Chapter 13: Breaking Ceilings and Healing Corazónes: Confronting Racial Trauma in Academia

We are a collective of Latinas in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) who are in various stages of our academic careers. Dr. Gomez was one of the first Master’s degree students to graduate from Dr. Miranda’s lab at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY). After completing a doctoral degree and postdoctoral fellowship, she spent several years as a tenure‑track faculty member at a small liberal arts college before making the decision to leave academia. Dr. Polanco‑Roman also completed her Master’s degree in Dr. Miranda’s lab during a non‑overlapping time period. She is currently in a tenure‑track faculty position at a liberal arts college. Ms. Mañaná spent several years as Dr. Miranda’s lab manager—also during a non‑overlapping time period—before moving on to manage a lab at an Ivy League institution. She recently returned to CUNY to complete a Master’s program in Industrial/Organizational Psychology, and is applying to doctoral programs.

We have been meeting as a collective for the past year or so to offer each other moral, emotional, and spiritual support as we navigate the twists and turns associated with life in academia. Our “circle” as we call it, is a salve, a place of refuge where we come together to air out and process our frustrations and celebrate our wins, a place where we can just “be,” a place where we engage more often than not in critical‑consciousness raising conversations, where we navigate the tricky terrain of processing not only how academia has affected us and our work, but how intersecting systems of oppression (i.e., racism, sexism, heteronormativity, classism, etc.) have impacted our lives in and outside the “Ivory Tower.” A place ultimately where we do a lot of healing. When presented with the opportunity to write this chapter, we all agreed to center our personal experiences navigating academia. Our stories often go unheard, undervalued, and unacknowledged. And just like us, there are countless others who have had similar experiences. As such, the present offering is the outcome of this process over several virtual meetings where we engaged in uncomfortable and unsettling discussions of the ramifications that the current climate in academia has had in all of our lives. In so sharing, we want to uplift the work of Black Feminist and Third World scholars who have laid the foundation for us. These include, but are not limited to, the Combahee River Collective (1977), Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, bell hooks, and countless other queer and non-queer women of color who blazed a path for us to follow and built a bridge for us to cross uncertain and treacherous terrain. We dedicate this work to them and those of you (us), who are aching to be heard. We hear you and see you.

I will start off my section by centering my embodied identities and social locations. I am an Afro‑Latina (Black Dominican), middle‑class (but grew up working class), bisexual, trained psychologist. It is important for me to open this section this way, as it will provide the reader context for my lived experience, how the academic world has interacted with me, and how I have inter- and transacted with it. As I write this, I am sitting overlooking the valeted entrance at my current employers’ new Intensive Care Unit wing.¹ I write in the wing’s sparkling new (albeit sterile looking and feeling) lobby, overlooking trees, a thin layer of snow blanketing the ground, and behind that a family compound of some sort. The vista is nice. A friend, nay, chosen family member, is here receiving care. I set this scene and bring her and the setting up for two reasons: (1) After about a year and a half of employment, I am still figuring out whether my current employer is truly committed to the values of inclusion and equity it espouses, and (2) My friend said something to me yesterday that served as a reminder of how others might perceive me, interpret my behaviors, and decide to treat me based on the color of my skin, the texture of my hair, the clothes I wear, and the way I speak. Claude Steele’s Theory of “Stereotype Threat” (Steele, 2010) comes to mind as I recall this and the subsequent automatic meaning making thoughts I experienced after this interaction. In the opening to his book Whistling Vivaldi, Steele (2010) describes a scene of a Black male graduate student (now a New York Times journalist and editor) walking in a seemingly predominantly White area of Chicago where he was going to school. He starts Whistling Vivaldi after passing by a number of anxious looking White people and wondering whether his presence in that part of town was the cause of their anxiety. As Steele describes it, this was done by this person whose story he’s relating in order to signal to the White people walking past him that he was not a threat, to neutralize a “phantom” (Steele, 2010, p. 6). In this case, the threat the White people in the story were reacting to was the phantom of racism. Whistling Vivaldi for the protagonist of this story was a survival strategy, by signaling to White people that he was something opposite of what they feared or expected, these fears and expectations informed by centuries of stereotypes against Black men (e.g., violent and dangerous), he, in turn, was ensuring his own safety.

This “threat in the air” or the “phantom,” as Steele describes, is a racial contingency: informing how we act and perform, how people react to us, the opportunities we have access to, our academic outcomes, career trajectories, and as 2020 made painfully clear, our life and health outcomes. All of these things are contingent upon the meaning that is placed on our identities. In a space such as persistently White institutions, institutions whose leadership and others in positions of power are predominantly White, in institutions whose culture is built around White cis-hetero normative, middle‑class, individualistic western values, stereotype threat hangs heavy in the air and has the power not only to distract us, but so too to derail us. As a response to overt and covert aggressions by those in power and those who benefit most from systemic privileges, we are often forced to make ourselves small and nonthreatening as a survival strategy—a survival tactic to assuage White people’s fear and discomfort when in our presence. As history has shown us, this imagined fear can have dire consequential career‑development implications at “best” and deadly health and life-threatening consequences at worst. However, the process of constantly being in survival mode and code-switching is cognitively taxing, distracting, and drains our productivity, morale, spirit, and wellness.

Per National Institutes of Health (NIH) and academic career‑development guidelines, I have just passed the “early-stage career” threshold, having earned my degree a decade and some months ago (Lauer, 2017). However, the barriers I have encountered throughout my career trajectory have caused significant disruptions in my journey, which have interrupted my ability to meet research and academic benchmarks (grants, promotions, etc.) that would increase my scholarly “output” and ensure advancement. I have spent the majority of the time after postdoc in survival mode, unable to dedicate enough cognitive capacity to remain on the tenure track, or a track that would ensure I met the goals I set up for myself more than two decades ago. I am the product of NIH-funded pipeline programs: National Institute of Mental Health Career Opportunities in Research (NIMH-COR) and Minority Biomedical Research Support and Research Training Initiative for Student Enhancement (MBRS-RISE), both funding part of my undergraduate and graduate careers. I then went on to attain my Doctoral degree in Counseling Psychology, and ended up at an Ivy League institution for clinical psychology residency/internship–much to my clinical training director’s surprise–and post-doctoral training. I checked all the boxes, did all the things that in my training I was told I was supposed to do to increase the representation of people who I was told were, like me, “underrepresented minorities,” or URMs for short. I was led to believe that having done all these things, I would “make it” to the land of milk and honey, as they say. I would be given a “seat at the table,” and in so doing, I could effect change from the “inside.” I have come to learn that whose table it is one is allowed to sit at is an important, often an unspoken and unnamed factor that needs to be taken into consideration when consenting to take said seat. I worked really hard to follow my mentors’ guidance, I almost dropped out of doctoral studies, yet with the support of my mentors, I stuck with it, pivoted my research focus, connected to a team of graduate mentors who were genuinely committed to my success, and matched at my top-choice for internship. For a while, I did a good job of assimilating to an academic culture that I later realized was only interested in allowing me in and letting me sit at their table so long as I did just that—sit, shut up, and assimilate. Things got real when I stopped whistling Vivaldi.

After my training, I ended up joining the tenure track faculty in the psychology department of a small historically and persistently White private liberal arts institution in Connecticut. By all measures, I had made it, the pipeline program reached the milestones it purported to attain, I increased the representation of URMs in academia. However, that is not where the story ends. What these programs do not prepare one for is the often spirit-breaking experiences encountered in academic institutions that are not committed to true equity and justice. What I mean here by true equity includes intentionally committing to systemic and transformative change that would meet the specific needs of faculty members of color in order to nurture career development and growth, and help us thrive in our respective fields. This includes moving away from performative token-based “diversity,” that is, diversifying “bodies” and expecting us to assimilate to the system. This performativity causes psychological, emotional, and spiritual harm, and amounts to unethical institutional practice. It can cost us our lives, as recently evidenced by Antoinette “Bonnie” Candia-Bailey’s death by suicide 5 days after receiving a termination letter from Lincoln University of Missouri citing “serious concerns” over her work performance (Weissman, 2024).

These and other identity-based contingencies are rife in academia (Galán et al., 2021). In her recent book, Dr. Uché Blackstock (2024) describes the “Pet v. Threat” binary we as people of color, in general, and women of color, in particular—specifically Black women—are forced into. We are in the academy’s good graces so long as we act as loyal, grateful, quiet “pets” who do not push back or speak up when we notice something amiss. However, when we wake up (if we do) to the injustices against people of color that are endemic, systemic, and systematic in the academic field (as they are in other aspects of our society), and start asking questions, push back, resist and disrupt injustices (as has been laid bare in the last couple of years), we easily and quickly become threats. There, we start seeing the fault lines in the pipeline “dream,” we find the leaks, or the leaks find us. The culture of Whiteness, racism, and other intersectional “isms” are the threat in the air that drains us of our life force and stifles our creativity, joy, and ability to achieve our career goals. In essence, this threat is toxic—it has the potential of traumatizing us, and this trauma manifests in a host of ways that ultimately impact all areas of our lives. Some of us persist (often at a great cost), and others engage in acts of resistance and refusal, choosing to liberate ourselves from the shackles of the academy and “drop-out,” often a life-saving and life-giving costly choice. The latter was my case; I chose to walk away from a sick system in order to save my life.

A 2023 report led by the American Psychological Association (APA) Task Force on promotion, tenure, and retention among people of color, showed that tenure‑track faculty at the ranks of associate and professor level remains predominantly White (70% and 76%, respectively) (APA, 2023), despite people of color² as a group making up approximately 40% of the population in the US (United States Census Bureau, 2024). What’s more, the track to tenure is beset with hurdles and barriers. These include invisible labor, such as serving as default mentors for students of color (done out of love and care for these students) in departments that are persistently White like my previous institutions. This work often requires a significant amount of invisible emotional labor in addition to academic support, as well as having to take on the “diversity” and “social justice” tasks that are more often than not ignored or neglected by White faculty members. For those of us who are community-based and focused researchers, having to take on the extra burden of preparing students to engage in such research, as they are not availed of the proper training in their research methods courses, takes considerable time and effort. On top of this, we have to deal with often hostile work environments, both in the classroom and departmental and other faculty meetings. All of this drains us of our time, energy and the cognitive resources needed to successfully prepare ourselves for tenure. The Higher Education Institute at University of California, Los Angeles (Stolzenberg et al., 2019) report on undergraduate teaching faculty findings show that Black and Latinx/e women, including those in STEM, were more likely than their Asian and White colleagues to report discrimination as a source of stress. Moreover, Asian, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx/e women were more likely to report having to work harder in order to be seen as legitimate. In essence, we have to surmount innumerable barriers, given the culture in academia, to attain successful advancement in our respective fields.

As a young child, my dream jobs were to become a teacher, a secretary, or a pediatrician, so it’s not surprising that I would find myself in academia researching and teaching about the mental health effects of racism and discrimination. I didn’t know many Latinas in STEM as a child, so I wasn’t sure what my path would entail, as I happened upon this field. This may have been a blessing in disguise, because had I known the nature and scope of the challenges that I would have had to confront and the sacrifices that were required of me, I may have considered a different career path altogether. These sacrifices, however, were not done in vain. As a tenure‑track faculty in the Department of Psychology at a small liberal arts college in a major metropolitan city where I grew up, I am now in a position where I can help make a career in STEM more accessible to other Latinas. This is a responsibility that I do not take lightly and one I do not take for granted.

As a Latina from a low socioeconomic status and immigrant background and first‑generation college student who is now a tenure‑track junior faculty, I often refer to myself as a unicorn. Like many who also grew up in predominantly Black and Latine communities, as I did, we experience considerable hardship navigating through institutions of higher education, particularly Predominantly White Institutions, which is logical considering that these spaces were created to explicitly exclude us. This is especially the case among those of us who resist the assimilationist approach—where shedding aspects of our earlier life, the life before academia, is rewarded. These hardships follow us beyond graduation and degree conferral, and evolve to take a different shape as faculty. This includes navigating academic politics, the increasing demands on our time and attention, the unwritten rules to achieve tenure, and importantly, the emotional, albeit overlooked, labor of protecting Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) students from the prevailing Whiteness in academia.

Abraído‑Lanza et al. (2022) describe the challenges that many Latinas in STEM encounter, which occur at multiple levels and often include sociopolitical context (i.e., immigration and racial climate), family dynamics and gender norms (e.g., caregiver roles), and institutional climate (i.e., attacks on race scholarship). To date, I continue to wrestle with a sense of belonging and community in a setting where I am a numerical and cultural minority. A lack of representation of Latinas in STEM serves as a constant reminder about the institution’s concerted efforts to keep certain groups of people out of academia. Without BIPOC in mind at the time that these institutions were created, it makes sense that our unique professional needs are unaccounted for and often overlooked by those in positions of power who help shape the culture and climate within these institutions. For this reason, systemic changes in academia are necessary, as we deserve to thrive and not just survive. In fact, one of the many challenges I personally experienced was an unabating tension between the rewarding of individualistic values over my collectivistic values.

As a doctoral student, I worked 12-hour days, seven days a week, juggling multiple roles, including as a student in my own classes, as an instructor teaching my own classes, as a training clinician in residence at mental health clinics, and as a budding researcher. As a result, I missed out on many family gatherings: Sunday dinners, birthday parties, baby showers, weddings, and funerals. My parents migrated from the Dominican Republic (DR) in the 1980s and landed in Brooklyn, New York, where I grew up. We would spend summers in DR, as many of our relatives still lived on the island—a tradition that continued, for the most part, through my adulthood. After starting my doctoral studies, financial and time constraints resulted in a 10-year gap before I was able to make another trip to DR. Fortunately, social media allowed us to stay in touch over the years, but I had missed out on a lot of quality time with family and friends. This was one of the many sacrifices I inadvertently made for my doctoral studies.

My doctoral studies were similarly fraught with barriers. I was fortunate to have benefitted from several social programs that were available to students like me. For my undergraduate studies, I was a beneficiary of the Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP), a state-funded program for academically and economically disadvantaged high school students in New York that aimed to reduce barriers to higher education. My undergraduate experience was also my introduction to Predominantly White Institutions, and served as the catalyst for my current pursuit of studying the mental health effects of racial discrimination and racial trauma. I intentionally chose a public college and minority-serving institution for my graduate studies, where the student population reflected more of the surrounding communities, my community. I feel safer in settings where I am not one of a few, so I traded material resources for a sense of community. A choice forced upon me even as faculty.

I continued to benefit from similar social programs tailored to students from underrepresented backgrounds. I was a predoctoral fellow in the NIH Research Initiative for Student Enhancement (RISE) program that aims to diversify the medical and behavioral sciences. Currently, I am supported by an early career grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health Equity Scholars for Action program, which aims to diversify the research and academic pipeline and support health equity research. These programs provided me with much-needed financial resources and mentorship. I worry about the future of these programs following the recent ruling by the US Supreme Court overturning affirmative action policies, i.e., race-conscious admissions practices. Such programs were created to redress the long-standing and unjust exclusionary practices that left women, people of color, poor people, and people of immigrant backgrounds out of academia. These are all identities that I simultaneously embody.

Our current hyper-polarized sociopolitical climate is threatening our ability to sustain such programs and a diverse academic community. As of January 2024, 16 states introduced bills, with five of them passing, to limit diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in colleges and universities that aimed to address the historical and structural barriers that excluded women and people of color, including Latinas, from higher education (Burnette II, 2024). Such campaigns against DEI in higher education not only threaten the recruitment and retention of Latinas in STEM, but it also discourages them to pursue careers in DEI.

The current climate for Latinas in STEM is precarious, and for those of us who work in DEI, even more so. Such challenges only add to the existing hardships that we face. Over the course of my short career, I’ve been told that I was a mediocre student by my advisor as a first-year doctoral student, a Latina in STEM, herself, who believed she was preparing me for the harsh realities that were to come. I immediately changed advisors following that meeting. I’ve had my intellectual property published without receiving proper credit. I’ve also been tokenized and seen only as a DEI expert and not for my expertise in other content areas (e.g., mental health). I’ve received overtly biased reviews for my grant proposals. My manuscripts have been unfairly criticized by reviewers and journal editors who have little understanding or appreciation, or both, for health equity scholarship. I have had my research mischaracterized by other academics with political agendas. But among the hardest challenges as faculty is witnessing the struggles of our students of color, and many times, feeling helpless in the face of their challenges. This concern is further amplified when learning about brilliant and successful Latinas in academia who are denied tenure, which was the case for Lorgia Garcia-Peña at Harvard University (Mochkofsky, 2021). Each of these blows is a psychological injury that chips away at my sense of safety and belonging.

I am often asked by Latina students considering a career in STEM: what keeps me going? And without question, I respond: my village of other Latinas in STEM. I would not be where I am today if not for this group of strong, brilliant, and courageous women of color who took me under their wings and mentored me. They not only modeled what was possible for me, they invested in me. They believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. They were patient with me and offered emotional support during the many times I considered giving up (which was nearly every day). They taught me skills that we need to succeed but don’t learn in a classroom—i.e., soft skills like the importance of building a strong professional network.

Mentorship was so critical for my success within academia, and I sought it from everywhere I could all of the time. I was hungry for a sense of belonging and community. I was able to cultivate one for myself in various ways. I joined the Latina Researchers Network—which aimed to provide support and networking opportunities to the next generation of Latinas in STEM—during its early, more active years. I also joined a Facebook group, Latinas Completing Doctoral Degrees, where we motivated, inspired, and supported each other in our shared struggles as Latinas in academia from all over the country, a group that has grown to over 9,000 members in a decade. More recently, I, along with my mentor and lab hermanas, all Latinas in STEM, have informally created a healing group where we meet regularly to help process our hardships and celebrate our victories. Despite being at different stages along the academic journey, it developed organically and attended to our collective needs. This space also served as the basis for this chapter.

Abraído‑Lanza et al. (2022) provide recommendations to help address these challenges, outlined to further support Latinas in STEM. Among their proposed systemic changes are mentoring and leadership programs, cluster-hiring, pay and service equity analyses, leadership accountability, and redefining metrics of success. I remain hopeful about achieving a critical mass of Latinas in STEM to help implement these systemic changes. The alternative is simply not an option. I share my story to help instill hope and empower future generations of Latinas considering a career in STEM that Si Se Puede!

A few years ago, I began to imagine hurricane-force winds blowing around a solid pillar, a pillar that didn’t move and that held up something, but wasn’t quite sure what that something was. No matter how strongly the winds would blow around it, or the devastation caused in the wake of the storm, that pillar stood strong and unmovable. Those winds represented many things, but about 4 years ago, I began to hold the image in the context of stepping into leadership in a program still recovering from the consequences of a faculty member, long-gone, who was found to engage in misconduct, confronting the systems that enabled him to cause harm, reflecting on ways I might have accommodated that system, while at the same time, being encouraged by my predecessor to “change the culture of the program.” It was at the end of a second turbulent year in leadership that I began to envision myself as the pillar, braced against the wind, but still unmoving, not quite certain how I had not been blown away amidst the stormy chaos, and hoping that I wasn’t simply in the eye of the storm and that it wasn’t just a matter of time for the winds to overtake me too.

I am the daughter of Honduran immigrants, the only biological child of my mother and youngest child of my father. My mother was one of 13 children (6 half‑siblings), and my father was an only child, raised by a single mother. My mother’s three younger brothers were killed—two by random acts of gun violence before I was born, and a third by a targeted act of revenge when I was 15 years old. My mother came to the US, like many, to work and send money home to her niece, whom she was raising as her daughter following her brother’s death, and who, over a decade later, I came to know as my sister. Teaching had been her profession of convenience—when the medical field, what she would have pursued if given a choice—was unaffordable to her. In the US, she held various types of employment—factory worker, data entry operator, and before her retirement, hospital housekeeping worker. My father, who had a 4th grade education, worked as a mechanic for a US Navy subcontractor and, prior to his retirement, as a crane mechanic for a heavy machinery service company.

I am the only one of my siblings born in the US, and until very recently, I was also the only one to have gotten a college degree. As a Honduran-American woman in academia, I am in the minority, even among Latinas in STEM. Born in Miami, Florida, I was incredibly talkative in my monolingual Spanish-speaking years, to the point that a neighbor referred to me as “la cotorrita” (which means, “the little parrot”). I grew up spending the occasional summer in Honduras in my mother’s hometown, where I ate pan con mantequilla Hondureña, spent time with cousins, learned to milk a cow, and rode a horse for the first time.

I learned to speak English at the private preschool my mother sent me to so that when I learned English, I would speak it “como los americanos.” I spent 4 years of my middle childhood in Yuma, Arizona, a desert city right across the border from Mexico. There, I first encountered questions about my racial and ethnic identity, particularly when three of my half‑siblings came from Honduras to live with us. My brother, who taught me to read in Spanish, constantly reminded me that I was Honduran, when I would argue that I was “American.” My first-grade teacher encouraged my mother to speak as much English to me as possible, because speaking Spanish at home would not improve my English-language vocabulary. By then, I was no longer “la cotorrita,” and, instead, was a shy elementary school student. Arizona was also the first time I remember my family experiencing overt acts of racism. For example, we had rocks thrown through our front door’s tempered glass by teenage boys with nothing better to do but express their hatred. One way to avoid that kind of “racismo,” my parents told me, was to keep away from people who had “red necks” (I literally thought this meant that people whose necks were red were racist). The other way was to assimilate. So I did, to the point that my heritage has, at times, gone unrecognized by both European‑American (“You are Hispanic? But you don’t have an accent?”) and Latin American peers (“I thought you were Greek or Italian”).

Growing up, I was taught that the US was the “land of opportunity,” that if you worked hard enough, anything was possible and that I should be grateful for the opportunities I had. Because I had internalized messages that to be Latina meant to be considered less intellectually capable, to me, achievement meant not only assimilation, but outperforming my European‑American peers in order to feel that I belonged. In my freshman year of high school, I asked my counselor at the public high school I attended in South Florida what I needed to do to be valedictorian, and I went on to get the grades needed to do just that. I completed my undergraduate degree at an “Ivy League” university, benefitting from need-based financial aid and academic scholarships, and went straight into a clinical psychology PhD program at a private institution, where I did research with a social/personality psychologist who was also clinically trained. After getting my PhD, I did a postdoctoral fellowship at a prestigious medical center with a prominent child psychiatrist, and at age 29, I began a tenure‑track faculty job at a public college that is part of the CUNY system, where I have worked for over 20 years.

I came to CUNY, because I wanted to work with students like me—those from lower-income, first‑generation backgrounds—to provide them with some of the same opportunities I had received. Little did I know, at the time, that my students would also provide me with learning experiences I would not have otherwise had. I also came to CUNY, because I wanted to grow my research on youth suicide at an institution that would not feel like a pressure cooker, where I wouldn’t have the “publish-or-perish” experience that I had heard of at other institutions. No one told me that my time was supposed to be protected from service as an early-career researcher. I had come to my institution to “make a difference,” so I jumped right into everything from helping to launch our psychology participant pool’s use of online recruitment for research studies to serving on and even chairing a search committee. In my 4th year, I was elected as the only untenured member of our department’s Personnel and Budget Committee, where I served almost continuously, as either a full or alternate member, for about 10 years. I also became involved in federally-funded initiatives aimed at diversifying the US biomedical workforce by helping undergraduates who were underrepresented in STEM enter into PhD programs and helping PhD students enter into postdoctoral positions. I later took inspiration from these programs in co-founding the Youth Suicide Research Consortium—a national network of researchers whose goal has been to diversify youth suicide research—with other colleagues (including Latinas) in my field (see, e.g., Miranda, 2019; Miranda & Jeglic, 2021; Molock et al., 2023), colleagues whose partnership has been invaluable.

One of my favorite aspects of my job has been directing a lab that provides research opportunities to students, whether or not they go on to seek out their own independent research careers. My lab has always been a special place (well, at least to me) where I get to witness the growth of new ideas and trace the trajectories of students who start off as beginning researchers and end up as seasoned colleagues. But what I have also learned is that teaching students to “succeed” simply by assimilating to the dominant culture is like asking them to swim against the current. Yes, it’s possible to do, but at some point, you become too exhausted to continue. Furthermore, assimilating to the dominant culture can lead us to perpetuate the same systems that we think we are working to combat and that stand in the way of progress for communities of color.

I have pushed back against the dominant academic culture in my own ways—not always intentionally. One has been by allowing my research goals to get “sidetracked” by my students’ research interests on systemic inequalities—a departure from my focus on individualistic factors. Because I work at an institution whose student body represents the diversity of New York City, the types of research questions students want to pursue are informed by their own lived experiences, which are not always consistent with the clinical psychology theories passed down from the Ivory Tower. So while my tendency has been to look inward—at ways of thinking—to understand vulnerability to suicidal thoughts and behavior, my students have encouraged me to look outwardly to the sociocultural context—something that my colleagues in fields like anthropology, community psychology, sociology, and social work have done more readily—but that the dominant voices in clinical psychology and psychiatry have, until recently, resisted. For instance, measures published by other Black and Latinx/e scholars (Landrine & Klonoff, 1996; Mena et al., 1987) and introduced into our lab’s protocols over 18 years ago by Dr. Gomez while she was a Masters student resulted in one of a handful of published empirical papers, at the time, on racial discrimination and suicide attempts in emerging adulthood (Gomez et al., 2011). This change in our data collection, in turn, opened the door to Dr. Polanco‑Roman’s published findings that having a stronger ethnic identity buffered against the indirect effects of acculturative stress on suicide ideation via risk factors such as hopelessness and depressive symptoms (Polanco‑Roman & Miranda, 2013). They joined the voices of other researchers who had long been advocating for the study of cultural considerations in youth suicide prevention (e.g., Goldston et al., 2008; Zayas et al., 2005).

At other times, I have pushed back against the dominant academic culture by using the advantages afforded to me by my position to speak up to protect others from harm, or to advocate for change, when I have had the opportunity to do so. At times, I have been the only person in the room to advocate for a student when others did not believe they were capable of successfully completing a doctoral program; I have also raged in righteous indignation when my students’ abilities were questioned, or when a lab member was mistreated by another researcher in my field. Sometimes speaking up has led to change, occasionally it has been met with indifference, sometimes it has led to conflict (even with other faculty of color), and in one extreme case, I was served with a “cease-and-desist” letter by a senior researcher—also a woman of color—from a higher-resource institution (a story for another day). In almost all cases, there has been an emotional cost, and the potential to find myself isolated—by the dominant academic culture if I agitate too much, and by those who have been harmed by the system, because no matter how hard I try, what I do may not be enough. But I continue to speak up. Maybe it’s “la cotorrita” in me, breaking through the demeanor of the shy student who became an introverted college professor. Or perhaps it’s the underlying faith—not always unwavering—but ever present, that has guided my life, faith that leads me to concur with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assertion that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” (King, 1968), or to take solace in the words written in 1 John 4:18 that “...perfect love casts out fear.” I continue to speak up as an act of love. By continuing to speak up, my hope is that others are empowered to do the same.

I have often wondered if one of the reasons I work so hard to diversify academia is that I am ultimately trying to feel a little less lonely—to not be “...one of the only…,” dare I say, pillars in the storm. Of course, I know that I am not, and that there are many of us trying to keep standing amidst the chaos that might surround us, including my colleagues in this “circle” and others who have served as sources of encouragement. When I first imagined it, I thought that being a pillar in the storm represented what I needed to do to help the advancement of others coming after me. But more recently, I have come to question who or what it has been that I have been holding up. Sometimes I wonder whether I have, at times, been holding up the systems that have caused harm to the colleagues who are part of this “circle,” including to me. Maybe I have been trying to hold up multiple systems simultaneously. It’s my hope that the larger our community becomes, the more we can let go of our internalizations of the system, so that the only thing we are holding up is each other.

I was walking around 185th and St. Nick the first time I heard it: “It’s The Heights Baby! Home of the Hoes and Haze.” He was referring to Washington Heights, the predominantly Dominican, working-class neighborhood in New York City where I grew up. Until that moment, I remember feeling energized by the buzz of the environment, drenched in the music and the hustle and bustle to survive that permeates “The Heights.” The words were not meant for my ears, but they were deafening. I could not think about anything else the rest of the way to my destination. I felt confused by the assertion; and even though I did not agree and had much evidence to the contrary, hearing a fellow Hispanic person painting such a bleak picture of my people and the place I called home made me feel small and ashamed. I did not know it then, but at their core, these words and the feelings that they elicited, were an omen to the consistent implicit and explicit messaging I would receive in the years that followed. These flippantly uttered words that reduced my home neighborhood to a haven for sex and drugs, and that I heard repeatedly as a teenager, erroneously communicated that we were of little value and had no meaningful contributions to provide to society. As I prepared to write my contribution to this chapter, I thought back to this moment; a moment that I have reflected on repeatedly and have yet to fully unpack.

Being an Afro‑Latina in STEM, much like everything else in life, is a mixed bag. The hardships that come with existing as a Latina in STEM are not unique to academia, but they are especially insidious, because, although impactful, the attacks on your worth are not always overt. There are also so few of us in these spaces that you can end up feeling obligated to endure for a greater cause and lead yourself down a spiral of unearned guilt for not feeling more gratitude for “opportunities” that so few of us receive. Even worse, the experience can leave you feeling “gaslit” and undeserving of the opportunities that you have worked so hard to acquire. Such experiences have led me to twist myself into knots trying to find my culpability in the bad behavior of others as a way of regaining some agency in what can often feel like a helpless situation. In many spaces in STEM, what you can bring to the table is often overlooked or underestimated simply because of how you look or speak, and the number of years of experience you possess become nearly irrelevant without the right degree. Merely voicing the presence of errors or injustices can lead to losing life-changing opportunities; and there is often someone who feels cheated by your presence, aching to remind you that you are not truly welcomed. It’s an environment teeming with opportunities to exploit immigrant upbringings that caution you to resist “rocking the boat,” be grateful at all costs, and work hard to far exceed expectations to earn your keep. The combination of this upbringing, a lifetime of exposure to prejudice and discrimination perceivably based on my race, gender, skin tone, and even the texture of my hair, and my refusal to assimilate to the predominant culture in academia, has stagnated my growth and made my journey in STEM quite difficult.

While I have met many wonderful people in academia, both Black and White, who saw something special in me, took me under their wing, and redefined the limits of what I could achieve, presumed-to-be-safe academic spaces—many touted for their diversity—have hosted some of the most blindingly racist moments I have experienced. These have ranged from “seemingly inconsequential” slights like a White lab mate ignoring me but introducing a White teammate to his parents (whom he claimed didn’t like Black people), to being reported to campus security by a White student for unknowingly sitting in the wrong area of campus to work on a project, then being called “ghetto” and told that my reaction, to their unnecessary escalation, was the reason “my people would always work for their people.” Experiences of this flavor traveled with me from undergrad research labs to workplace research environments and reared their heads in the most inexplicable circumstances. I have had White colleagues double down without consequence on their prejudice and disrespectful behavior during meetings meant to address said behavior. Of note, during a diversity meeting, I was told by a White colleague whom I supervised that they had been conditioned to only accept guidance and direction from White men, a mind-bending statement that was preceded by them bemoaning that White people were plagued by unfair expectations to work hard and forego work-life balance.

My negative experiences in STEM have not been limited to just interactions with White people. Even more hurtful and unexpected in nature, has been the pain caused by other people of color who have been forced by these environments to subscribe to the notion that there isn’t enough room for multiple people of color and their varying views to exist in these academic spaces; people that have raged against the machine and ostracize anyone, White or Black, whose ideals, especially those regarding how to address systemic racism in academia, do not perfectly align with theirs; people that mask their true feelings to fit in and take on the happy-go-lucky person of color persona—always cheerful and smiling—to evade harmful tropes about Black people; people that recognize the harmful reactions to systemic racism that lead people of color to hurt other people of color and who choose to stand by as a form of self-preservation; and people of color that have contorted themselves to fit performative, superficially welcoming institutions that court you and momentarily celebrate your individuality and authenticity, but then implicitly, but strongly encourage you to change to make yourself more palatable to their senses.

Many of these spaces and the people that lead them racially objectify you as a means to an end to an ego boost meant to portray a persona and values that they do not genuinely hold. Proclamations of support for diversity and equity are made without meaningful efforts to ensure safety in these environments, and what is implicitly and explicitly communicated is that your mental health and well-being are not important and that sacrificing aspects of yourself and your health are par for the course for the opportunity to breathe this rare air for which you should be grateful. Remaining within the many inauthentic, performatively diverse environments that exist within the STEM field is fraught with the pressure of all the different identities that you represent; the stereotypes that you feel compelled to work against, the responsibility of trying to make these environments more just and welcoming for future generations; the pressure to be impressive but not threatening to White people, to the few people of color fighting for survival, to your superiors that “welcome” feedback and accountability until you provide it, to the people you oversee that interpret your neutral messages as aggressive but overlook White people explicitly degrading their teammates; to the pressure to call out bad behavior usually perpetrated by White people in power that claim to stand for equity but hold you to a different standard than your White colleagues; the pressure to not call out bad behavior by other people of color out of fear of hurting the cause or giving White people something to run with; and the pressure to not cave and continue going against the grain to remain true to yourself.

My biggest takeaway from my experience as a Latina in STEM is that in this context, where the stakes and capacity for harm are so high, not everything is an opportunity—a life lesson I learned from a comment left on my mentor’s Twitter post about the hypocrisy of “PIs [Principal Investigators] that put on a good face about diversity but bring BIPOC people into dysfunctional environments that cause them harm” (Miranda, 2022). Truly diverse spaces in STEM are few and far between, and if you allow them to, some of these spaces that tokenize diversity will not only drain you dry, but eat you alive; they will chew you up, spit you out, and then reduce you to your mistakes and the shortcomings that they helped create through their negligence—mistakes that as a person of color in these spaces, you are pushed to believe you do not have the luxury to make, because the threshold for error, even just perceived error, for us, for Latinas, for people of color, is smaller. Due to the scarcity of people of color in STEM and the dynamics that these spaces cultivate between the few people of color present, you usually have to face these hardships alone or with a limited support system, and without the protection that having a network of people that look like you and see your humanity can provide.

For me, another important takeaway has been that people are complicated, and may come with a host of traumas that inform their behaviors; and that as difficult and counterintuitive as it may be in these spaces, we owe it to each other, within reason, to at least try to give each other the benefit of the doubt and show each other some grace, whenever possible. Without the support and grace afforded to me by my friends, family, and the members of this healing circle, and the grace that they helped me show myself, I would not be where I am today. It is imperative to your survival in these spaces and their aftermath, that you find your tribe, show yourself grace, and learn to discern which people, spaces, and institutions deserve your energy and everything you bring to the table. Contrary to what the barrage of negative implicit and explicit messages that are thrown your way will try to convince you - you are valuable, your contributions are valuable, and you are worthy and deserving of being in these spaces.

In a recent publication with a different writing collective (Gomez et al., 2024), we (Dr. Polanco‑Roman was a co-author) found that among a group of college-aged young people of color, both in academic and nonacademic spaces, racism-, xenophobic-based violence, and microaggressions experienced directly or vicariously were associated with racism‑based stress and traumatic stress even years after the original encounters. These experiences with racism had a significant impact on these young people’s lives, as evidenced by our findings. In addition to understanding the impact of direct and indirect experiences with traumatic racism‑based stressors, we wanted to understand how these young people dealt with and healed from such experiences. Our qualitative findings showed, overall, that leaning on the collective, centering one’s identities and culture (rather than denying our heritage or assimilating into Whiteness), activism, and engaging in spiritual, cultural, and ancestral practices helped them navigate these challenges and connect to the hope that things could be different. Our findings dovetailed with the psychological framework for radical healing developed by French and colleagues (French et al., 2020). The ultimate goal of this framework is being able to envision and attain self and collective liberation, hence radical healing in the face of ongoing oppression. The pathways or components include: (a) Critical Consciousness (i.e., awareness and understanding how systems of oppression and hate are interlocked and mutually reinforcing); (b) Strength and Resistance; (c) Cultural Authenticity and Self-Knowledge; (d) Emotional and Social Support; and (e) Radical Hope. In keeping with this, we are radically hopeful that things can and will be different, if not for us, for the generations that will follow us. This is evident in our relationship with each other, and our continued commitment to collective care and justice. We offer these words, our experience, and our process for a number of reasons. We are adding to the body of literature that acts as a counter-narrative to the continued attacks on our stories, experiences, and lives. We also hope that our examples make those of you who are reading this feel less alone; we are part of your community, and we care. We do this for the continued work of our collective liberation. We do this as an act of radical love.