Episode 22. Interview with Dr. Anita Tijerina Revilla on the Latinx Educational Pipeline

So a lot of the work that you do focuses on education and activism, and those are things that you've personally been involved in that are close to your heart.

So where does your educational story begin?

Yeah, I think one of the reasons that I decided to do education was because, by and large, my community and my family have not had access to an equitable education.

We have been literally the people who have been left behind, who have been pushed out of institutions of education.

So I, as a small child, was identified as a smart kid.

And so I was... tracked early on into gifted and talented and eventually into a college track.

But that wasn't true for many of my friends and my siblings and family members.

And so along the way, I realized that I was being targeted as one of these children to go to college.

And I received the messages that if I went to college, I could get my whole family out of poverty, that I could help my whole community.

And so this was one of the goals that my mom instilled in me, that if I went to college, that I could help all of us.

And that was something that was delivered to her from local Latino politicians.

And so it wasn't until much later that I realized that there were some contradictions in that, but I became very committed to being this very high achieving child.

And so I joined every honors class that I could.

I became a member of every extracurricular activity that I could.

I went to all the summer programs and I got to go to an Ivy League school.

And mind you, no one in my family had gone to college.

So to go to Princeton University, the first in my family to go to college was a really big deal.

So I came from San Antonio, which is a big city.

It feels like a small town, but it's a big city.

San Antonio is 70% or more Mexican and Mexican-American.

Much of my family had been in Texas even before it became part of the United States, right? And so we have long roots.

Even my great, great grandparents were born in Texas.