Ariana Aparicio shares about the challenges she faced growing up as an undocumented student.
Growing up in Marin County as a first-generation, undocumented student came with challenges. My parents came to the U.S. from Mexico seeking a better future, but opportunities for families like mine were scarce. As a child, I learned early on what it meant to navigate education and society without a safety net, watching my parents work tirelessly while I tried to figure out how someone like me could ever make it to college, let alone graduate school.
I became the first in my family to earn a college degree, a master’s degree and most recently, a Ph.D. at UC Riverside. But the journey wasn’t easy. As a DACA recipient, I navigated my education under constant uncertainty, never knowing if the protections that allowed me to study and work could be taken away overnight. There were no roadmaps, so I became my own advocate and translator, often juggling schoolwork with the invisible labor of figuring out how to make college possible without the resources most of my peers took for granted.
Over the past decade, I’ve worked as an educator and social justice advocate, mentoring first-generation and undocumented students and fighting for equitable access to higher education. I share my story not just as a personal milestone, but as an example of resilience and community impact. Looking back, I wish I had known that I was not alone, that there were others who had walked similar paths and that a community of support existed, even if it wasn’t immediately visible.
I want to show other undocumented students that they belong in spaces where society told us we didn’t. I would like my story to serve as a reminder that, as immigrants or children of immigrants, we are worthy of much more than what society expects us to achieve. With a Perspective, I’m Ariana Aparicio.