By Sarah Rodriguez January 13, 2025 Photos courtesy of the author The smell of fresh bailed hay and diesel lingering in the air by day. The symphony of cicadas and crickets on hot summer nights. The illumination of Friday night lights and the intoxicating smell of brisket in the smoker. Every time I experience one of these, no matter where I am at, I am transported back to my rural East Texas hometown of Eustace, Texas (pop. 500 at the time). The place where five generations of my family have been, and continue to be, rooted to the land and to the community. Where your PawPaw and Granny lived, where your mama can still tell you what to do, and where you will forever be seventeen. It is home. And yet, if you told me years ago that I would be proud of my rural upbringing, I would have called you crazy. As a teen I wanted to get out. Even in all of my belongingness to home, I still felt like an outsider in my rural community. In a sea of white faces, I was one of a handful of brown faces. I was put in a sombrero and sarape for Christmas on the tiny town square and typecast as a flower-in-my-hair, flowy-dress-wearing Latina drum major in the high school marching band’s Carlos Santana show. “You’re the smartest Mexican I know,” one school friend wrote about me on a National Honor Society praise page. And, the ever-present question of “Where are you from?… No, where are your parents from? No, where are they really from?” I lived my life knowing that I was different—I mean, look at me as a child—but I could not put my finger on why. Growing up in a rural, overwhelming white community behind the pine curtain, as they call my area of thickly wooded East Texas, I literally had no idea what it meant to be Latina. There were no role models, no familia that I could turn to as they lived hundreds of miles away near the Mexican border in the Rio Grande Valley. It all came to a head when I asked my dad what boxes to check on my college application. I realized I was, indeed, a Latina living in rural America. It was a revelation. Within the span of a week, I went from a simple, like-everybody-else East Texas country girl, to a full-on Latina with Mexican heritage and a recognition of years of racialized experiences that were now making a lot more sense. I spent the better part of my 20s trying to deny my rural upbringing and awkwardly fit in with Latine colleagues from urban areas. I would tell people I was “from the Dallas area” to mask the shame I felt in coming from a place no one had ever heard of. I quietly subdued my East Texas twang of an accent and let people make assumptions. If I just de-emphasized my rural upbringing, I could create a newer, stronger Latina identity. And, it worked. I found myself catapulted into Latine spaces everywhere, rubbing elbows with people from Los Angeles, Miami, New York, talking about carne asada and singing Selena’s Como La Flor. I built a faculty career telling the stories of Latine students and advocating for their success. Through my work, I have highlighted their resilience in the face of systemic injustice and the incredible wealth of knowledge that these students bring from their families and communities to their educational journeys. Over the years, I have urged practitioners and scholars alike to care about and support actions that support their success. But something was still off and felt almost inauthentic. Time and again, I found myself wondering—where are the rural Latine students? Where are the stories of small-town Latinas pursuing STEM fields? Why is it that most of what we know about Latine students, especially those in STEM fields, is largely from an urban perspective? Still, I did not feel comfortable bringing this to the forefront of my work. I moved from faculty job to faculty job—always situated in rural communities in both Iowa and Texas—but these thoughts would emerge, then move fleetingly to the corners of my mind while I hustled for tenure, funding, and connections. However, when I moved to Virginia Tech with my husband and young daughter and bought a house out in the country, I began to reconsider my work. Always a passive lover of rural work due to my upbringing, I began to really pay attention now. I subscribed to all things rural, both local and national. I listened to how people both in, around, and outside of VT talked (or did not talk) about rural communities and whether they acknowledged rural students from racially and ethnically marginalized backgrounds. I started asking questions of my friends and colleagues who do rural work. I attended my first rural conference. I embarked on my first study on rural community college engineering students and will continue to pursue this work as part of my journey to bring together my life’s purpose and a sense of place within my rural and Latine community. I believe that we are all placed where we. There is a reason that me, a rural Latina, found herself so far from home and yet surrounded by an area and community that really is not that different from the place that I left all those years ago. The woods, the country life, the sea of white faces. The words of Vicente Fernández ring in my mind – Volver, Volver (to return, to return). In a way, it is like a return to a home away from home. Returning into the arms of rural life and issues feels authentic in a way that I cannot describe. I am right where I am meant to be, and I cannot wait to see where it leads me. Sarah Rodriguez, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Engineering Education in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech. In her rural research, she concentrates on identifying and asking urgent questions about systemic inequities that marginalized communities experience as they transition to and through their STEM education experiences. To deepen her rural work, Dr. Rodriguez has been selected as the Spring 2025 Rural Scholar in Residence at the Virginia Tech Center for Rural Education. Subscribe here! * indicates required Email Address * /* real people should not fill this in and expect good things – do not remove this or risk form bot signups */
