'Very special for me' : UNM hosts event honoring first generation student

For Denise Salas, a junior at the University of New Mexico, performing with fellow mariachis at the state’s flagship university for an event commemorating students who are the first in their families to go to college was special.

“It’s honestly very special for me, especially because I am a first-gen student,” she said, adding she was raised in the city’s South Valley by immigrant parents.

“They were very excited, from the start,” Salas said. “They were very happy to know that I was actually going to go get a college degree, which is something that they fought for when they came to this country.”

On Friday, in the student union building, the university honored its first-generation students during the “weeklong First-Generation Celebration.”

More than a dozen students and faculty members attended the event on Friday, including outgoing UNM President Garnett Stokes, who was also a first-generation student.

“You may know that first-gen students make up nearly half of our Lobo student population. That’s remarkable,” she said. “Celebrations like this one, this afternoon, are just one opportunity ... for our first-gen students to actually celebrate with each other and support each other together.”

One of those students was Miriam Barbra, raised in San Antonio, Texas’ Eastside Dignowity Hill neighborhood. She hopes that the dual degrees she’s pursuing in Chicano Studies and political science will propel her to graduate school, where she plans to pursue a master’s degree in social work.

“I think having support systems like my mom, like my parents … I want to give back to the community who raised me,” she said. “So being able to be like, ‘OK, I’m going to go get my degree in this, and therefore I’m going to go back home to help my community.’”

Barbra is a third-generation Mexican-American; her mother has an associate’s degree and works as a nurse for the San Antonio Independent School District, and her father works in a warehouse for Texas grocer H-E-B.

“I’m really grateful to be at UNM, I think that’s one of the biggest things; being in a community,” Barbra said. “Being in a university that supports students like this, supports ethnic studies in general, I feel really connected.”