CHAPTER 7: NAVIGATING ACADEMIA AND BEYOND WITH RACE MENTORING: A Biracial Multicultural Female PhD Student’s Journey Toward the Hood

My birth name is Merzili Villanueva. I don’t have a middle name, and as a child I oftentimes felt odd because most of my peers had one. As a child, I felt like the odd one out in several other regards: I didn’t have siblings, my parents were of different races, my mom had a thick Spanish accent, and my dad’s skin was dark. Perhaps my perception of these differences and internalized feelings of strangeness had much to do with the community we lived in, the school I attended, and my other family members (they were all born to parents of the same ethnicity, save a couple of cousins who had one immigrant parent and one American-born parent). Perhaps from a young age I realized that these differences would pose challenges in my life; perhaps this realization was a foretelling of some of my future challenges. Fast-forward 5 to 10 to 25 years later, and this early realization manifested in real life. Pure circumstance or self-fulfilling prophecy, I remain uncertain.