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By Gerardo Cadava
Alejandra Campoverdi grew up with her immigrant mother, aunts and grandparents, in a crowded Santa Monica apartment with clippings from fashion magazines on bedroom walls. His outfits were a testament to the prestige to which he aspired. She wore a plaid uniform skirt at what is now Saint Monica Preparatory, the Catholic school she attended with cash aid, and her grandmother, who agreed to work as a teacher’s assistant. In high school, he connected with his Latino identity and his teenage gang. Her boyfriend, Spider, dressed as a chola (a female counterpart of a cholo, a term used to describe a Mexican-American gang member) with brown hair, lipstick, baggy pants, and heavily combed hair.
Campoverdi was the first in her family circle to graduate from college, from the University of Southern California. There she joins the Delta Delta sorority; For his new uniform, he writes, “Reef sandals and Roxy shorts. “When he enrolled at Harvard’s Kennedy School, he took “mental notes of the ‘Harvard look,'” opting for outfits like a “red and white plaid jacket, jeans, and boots. “Campoverdi went on to paint about Illinois Senator Barack Obama’s presidential crusade and was assigned a task in the Obama White House, where he “wore a collarbone-length button-down jacket and a knee-length skirt. “She painted for Obama from his first day in office until 2012, spending part of his time as special assistant to the deputy director of the policy team and the rest as deputy director of Hispanic media, a position that allowed him to help shape the administration’s plan appeals to Latinos.
Campoverdi’s story is a story of past fortune thanks to her ambition, hard work and talent, which allowed her to move “from welfare to the White House,” as she puts it in her new memoir, “First Gen. “Soulful classes are drawn from the emotional and physical scars you’ve accumulated along the way, which come with any promotion. “First Generation” is Campoverdi’s story, but he also needs his eBook to resonate with others who are the first or only users of his book. “Your family, community, or social demographic crosses a threshold. “The “first and only,” he calls them.
Campoverdi learned ambition from his mother, Cecilia. ” If you don’t ask, you don’t receive,” his mother used to tell him. When Cecilia was young in Mexico, she listened to Janis Joplin, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. as he carried his radio to the border and held it over his head to pick up signals from the United States, reinforcing his preference for settling there. One day. He eventually got a job at a factory in Los Angeles, where the hairnet and rubber gloves he wore were not compatible with his “Hollywood vision,” but still allowed him to buy fancy flared corduroy pants on his first paycheck. Reporting on life north of the border, her sisters joined her. Their parents soon followed. A few years later, Cecilia had a baby girl.
Campoverdi’s formative years were filled with imagination, laughter and love. It is “the merit of living with as many adults as an only child,” she writes. Together with her grandmother and mother, she imagined herself as Cinderella and plunged into a fairy world. stories or romances between classes,” such as the 1970 film “Love Story,” about dating between a wealthy Harvard student, played by Ryan O’Neal, and a working-class student at Radcliffe, played by Ali MacGraw. Campoverdi’s mother liked him so much that she started calling him Ali.
But Campoverdi also writes that there was “an air of constant chaos” in the house. She was born when her mother was twenty-five and is still “chasing her version of the American dream”: dancing, skating, fashion, celebrities and men. His grandmother Abi, short for granny, was his support, but his grandfather Abito, short for grandpa, occasionally came home because of his job as a mechanic. And money was scarce. One Christmas morning, Campoverdi opened the door and discovered “a cardboard box full of food and toys packed on our doorstep. “It was a gift from the Santa Monica Fire Department. He remembers feeling “a duel of emotions: happiness for a lot. “I needed help and shame at the thought that we had become an instance of charity. “
As a child, Campoverdi recalls, she took care of her family’s problems herself. “I saw blood around me, from cash to food, energy and functions, so I made the tourniquet,” he writes. Like many young immigrants, she “has become a caregiver, translator, consulting physician, form filler, concept explainer, living dictionary, and therapist. “Campoverdi also began to question what Latino identity meant to her. Spanish your local language and the one you spoke at home. When she started school, her instructor thought she had a learning disability and placed her in a lower-level reading group. When Abi had everyone at home speak English with her granddaughter, Campoverdi began to excel. At the beginning of high school, she saw Latinas sitting on the steps of the library and thought, “Those are my people. “But when she tried to sit with them, the “pack leader” told his crew, “Raise your hand if you need her to sit with us. “None did. She only became a new company when she started dating Spider.
The contradictions of Campoverdi’s Latino identity continued to haunt her at USC. “I looked for Spider and I looked for USC,” he writes. I’m proud of my Latino identity and dive headfirst into the so-called ‘white stuff. ‘During his freshman year, Campoverdi lived at home and drove to school in the ramshackle Mercury Capri that his mother had bought him with her. Reimbursement of tax credits on income earned. When she moved into her sorority in second grade, her “life situations progressed dramatically,” she writes. Each morning, she “walked down our mahogany spiral staircase in my fluffy bathrobe to the breakfast room, where piles of freshly made, steaming blueberry newspapers and muffins awaited her as if in a dream. “A black cook made tortillas for her and Mexican housewives cleaned up after her. Campoverdi found it “shocking to be a woman of color in a predominantly white environment, served through women of color. ” She had “never felt richer or poorer in my life,” he wrote.
After graduating, Campoverdi was a waitress while flirting with a modeling career. She danced in the music videos for Justin Timberlake and Smash Mouth, starred in “The Aviator” with Leonardo DiCaprio and starred in a beer ad with Ben Stiller. In 2004, she made the impression on Maxim in lingerie, which she now considers her biggest professional step. Later, when Campoverdi was running for Obama, Gawker brought the photographs and dubbed her the “Maxim Babe of the White House” in a story about their romance. Dating speechwriter Jon Favreau. Su temper plummeted when she read the story and clicked on the comments. “If the images weren’t enough to thrill me,” he writes, “the sarcastic implication of the story: that I didn’t deserve what I completed. “- I would. I felt that all the gender stereotypes had been projected onto me at the same time.
After Campoverdi left the White House, he moved to Miami to help launch Fusion, then a joint venture between Univision and Disney’s ABC News. It was there that he earned “six figures” for the first time, a purpose he had set for himself as a waitress after college. In Mamiami, he lived on the twenty-fourth floor of a high-rise building. His apartment had floor-to-ceiling windows through which he could see the ocean. She writes that she “swam in turquoise water every weekend and drove a silver BMW. “In the end, “it was enough success to breathe less hard and start saving money, but not enough to take my whole family with me. “Her mother, who is proud of all her daughter’s achievements. achievements, he told Campoverdi: “I live indirectly through you. “
Campoverdi kept climbing and she kept fighting. Breast cancer has affected at least 3 generations of women in your family. His great-grandmother Maria Elena died of the disease when Campoverdi was a baby. His maternal grandmother, Abi, died while Campoverdi was in high school. Her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer after Campoverdi. When his mother tested positive for the BRCA2 gene mutation in 2014, Campoverdi also took the test. His positive result meant he had an eighty-five percent chance of developing the disease. Four years later, back in California, she opted for a bilateral mastectomy.
Campoverdi’s fitness crisis prompted her to position herself as a public figure. When President Donald Trump called for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, she crusade to fill Xavier Becerra’s seat in Congress. (Becerra was named California’s attorney general, replacing Kamala Harris when she became a U. S. senator. ) In her crusade announcements, she described her family’s history of breast cancer, the importance of quality education, and the inequities in the corrupt justice system. Campoverdi’s story attracted the attention of the national press, but failed to overcome the more established candidates. (He came in 11th place, with 2. 4% of the vote. ) The bankruptcy of the “First Generation” committed to his crusade is full of stories about the drawbacks of fundraising and the need to answer questions about Maxim’s appearance.
As the election approached, Campoverdi fell into what he now describes as a “black hole. “It happened suddenly, he writes, the same night a potential donor made sexual advances to him. “If you and I are together for the night,” he said, according to Campoverdi, “I’ll raise you a million dollars. “”Everything came back,” Campoverdi writes, “the attempts I made as a child to save everyone at my expense. The infuriating tactics I tried to compensate for my supposedly incongruous identities. The rush to triumph over my lack of belonging. Unrecognized isolation. I swallowed the terror with aspiration and ambition. The eternal status of outsider. And the duty I still felt to use my life as a mechanism to make my family’s sacrifices worthwhile. He explains that this moment of crisis was the beginning of his “healing journey”, which he will no longer undertake to “sand the rough edges of my past, of my choices, of my appearance, of my family, of my pain”. and my life in general, until they are elegant and comfortable for everyone.
The publication of “First Gen” can be understood simply as the culmination of Campoverdi’s journey. But rather than a story about his liberation from the desire to belong, “First Gen” feels more like a repetitive loop; the new turning point in a career explained through self-reinvention. Campoverdi positions himself as a consultant to other Firsts and Onlys, to help them on their own path to school and beyond. To make his experience comparable to theirs, he turns to pop psychology, using terms such as “breakup guilt,” “pioneer toll,” “invisible inheritances,” “parentalized child,” “law of bicultural balance,” “falls. ” and social”. Ladders”, “Lonely Hustle”, “blindfolded cliff jumping” and “imposter syndrome plus”. Campoverdi felt guilty when he raised gargantuan sums for his political crusade while his aunt still lived in a hundred-square-foot studio apartment with no air conditioning or heat. “Social Falls and Ladders” is the metaphor for his delights like not receiving any assigned tasks despite having the right degrees. He jumped off cliffs blindfolded when he incurred $150,000 in debt to attend Harvard, or racked up “five-figure credit card debt to pay for school tuition. ” subsistence and being able to work on Obama’s crusade.
Many of those concepts are taken from a generation of scholars who have written about first-generation scholars. In 1989, Howard London published an initial study called “Breaking Away,” which documented the negative mental reactions that first-generation working-class academics throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Ernest Pascarella and Patrick Terenzini published a series of influential articles based on surveys of thousands of university academics, which mainly showed how parents’ views on schooling made the decision about their children’s education. School Readiness and Success.
In the early twenty-first century, universities celebrated their efforts to recruit scholars from diverse backgrounds (adding those who were the first in their families to attend school), even as those scholars still struggled to assimilate socially, financially, and educationally. Canada-based sociologist Wolfgang Lehmann found that first-generation students were more likely than others to drop out of school because of “discontinuities of cultural elegance, such as not fitting in, not feeling educated, and not being able to identify. “to other academics. More recently, sociologist Anthony Abraham Jack, a professor at Boston University and author of the influential e-book “The Privileged Poor,” found that reports from first-generation school scholars diverged depending on whether they attended underfunded top-tier public schools. . elite educational environments, already familiar with the tactics and customs of the rich. “
Studies conducted through those scholars have become a vital resource for academics and university administrators. In 2015, academics at Brown University hosted the first 1vyG Summit, where more than three hundred academics from across the United States gathered to “discuss tactics in which universities can improve. “”Elite schools across the country began to view first-generation scholars as members of a distinct identity group, similar to ‘Hispanics’ or ‘blacks,’ and emphasized in their promotional materials their developing percentage as a percentage of admitted scholars, as well as the facilities offered. that they may be waiting to receive. In recent years, the number of first-generation academics has increased to represent more than a share of all university students. Many more of those academics attend underfunded public universities and network schools than elite private schools.
Campoverdi attempts to address scholars in this broad category, raising vital questions about the meaning and usefulness of first-generation identity. In my delight in training first-generation scholars at Northwestern, a school that resembles USC’s, they share with Campoverdi a sense of duty to their network and confidence that their monetary stability is vital to them and their families. Many help their families monetarily by sending cash home for rent, food, medical care and other basic needs. But some might wonder if the loads of thousands of dollars in debt that Campoverdi accumulated value him. (They would also be curious to know how, or if, he paid for everything. )
Campoverdi argues that upward mobility was not an option; It was all I had to do. “The First and Only will have to go beyond the social elegance into which we are born,” he writes; otherwise, monetary stability and economic mobility would not be possible. But the scholars with whom I have painted, in addition to seeking stability and mobility, are mainly dedicated to locating meaning in the paintings they paint. They wonder if they deserve to stay in pre-med because their parents want them to become doctors, or how the work they will do after school can benefit them and their communities. Sometimes these questions lead them to medical school, finance, or consulting; Sometimes this leads them to work in government or in local organizations. Either way, they want more than stories about how to survive the consequences of upward mobility.
Campoverdi’s history of effort and emotional pricing will help other First and Only Ones know they are not alone. This can give them confidence that they can climb mountains like she did, even if they will be marked along the way. But it also reminds us that a degree from a leading personal university uplifts individuals, not communities. Helping first-generation academics achieve their varied goals requires a deep commitment to the confusing relationship between individual and network success, as well as the burden of scaling. ♦
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