Chapman professor focuses on undocumented Latinx parents, college admissions in new book

Chapman education professor Stephany Cuevas talks about the unique challenges Latinx parents face when trying to get their children into college and how they navigate through them at the virtual launch for her book, ““Apoyo Sacrificial, Sacrificial Support: How Undocumented Latinx Parents Get Their Children to College.” DANIEL PEARSON, Photo Editor

After years of gathering research and writing articles on the topic, integrated educational studies assistant professor Stephany Cuevas finished cumulating her work into a 160-page book, entitled “Apoyo Sacrificial, Sacrificial Support: How Undocumented Latinx Parents Get Their Children to College.” To celebrate the book’s November 2021 debut, Cuevas hosted a virtual launch Feb. 24 where she delved into the context of her work and answered readers’ questions.

“So many of us grow up with certain experiences and feel so isolated, and you think that you’re the only one, and you think that your family is the only one, and it means a lot to see those experiences reflected (in this book),” Eve L. Ewing, an assistant professor from the University of Chicago, said at the launch in her opening remarks for Cuevas. 

During the introduction, Ewing also explained how Cuevas used both her personal and academic experiences to explore the subject of undocumented parents navigating the college admissions process in her book. Rather than solely focusing her research on the students themselves, Cuevas approaches the topic as a familial issue.

“Central to (Cuevas’) research is the notion that Latinx students don’t experience education in isolation as sole, compartmentalized, individual students,” Ewing said.

Cuevas’ research proposes that students who have one or more undocumented caretakers are confronted with undue difficulties in the college admission process. At the event, Ewing discussed how Cuevas rationalizes this hypothesis with the logic that the college admissions process usually excludes parents and focuses on adviser-student relationships only.

“I’m thinking about the kind of colonial mentality where an educator assumes they know everything, and they’re just going to interact with the child and leave the parent out of it,” Ewing said. 

According to Cuevas’ research, this creates issues in undocumented Latinx households where parents want to help their children in this process but don’t have the tools or information to do so. For example, some parents might not be equipped with knowledge on the admissions process, financial aid or the differences between community college and state universities, especially if they have never applied for higher education themselves.

“Parents want all this information; they want to fully understand, so they can be part of those conversations with their children to help their children make decisions,” Cuevas told the virtual audience. “Families just want the application process broken down to them in ways that they can fully comprehend it, so it’s not just translating terms.”

Cuevas explained that additionally to the already complex process of college admissions, some immigrant Latinx families also face the issue of a language barrier. Her solution for this problem was that educators should create workshops catered to their student population to help these parents understand and be involved in the process.

During the event, Cuevas also shared what went into the research of the book as well as some excerpts from it. “Apoyo Sacrificial” is based on Cuevas’ dissertation, for which data was first collected in 2016, though the dissertation itself was written and approved in 2017.

Cuevas started the process by looking into existing studies on how immigrant Latinx parents help their children get to college. However, Cuevas’ coludn’t find any literature that differentiated between documented and undocumented Latinx parents in the research. 

Making this distinction in the literature is crucial, Cuevas said, because the parents’ immigration status plays a big role in how they support their children, since undocumented parents are often scared of using federal resources for fear of deportation.

Cuevas, a 2018 Harvard graduate, wrote some articles with the information she had gathered, which she later edited into “Apoyo Sacrificial,” which came out in November 2021.

Ten families, consisting of 13 parents whose children were accepted and enrolled into “Coast University”  — a pseudonym used for the university in California the study is based on, participated in the study. All the families were of mixed-status, with one or more undocumented caretakers also being low-income workers, a majority of whom were of Mexican descent.

“I really wanted to learn from the parents,” Cuevas said. “I think we often talk about family engagement, and we talk about the importance of it, and there’s research that shows it. We talk to the educators, we talk to the students, but often the missing piece is talking to the parents. We talk about parents, but not to parents.”

The title of Cuevas’ book illustrates the intent behind her work, with the word ‘apoyo’ (support) serving to question what the supportive behaviors of undocumented parents are. The word ‘sacrificial’ describes the sacrifices they have to make for their children due to their immigration status. 

Cuevas talked about a family where the mother helped her child by translating her personal statement and helping her edit it over and over again until it was perfect. She also read an excerpt about a family where the mother gave up her blood pressure medication to pay for SAT preparation courses for her child.

“The level of sacrifice surprised me,” Cuevas said. “I knew from personal experience with my own family and with the families that I worked with throughout my years in education that families (and) parents sacrifice things for their children. So I knew that that existed, but the detail of the sacrifice surprised me.”

She hopes her book helps educators not only to understand the complexities that mixed-status families face but also to evaluate how they might be creating systems that marginalize these families.

“(Educators need to understand that they) are just as likely to work with the child from a mixed-status family as they are from a divorced household,” Cuevas said.

Cuevas also said institutions should be more transparent with their admissions process to help people better understand what it actually entails. Leslie Young, a lecturer in the integrated educational studies department at Chapman, acknowledged the university’s initiatives in increasing the student body’s diversity, and she believes Cuevas’ book will help.

“With the knowledge that comes from this book, it will make the admissions process a little bit more holistic when looking at students, the challenges they have faced and how the parents have been involved in how to cope with those challenges,” Young said.

Young attended the event because she had taught several undocumented, elementary school students while working in the Anaheim City School District, and she was also interested in what Cuevas had to say about the undocumented parents.

“Seeing (how an undocumented status affects students) up close and personal really made me think about how the system needs to improve, and above all, how attitudes need to improve among educators who are not so familiar with this and don't understand what (the best ways are) to help these students and their parents,” Young said.

Chapman first-year graduate student Cristal Flores, who is working on her masters degree in education with an emphasis on cultural and curricular studies, said the main point she took away from the event was that her people’s stories matter.

”As a daughter of immigrants myself, entering spaces like Chapman can sometimes feel lonely — like you don’t know people who have the same experience as you do,” Flores said. “(But Cuevas) validated that my story does matter, and the sacrifices of my parents matter, (too),” Flores said.

Flores, who is also a student instructor, added that she felt like “Apoyo Sacrificial” also gave her new vocabulary to express her experience as a daughter of undocumented immigrants and how it shaped her life. An example is the idea of “deportability,” — the fear undocumented families live with that they could be deported at any time — something she’s lived with all her life but never had a word to explain until she found Cuevas’ book.

“These stories matter, and I think Chapman should do more to highlight these stories,” Flores said. “It should not solely be on just the Latinx faculty to do that. There are so many hidden treasures at Chapman, (and) when you have these little treasures like Professor Cuevas and her book, it gives me hope that maybe (the university) is starting to see (Latinx authors).”