Daisy Paredes

My study asks how formal and informal practices of care at a public minority-serving university in South Texas mediate political-economic pressures to shape the lives and identities of first-generation, or first-gen, students. I explore how value and care intersect in neoliberal universities intended to positively transform socioeconomic realities and individual futures. Viewed through the lenses of care and value, the intersection of this historically marginalized population and a core social institution addresses anthropological questions about who and what can be actors of care and how values are deployed to produce and evaluate identities. This is a thirteen-month case study on how two first-generation scholarship programs support and instruct first-gen students with the goal of creating social mobility and generational wealth. I explore competing narratives or definitions of being first-gen, educated, and successful, and consider how non-kin, non-clinical care practices exist in a complex institution with no original directive to care—particularly in the context of ongoing state dismantling of equity-based praxis in higher education. Utilizing a combination of ethnographic, LatCrit, and Chicana-feminist qualitative methods, I document local meanings of first-gen, good education, and good life and identify emergent, everyday forms of transformative education praxis amidst increasing state and market constraints.