She had been forewarned of what a Brown girl from a Rio Grande Valley farming town might encounter at a big, majority-White university.
“When my tío starting teaching at Texas Tech,” began Vallery Valle, summoning what her uncle had relayed, “he walked in, his first day on the job, and the lady at the front desk asked him if he could clean the toilets.”
Her uncle politely said he was not a custodian and kept it moving, said Valle, whose relative now is an interim department chair in Texas Tech’s College of Education.
At the University of Texas at Austin, (UT-Austin) where Valle is a senior communications major, she had also been mistaken for someone else. “Like, when I was working the front desk at my dormitory, a girl would come up and say, ‘My dishwasher’s broke. Fix it.’ I’d say, ‘Excuse me, I live here just like you do. I’m not supposed to fix anything,’” recalls Valle.
That’s a critical detail of Valle’s college experience and, by extension, those of other Hispanic students at UT-Austin. It’s among the details she’s laid out for members of that flagship campus’ Subcommittee on Latinx Recruitment and Retention — Valle serves as its student representative.
The subcommittee’s work is one aspect of an expansive, years-long effort that’s resulted in UT being among the schools earning a “Seal of Excelencia” from Excelencia in Education, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit singularly aiming to ensure that more Latinx students enter and exit college successfully.
“What stands out is that their intentionality is clear,” says Deborah Santiago, co-founder and CEO of Excelencia in Education, of UT-Austin. “The sense of belonging they seek to create for their students is clear. … They are being very proactive in making sure students have support services and connections to human beings who can be a real resource.”
