UCLA assistant professor of education lauded for work with undocumented students’ access, persistence and success in higher education.
UCLA Assistant Professor of Education Cinthya Salazar has been recognized with the 2024 Early Career Award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), for her exemplary achievements and contributions to the study of higher education through research, leadership, or service to ASHE and the field of higher education. Having joined the faculty of the UCLA Department of Education this fall, Salazar is noted for her research and teaching on the trajectories, access, and success of undocumented students, informed by years of experience as a higher education administrator and a formerly undocumented student herself.
Salazar will receive the award on Nov. 22, during the organization’s 49th annual conference in Minneapolis. In addition, she will present a paper co-written with Cindy Barahona from Texas A&M University entitled, “Legal Violence and the Experiences of Undocumented Students Graduating from College,” at the conference on Nov. 23.
Professor Salazar’s research focuses on the mechanisms used by undocumented students to access, persist, and succeed in higher education, using participatory action research and engaging undocumented students as co-researchers to generate localized student success models that can promote their college retention.
Salazar teaches undergraduate and graduate courses centering topics such as immigrant student experiences and needs, student development and engagement, qualitative research methodologies, and higher education and student affairs administration, informed by her experiences as a higher education administrator and student affairs educator working with minoritized students in college access and retention programs for more than eight years.
Prior to joining the UCLA faculty, Salazar served as an assistant professor of higher education administration at Texas A&M University. She received her Ph.D. in higher education, student affairs, and international education policy at the University of Maryland in 2020.
Professor Salazar has received numerous fellowships and awards including the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship (2019), the ASHE Bobby Wright Dissertation of the Year Award (2020), the Early Career Scholar award presented by the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education (AAHHE) (2023), and the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship (2023). Her scholarship has been published in the Journal of Higher Education, the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, the Journal of Qualitative Research, and the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, among other outlets.
Salazar is an active member of ASHE and previously served the organization as co-chair for the Presidential Commission on Undocumented Immigrants. She remains active in professional organizations and presently serves on the leadership team of the Undocumented Immigrants and Allies Knowledge Community (UIAKC) within NASPA.
Salazar was one of the first researchers in higher education to use Participatory Action Research (PAR), a culturally relevant methodology that promotes engagement with participants as co-researchers, to explore the areas of graduation and career transitions out of higher education for undocumented students with and without DACA. Her research has also been adapted into practical tools, such as a college survival guide for undocumented students and website content for Hispanic Serving Institutions.
Salazar shares her perspectives on serving immigrant and undocumented immigrant students; making sure they feel that they belong on university and college campuses; and the inspiration that family can provide toward better lives through higher education.
Congratulations on your ASHE Early Career Award! How has your involvement with the organization enhanced your work as a grad student and now, as an academic?
Cinthya Salazar: ASHE is the leading research association that uplifts and centers higher education and student affairs research. I would say for students, early in your studies, I think it’s important to join a professional organization that will expose you to what is currently happening in the field, what kind of scholarship is being produced, and what kind of conversations different scholars are having among each other based on what they perceive to be the most pressing topics of higher education.
It’s also really helpful to join early because you get exposed to different theoretical perspectives, not just the topics, but … theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches. That was particularly important to me as a scholar, because I do participatory action research in the higher education space. I was interested in learning more about actual research and when I joined as a doctoral student, I was looking for sessions that … were not structurally there for me. But I connected with scholars that knew someone who had done that work and they facilitated the introductions and conversations. And as I continue to think about my career, [ASHE is] what I consider my research conference home. It’s been really important to how I think about my work and how I present and disseminate the findings.
Tell me about your experiences as a higher education administrator and how they inform your research and teaching today.
Salazar: I started as an administrator before I had a graduate degree in higher education. I worked first at a community college, Miami Dade College … in continuing education, managing and supporting kids and teen programs, supporting adult education programs like the GED. That experience was really foundational to shaping me as a professional later on.
After Miami Dade College, I went into the communications field, and I wasn’t very happy. My degree was in communications, I was working in TV production. And it was not fulfilling the way I wanted it to be. I decided to go back and get a graduate degree in higher education administration for my master’s. During that time, I re-entered the higher education space as a practitioner, as an administrator,
I worked at a career center as a career coach, guiding students on their pathways and their aspirations, and how to make sure they could have fulfilling careers. I also worked at a women’s center with advocacy initiatives, mostly for women of color, for gender equity, for safety on college campuses for women students. Those two roles were at Florida International University. Then, I transitioned to Georgetown University, where I was the director of the access and retention program for first-generation college students of color from low-income backgrounds. I worked with the population I wanted to work with, full-time. My role was fostering student success, supporting students in different capacities so that they could do well, graduate, and stay at the institution.
I worked for three years at Georgetown. At that time, I was also advocating for undocumented student initiatives on campus. I did a needs assessment to be able to identify the main issues that students were experiencing, based on their status at Georgetown, and based on the the results, there were some recommendations that were put forward with students.
When I entered my doctoral program, I had about eight years of professional experience working in higher education. I applied those experiences when I was doing my doctoral program because I had that lens … I had that practice, that direct information from students in a current time, and it was really helpful for my scholarship.
Eight years is a long time, from the DACA period to all the changes that have taken place. What are some of the biggest changes that you’ve seen in your collective years in this field?
Salazar: That’s a good question, because I started doing research and my work with undocumented students before DACA, before 2012, and I am formerly undocumented. When I went to college, I was undocumented as an undergraduate student [as well as] my family, I have other family members, like my brother, who were also undocumented students.
What I’ve seen in relation to changes [are] narratives about who is an undocumented college student [or] who deserves to be an undocumented college student. What my research has shown me and and other scholars as well [is] what DACA has done is that it has expanded opportunities, but it has also reinforced a narrative of who is deserving and who isn’t because there is a very specific criteria for DACA. You have to be a specific age. You have to be someone interested in a career or education. You have to have a perfect record, not even a misdemeanor or an offense that maybe is not criminalized in one state, but it is in another one.
It creates this very ideal “dreamer” portfolio or image, and I think that’s dangerous for higher education institutions to not allow undocumented students to be humans, to be young and to make decisions that are not just based on this narrative of deservingness.
When DACA was introduced, it provided a lot of hope and tangible results for people by expanding access to higher education. I think the aftermath of that was now we have a very narrow view of who is an undocumented student in college.
And now that DACA has not received new applications since 2017, the majority of undocumented college students don’t have DACA. I am writing a paper about this … that we have become as institutions, DACA- dependent, and that is problematic because our policies [and] practices are just centering students with DACA with access to a work permit, with protections from deportation, with access maybe, to a driver’s license.
And that is not the case anymore, that is not the majority of undocumented students. There’s a lot of policy work that needs to happen, like policy reviews at the institutional level so that there is no more reinforcement of the narrative that [students] have to have DACA to do this. There is also growing work on undocumented Black and Asian students. That’s something that for the past 15-20 years, from the early 2000s to 2020, we were barely talking about, other intersections of identities for the undocumented community. And now there’s not enough yet, but more work about undocumented Black, Asian, and queer students as well.
I heard you speak at convocation about growing up in Peru. Were your parents involved in education or higher education? How did your upbringing propel you into your field?
Salazar: Actually, they weren’t, which is interesting. My dad was a police officer. My parents had me very young, my mom was 19 and my dad was 21. [He] was in the police academy when my parents had me, and we were what I think would be defined as a working-class family in the United States. In Peru, I think we were considered middle class, just because class is very complex in Peru. My mom actually did not finish high school in Peru. I don’t want to use the term, “dropout,” but she discontinued her education. Many years later, about seven or eight years ago, she completed her GED, so that was a very proud moment for us, because she did it here in the U.S.
I was a first-generation college student. I don’t have cousins or aunts or uncles that back in Peru, were in college, or talked about college. Now, after 22 or 23 years of living here in the U.S., some of my cousins have become educators in Peru, and I have an aunt who went to college later as an adult, once she had kids [and] became an educator in Peru as well. I did see trends in my family to go into a helping profession and support others. I think it’s based on the fact that our access to education to higher education was not easy to navigate.
I’m the oldest of three children, so I I have my brother, who’s a few years younger, and then my sister, who’s 12 years younger than me. My mom stayed at home with us all the way until my parents separated when I was 16, and that’s when she went to work for the first time. And my mom stay home with us all the way until my parents separated. She worked with my grandfather, he had a restaurant and a printing business. So, she went to work with him because she did not have [a] formal education, formal training.
How prevalent is familial support through academic life for your undocumented students, whether from their home country or once they arrive in the United States?
Salazar: That’s important, I think, in terms of concrete guidance and assistance. It wasn’t there necessarily for me, [my parents didn’t know to] do this, to fill out application[s]. But there was always this encouragement to pursue higher education, with the hope and belief that higher education will provide that stability, social mobility, sense of self-realization, and sense of self. That continues to be the case for most of the undocumented students that I have worked with as co-researchers or as participants.
Most of the the data that that has been generated through those different projects with my students has shown that family is a key source of support in terms of words of encouragement [and] inspiration. Fulfilling the dreams that students have is not only for them, but it’s also for their families. They want to give back to their families by graduating from college and being able to support younger siblings or other extended family members.
I do have a few students that have spoken about family as a source of stress and I wrote an article about that, the stressors that come with family expectations, especially when a student is not able to fulfill their academic responsibilities. They may be doing well in college, or they fail a class or have to withdraw [and] retake the class. They feel a lot of stress because their families don’t necessarily understand why that is happening or don’t understand the stressors that they feel navigating campus, because there is a tendency [to think] that [being] in college is a little bit easier than being in the workforce as an undocumented person.
For students, that creates a lot of pressure, and it affects their well-being and their mental health because they still feel isolated on the college campus. They still feel that they are navigating a world – without a manual – that they don’t know, and they also don’t want to disappoint their families and [want to] be able to support them in the future.
Did you work with students with imposter syndrome?
Salazar: Yes, absolutely imposter syndrome. They don’t believe they should be there. Many were superstars in high school. The students who went to Georgetown had 4-point-something GPAs, like GPAs that don’t exist. They were showing up to campus [but] felt like they were faking it, like, “How did I get here?” But they were brilliant, and they earned the right to be on that campus.
That shows up in the data and also in conversations with my co-researchers when they’re doing research and analyzing data with me and interviewing participants they doubt: “Am I really doing this? Can I actually produce knowledge? Can I write this article?” It’s important to continuously remind them of their power, how brilliant they are, and their ability to contribute.
I think why ASHE is recognizing this work at this time is because I am not just focusing on undocumented college students while in college and their transition to college, but thinking about [their] transitioning out [of college], what’s coming next [and] how we, as institutions and institutional agents … not completely stop our responsibility with them once they reach graduation. We do have, I think, a responsibility to continue to support students as alumni. I know that a lot of institutions, the work they do with alumni is mainly based on development, in terms of [fundraising], but it’s more than that. It’s [fostering] that sense of self, belonging, and fulfillment.
I am working on different pieces about the transition out of college. I work with one undocumented student from my previous institution. We are co-researchers and I’ve been mentoring her in this process. So far, we’ve generated about 85 hours of longitudinal data with undocumented students who graduated. We’ve been meeting with them two to three years after they graduated college to see how are they navigating that post graduation life. Are they even thinking about going back to school? Or how are they developing their sense of career purpose as professionals? What relationships do they even have right now with their institutions? A lot of times institutions become so central for students who are undocumented and … provide a lot of protections. And then, once [students] finish college, they have to re-enter society as undocumented college graduates, and that triggers a lot of emotion.
What has it been like to be at UCLA?
Salazar: I’m excited to be here. This has been a dream come true, and I think there’s a lot of work to be done here at UCLA with the undocumented community still, despite the belief that there’s a lot of progress – and there is.
There’s still more work that we need to do, specifically, I think, to expand access for opportunities for undocumented students without DACA. I think undocumented students deserve to have a campus that allows them to work and engage on campus, regardless of their immigration status and in different ways, and we can do that.
There’s a student organization on campus called IDEAS (Improving Dreams, Equality, Access, and Success). The work that IDEAS is doing to provide opportunities for students on campus to develop professional skills is critical and I want to be part of that example. They are advocating right now, for this campaign called “Opportunity for All.” I’ve been attending their meetings, and they have been doing a lot of advocacy to pass a bill that will allow the UC system to hire undocumented students.
Working alongside undocumented students is more critical now after the elections. I think that engaging in participatory action research with undocumented students serves as a mechanism to promote their retention and success in higher education, which is even more critical during these sociopolitical times. This approach to research leads to actions that promote social justice and change. The next four years will be challenging and institutional agents like faculty and administrators will need to be more creative, bold, and unapologetic to meet the needs of undocumented students with and without DACA and truly serve them on campus.
To read some of Professor Salazar’s work, visit these links:
Where Do I Go from Here? Examining the Transition of Undocumented Students Graduating from College
The Journal of Higher Education, June 2023
Undocufriendly ≠ undocuserving: Undocumented college students’ perceptions of institutional support.
Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 2022
ASHE Bobby Wright Dissertation of the Year Award (video)
Photo by Michelle Trevino