, and everyone at home hates you,” Katy said. “And says like, ‘You abandoned us, or you are not really like us anymore.’”
For Katy, El Paso feels like a small town — but it’s a big town, with a big history. She sees the Mexican Peso used nearly as frequently as the U.S. Dollar. Serving staff at restaurants speak Spanish more frequently than they do English.
“Not only is there a very heavy border patrol presence — you can’t go to McDonalds without seeing an ICE agent or a CBP agent.” Between the military presence and noisy helicopters of Fort Bliss, the security places a discomfort that she calls nearly “surreal.”
“It is just an uncomfortable presence — but it is kind of just accepted as another reality.”
She points to a new outlet mall in the east side of El Paso, popularly decorated with sombreros, mustaches and “spicy” appropriated rhetoric. “I realized what an insane cultural divide that is. I think that a lot of the community has to embrace things like that, because it feels like that is almost what they want to see from us — instead of letting the community be authentically itself.”
There is also an obvious racial divide in the city, she said. “It is definitely not as diverse as people think it is — but it is uniquely Mexican American. But not in the way that we understand ‘Mexican dash American,’ but very Mexican and American — those things together.”
But this sort of cultural fluidity comes alongside innate inequalities, Katy said. She attended school in a magnet program, where classes were taught half in Spanish, and the other half in English.
“There was obviously a pretty salient imbalance in the program, although it was really helpful and helped some students excel very quickly,” she said.
“I didn’t anticipate going to college,” Katy said. Although she was in the same level courses as other students heading to university in the fall, she realized something was working against her.
“I realized I was being passed over for so many opportunities,” Katy said. She had to argue with her principal to allow her to take advanced physics classes. She was excluded from photo-ops for college readiness programs. No matter; Katy ended up graduating in the top 10% of her class.
In August 2019, Katy ran to her mother’s office in panic. It was next door to the site of the mass shooting that killed 22 people at a Walmart store, a case of domestic terrorism where the suspect admitted to targeting Mexicans. “My dad is a very stoic Native American man, and he looked me in the eyes and said, ‘It’s about time now, the people who are here are not going to find the family members that they are looking for,’ and he started crying.”
“22 people died because they were Mexican,” Katy said. “Communities are ruined consistently and stories never get told, and they are still broken.”
Katy’s community was, and is, hurting. She knew the best way she could help was by harnessing her strengths, and ridding the nagging sense of betrayal. “El Paso is constantly oppressed, and kind of always painted over with a nice, Latinique spice. But they have so much more to offer,” she said.
“No one can help each other because everyone is so confused and hurt about all of the things that keep happening to them — everyone feels like, if you leave, you are no longer part of them, but if you don’t leave, you can’t help.”
She served as the Assistant Resident Director for the Fulton Townhouses, acted as a founder and President of Students Together Advocating for Reproductive Rights (STARR), Director of Programming for FEMME club, and the Community Outreach Chair for the SGA Diversity and Inclusion Board. However, being the spokesperson of communities like El Paso doesn’t always feel right for Katy at times — it feels necessary owing to unfortunate realities of representation.
“I feel like there are a lot of people who have stories to tell and they are constantly being silenced. It’s about struggles and strife,” she said, her voice cracking. “And issues of identity — if anyone had a time to talk, it’s us — now.”
When Assistant Professor of Political Science, Dr. Elizabeth Kaknes, met Katy for the first time, she remembered thinking to herself, “still waters run really deep here.” Kaknes said that impression hasn’t changed.
“You can’t really pin her down as a Texan, or Chicana, or 22-year old, she sort of defies any particular box you'd put her in. I think it is a really beautiful thing for a young person to not label themselves and subscribe to a label,” Dr. Kaknes said. “She’s really flourished in a nice way that has created a niche for her between public opinion and some of the quantitative elements of survey work.”
It took Katy a long time to realize that her efforts were best concentrated in her time at Marist, at least for now. After graduation, Katy aims to work in quantitative research, economic and social inequality.
She remains deeply dedicated to her roots, representing her Chicana heritage in new spaces and advocating for marginalized communities so they too, can be afforded the opportunities she secured for herself.
“There are amazing people with so much to offer the world, that just don’t have the opportunity — the foresight or resources to think about attaining something larger than they are — which is devastating to me,” Katy said. The challenges faced by those in her community echo issues of human capabilities, or ability to even imagine grasping opportunity, in the developing world today.
“But I did make it here, and now I want them to know that it could’ve been them, and it can be, and it will be.”
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