The Legacy Begins

Cross-legged on the carpet, Maribel Hernandez ’04 is flipping through photo albums, searching for a picture to run with her FM profile. There’s a preteen Hernandez with her family just after they emigrated from Mexico, and Hernandez smiling beside Madeline Albright. That’s Hernandez grinning wildly, her face painted red and white with high school spirit, and her with Bill Clinton last spring. She says her family in Mexico was the most excited about Clinton. “They still talk about it,” she says, laughing.

As she moves through her Winthrop room, hung with Mexican art, Free Tibet postcards, and memorabilia from her prep school, Exeter, Hernandez is comfortable and cheerful. The daughter of immigrant parents, she appears unburdened by her trek from Mexico City to Harvard, and her eyes light up at every interval as she talks about moving to Houston, Texas, in the eighth grade.

Initially put in an English as a Second Language (ESL) class at the sixth grade level, she made her public school honors program in just two years and was pursued by Exeter’s minority recruitment program. “When they said Exeter, I thought it was an English word I didn’t know,” she recalls. “So I went home and looked it up in the Spanish-English dictionary. I didn’t see anything, so I tried the English dictionary. I just had no idea.”

Hernandez remained ambivalent even after she had been filled in on Exeter and its national prestige. “I always had a nightmare that I would wake up and not be able to speak English,” she says. “So I was afraid that if I went to Exeter, I would suddenly be unable to communicate.”

After her middle school guidance counselor convinced her to apply, Hernandez had to face the interview process. At the interview, her African-American interviewer offered to conduct the meeting in Spanish. Hernandez was put at ease, but insisted on English. After the interview, the Exeter representative made a surprise appearance at her choir performance and waited afterwards to speak to her parents, explaining to them in Spanish all of the opportunities Exeter had to offer.

When Hernandez had first mentioned applying to boarding school, her mother had burst into tears at the prospect of the family being divided. By the end of the application process, Hernandez says her parents were fully behind the idea. Her mother had been a professor of public administration in Mexico, an occupation she had been unable to continue in Texas because she spoke little English, and strongly encouraged her daughter’s education.

“When I think about it, I think my mother is the reason why I was so persistent about my education,” says Hernandez. “None of my friends in the ESL program decided to go to college. For me, there was never a question as to whether I would go to college, although I never thought it would be Harvard.”

When the letter from Exeter arrived, Hernandez was so unsure of her English, she thought she had somehow misunderstood. She slipped it into her backpack, and when she got to school the next day, she asked her counselor to read it and tell her what it said. Not only had she been accepted, she’d been given a scholarship, only two years after arriving in the United States.

New Hampshire, where Exeter is located, was a culture shock. Hernandez had never seen snow before, and was dismayed at the absence of Spanish-language television and radio. Her best friend at Exeter was African American, and when the two would go to church every Sunday, little children would stare at them all through the service. “We were the only two people of color in the whole church. They were just intrigued,” she says good-naturedly. Still, Hernandez raves about Exeter’s academic and extracurricular opportunities, and says she felt welcomed and supported by the entire community.

“That coat I have over there?” she says, pointing to a gray parka hanging on a doorknob. “Exeter bought it for me. It’s the only winter coat I have, and I still wear it. They knew I was in danger of dropping out and going to back to Houston, so they always made me feel like I was surrounded by a million people who cared.”

The coat was just the start—Exeter’s teachers and administrators also bought her dresses, party clothes, and anything else she needed to participate in the social and academic life of the school. “I never felt disadvantaged. When I saw people who were rich, I thought, ‘Oh, they have more, but I have what I need.’”

When it came time to apply to college, Hernandez faced a quandary: as a Mexican citizen, she was considered an international student, and thus was ineligible for financial aid at most universities. Of the schools she applied to, only Stanford and Harvard could afford to give international student aid. This required getting into two of the most selective schools in the country, but Hernandez breezed through the admissions process, and chose Harvard.

Having already thrived in a New England boarding school, Harvard wasn’t much of an adjustment. Still, the support system that had so nourished Hernandez at Exeter didn’t seem to exist at Harvard. “At Exeter, there was a community of people who looked out for you. At Harvard, you have to build that community for yourself, you’re on your own. That was the hardest thing. For a whole semester, I struggled.”

She says she felt lost in a place of Harvard’s size, and missed the proactive advising system at Exeter. It was only when Hernandez got involved with RAZA, the Mexican-American student group, that she began to feel at home. “I finally felt that there was a group of people that knew where I was coming from,” she says. “I felt I had found a group where I could belong.”

At Exeter, she had never been involved with the small Latino organization, preferring the Tibetan organization and Student Council. As she puts it, “My identity as an ethnic person happened here.” Last year, Hernandez served as president of RAZA, and remains active in the Harvard Association Cultivating Inter-American Democracy (HACIA Democracy), a model government program for Latin American High School students. She tutors writing and Spanish at the Bureau of Study Counsel, is a Mexican-American representative for the Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program, and is a member of the Race, Culture and Diversity Council for Winthrop House. Her involvement in the campaign for Latino and ethnic studies at Harvard grew out of these activities.

“I had thought of Harvard as it, as being totally perfect,” she says. “It seems to me that if you can make a change here, at the preeminent educational institution, you could make a change elsewhere.”

This summer, she plans to research her Social Studies thesis on the effect of the North American Free Trade Agreement on maquiladoras, low-wage multinational factories in Mexico. But the bulk of her summer will be spent at Goldman Sachs, where she worked last summer. Two years ago, her mother was injured in a hit-and-run car accident, and needs surgery on her dislocated eye she cannot afford. Hernandez wants to chip in.

“I thought about doing Teach For America or the Peace Corps,” she says. “But in a way, that would be a luxury for me. If I don’t work, my parents won’t necessarily be able to take care of me. I want to be able to take care of them.”

After graduation, Hernandez hopes to do the two-year analyst program at Goldman to pay off her Exeter and Harvard loans, and then perhaps go back to social advocacy work.

Despite the fact that she works twenty hours a week, Hernandez says she sees her life as one of luxury. “There are so many opportunities that I’m living as if I have a lot of money,” she exclaims, citing her spring break trip to Guatemala with HACIA. “I can focus on my studies without having to worry about heat. I don’t have to think about whether I have enough to eat tomorrow.”