Chapter 7: Testimonios from Those Who have Successfully Navigated the Doctoral Pipeline While Working Professionally in the Field of Student Affairs

As we reflect on the process, we embarked on completing our educational journey towards our doctoral degrees while also being working practitioners. Our intersectionality of identities and our experiences with our Latinidad played a monumental role in our persistence toward terminal degrees. In the following pages, you will find the educational and professional testimonials of two individuals pushing toward obtaining their terminal degrees. Their perspectives and experiences based on their validation of their identities will be permanent through the pages, but the one constant was the validation of their Latinidad. You will hear the stories of being raised in the borderlands and experiences of being raised in the Midwest and a bronze star veteran’s wife. Even though, as Latinos, these individuals may share a common identity or even a common language, geographic location, and gender identity added to the complexities of these groups.

Moreover, those educated at large public universities imposed on those that attended elite private universities can add to these complexities. As such, we feel these identities can add to the discourse on how the multiple forms of identities and resistance to the “norm” can lead to an emancipatory change in their respective community and increase representation in the field