I remember the day I told my parents I was pregnant. It was 1997, the fall of my junior year of high school. We had immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico a little over a decade earlier. We — my parents, my siblings and I (plus some extended family) — lived in a cramped two-bedroom apartment outside of Los Angeles. My parents worked at a bungee cord factory.
When I broke the news, my mother, who has a second grade education, wept. “I thought you wanted to go college,” my father said softly. “What about your education?”
All along, college had been my plan. I took many AP courses, was ranked second in a class of more than 700, and my SAT scores were high. At that moment, though, college seemed a distant dream. READ MORE AT 90.9WBUR
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