Honorees were nominated by faculty or staff and endorsed by their college’s dean. Here is a closer look at each award recipient:

Alexis Medina, human development

President’s Outstanding Graduate Award

Dean’s Award, College of Education, Health and Human Services

Medina was lauded as an exceptional scholar, mentor and advocate whose achievements reflect the highest ideals of CSUSM and the CSU’s mission of social mobility.

His academic excellence culminated in a 3.97 grade-point average and summa cum laude distinction. But it was his hands-on commitment to advancing student success for others that most distinguishes him.

Across more than 1,200 hours of community-engaged service, Medina has worked directly with K-12 students in under-resourced schools, providing individualized academic support, facilitating small-group instruction and mentoring young learners as they navigate their own educational journeys. In dual immersion classrooms, he leverages his bilingualism, supporting Spanish-speaking students in developing both academic confidence and a sense of belonging in spaces where they are often marginalized. He intentionally creates inclusive learning environments that affirm students’ identities, reinforce their capabilities and encourage persistence in the face of challenges.

Beyond the classroom, Medina extends this impact by guiding high school students, including first-generation and multilingual learners, through college and career exploration, helping them envision pathways that may have once felt out of reach.

Wendy Hardy, linguistics

Dean’s Award, College of Humanities, Arts, Behavioral and Social Sciences

Hardy, who also has a minor in French and American Indian studies, was praised for leaving a lasting impact academically and culturally across the campus community.

Hardy’s work demonstrates the transformative power of language to build understanding, preserve culture and advance justice. Graduating with a 3.958 grade-point average, she displays academic excellence that's matched by the depth of her applied work, from contributing to the Kawaiisu Language Documentation Project in support of Indigenous language revitalization to advancing research on linguistic justice through faculty-led scholarship. She is also a gifted educator, serving as a teaching assistant in French, teaching at the San Marcos Senior Center, and bringing creativity and care to tutoring and mentoring.

As founder and inaugural president of the Linguistics Collective, president of the French Club and a leader on the CHABSS Dean’s Student Advisory Council, Hardy has created spaces for belonging, professional growth and community that will endure well beyond her time at CSUSM.

Casey Budlong, business administration marketing

Gerevas Family Dean’s Award, College of Business Administration

Budlong has made a difference across many student groups on campus, and she was hailed as a purpose-driven student leader whose academic excellence and professional growth reflect the very best of CoBA.

Graduating with a 3.915 grade-point average, Budlong has distinguished herself as a top-performing marketing student with a strong foundation in both the analytical and creative dimensions of the field. Business professor Kristin Stewart said from her experience working with Budlong through a Professional Sales Center social media micro-internship, along with consistent feedback from her professors, she is repeatedly described as reliable, independent and collaborative. Budlong also was lauded for consistently taking initiative and producing work that is both thoughtful and results-driven.

Beyond the classroom, Budlong has made a meaningful impact on campus and in the broader community through leadership and service, including supporting environmental efforts through the Surfrider Foundation and serving as a volunteer board member for the Huntington’s Disease Society of America San Diego Chapter.

Isabel Serrano, biochemistry

Dean’s Award, College of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics

Graduating with a 3.95 grade-point average in a demanding major, Serrano has distinguished herself through academic excellence and the depth and impact of her research.

In the lab, Serrano has made meaningful contributions to the field, developing novel compounds with potential applications in areas like medical imaging and next-generation technology. Her work has led to a peer-reviewed publication and a patent contribution through her internship with Novartis.

Serrano was lauded for how she brings others along with her. As the founding president of Out in STEM and a leader in multiple student organizations, she has created opportunities for her peers to connect and see themselves in STEM fields. She has helped raise funds so fellow students could attend conferences, mentored first-generation students and built communities where people feel like they belong. Outside of campus, she has carried that same commitment into her community, using her bilingual skills to advocate for others. Serrano’s journey is already opening doors for those around her.

Callie Steppat, biological sciences

Dean’s Award, Graduate Studies and Research

Steppat is completing a master’s degree with a perfect 4.0 grade-point average and will continue her education in a Ph.D. program at Cornell.

In the lab, Steppat has built an extraordinary track record by finishing her degree in one year, an unprecedented achievement in the program. She has led five research projects, contributed to six peer-reviewed manuscripts and introduced entirely new lines of inquiry that will continue shaping the lab’s work long after she leaves, according to biology professor Dennis Kolosov.

Kolosov praised Steppat for being an outstanding teacher and mentor, someone who creates supportive, inclusive spaces where students feel comfortable asking questions and building confidence in science. She has co-mentored undergraduate and graduate students in the lab and the classroom, truly embodying the teacher-scholar model, helping lead them to conference presentations and publications.

Outside the university, she volunteers in her community through beach cleanups, supporting dental care for underserved populations and working with veterans in need.

Nayelie Ortiz, sociology

Dean of Students’ Outstanding Leadership Award

Ortiz has built a strong academic record, but Interim Dean of Students Norma Larios said what stands out most is how Ortiz has used her time at CSUSM to lift up those around her.

Since her first year, Ortiz has been deeply involved with the COMPASS Center, supporting undocumented, mixed-status and immigration-impacted students through mentorship, advocacy and day-to-day care. She has helped students navigate challenges and persist to graduation, often stepping in during moments of real crisis to make sure no one feels alone. Whether organizing support for a peer in need or simply showing up consistently with empathy and encouragement, Ortiz leads in a way that is both powerful and personal.

That commitment to others extends far beyond campus. Ortiz mentors first-generation students, coaches youth soccer and volunteers in community safety patrols to support families in her hometown. Even while facing personal challenges, including the impact of devastating fires affecting her own community, she has remained focused on showing up for others.

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Interim Assistant Director of Editorial and External Affairs

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

She thinks about the version who had just graduated from Cal State San Marcos and still harbored some self-doubt, unsure how she would turn her sociology degree into a career.

She thinks about the version who set off for UC Davis as the first person in her family to attend college, but who couldn’t find the support that she needed and ultimately failed out.

Most of all, though, she thinks about 12-year-old Shanelle, a Black girl from southeast San Diego (the “hood,” as she proudly calls it) who had her whole life ahead of her but also had already experienced her share of pain. Watkins even dedicated her doctoral dissertation to that Shanelle.

“That’s when things started to click for me and a lot of questioning started to happen,” Watkins said. “That little girl, I just want to take and hold and heal.

“I think that she probably would think I was really cool. I think she would really like me.”

Now 36, Watkins is devoting her life to ensuring that other young girls – or, more precisely in her case, young women of color – can receive the mentorship that she sometimes got but occasionally eluded her, can achieve the success that she has attained despite the obstacles that dotted her path.

Two years ago, Watkins left her job as assistant director of the Black Student Center at CSUSM – the university she had returned to almost a decade after graduating – to become director of the Chancellor’s Associates Scholarship Program at UC San Diego. CASP, as it's known, awards scholarships to and nurtures during their time at the university local and high-achieving students who come from low-income families – students, in other words, like young Shanelle.

While she was working full-time at CSUSM and now UCSD, Watkins also was studying at both schools part-time, as an Ed.D. candidate in their joint doctoral program. Her dissertation, inspired by her experience running the Black Student Center for three years, explored the challenges faced by Black women student leaders at Hispanic-Serving Institutions within California State University.

“I wanted to know what leadership meant to them,” she said. “How did it come about? Where was it rooted from? Through those questions, I heard very rich stories about the stress of code-switching or feeling like you need to assimilate to fit in or not being seen or being the token Black person in whatever organization or group you belong to.”

She defended her dissertation and officially became Dr. Watkins, but she wasn’t finished with the subject. As an outgrowth of the project, last September she started a company called Leading While Becoming. The leadership organization offers quarterly group coaching cohorts and one-on-one coaching for women of color. She has built a roster of about a dozen clients, most of whom are women in their 20s who are trying to launch their careers.

“I didn't foresee it happening this way,” Watkins said. “I thought my dissertation might be a toolkit to inform college leaders. I didn't think it would be a full-fledged coaching program. But I am glad, because it gives me the opportunity to meet with folks and empower them and watch them grow. It’s doing a lot of the things that I wish I had had.”

What 12-year-old Shanelle did have was a love of education and a thirst for knowledge. What she didn’t have was financial resources or the most stable home life. Her mother, Augusta, was a stay-at-home parent who Watkins said did the best she could to raise her despite confronting personal challenges. Her father, Aaron, struggled with substance abuse problems before he got clean in a drug rehabilitation program and turned his life around.

Aaron Watkins became Shanelle’s rock. After going sober, he got a job in facilities management at UCSD, where he worked nights cleaning science labs and offices for the next three decades. During the day, he worked (and still works) as a delivery driver for Pizza Hut. But he still found time to drive Shanelle to school every day, and to pick her up between his shifts.

“Through his dedication to remaining sober and his hard work, I think he definitely instilled a lot of that in me,” Watkins said.

In contrast to his other two children (Shanelle has an older sister and younger brother), who both played sports, Aaron Watkins recalls Shanelle being laser-focused on academics and ancillary activities – from being part of a radio broadcast with a classmate to serving on a drill team to doing a ride-along with the local police department.

“She was involved in everything she could be,” Aaron Watkins said. “She was almost always self-motivated.”

Her passion for learning, however, didn’t always come with a sense of belonging. When Watkins reached middle school, her family took advantage of a city program that allowed kids from disadvantaged neighborhoods to attend schools in wealthier communities. She went to Correia Middle and Point Loma High School, which both feature predominantly white student populations.

“I questioned if I fit in there or if my family had the money to provide me with the things that I needed to thrive,” Watkins said. “For a little bit, it did kind of dim my light.”

That light grew brighter in high school, when the canceling of her elective choir class because of low numbers led her to the Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program, which is designed to prepare underrepresented students for college. On the first day, her teacher, Kellie Larson, told Watkins she would have to go to study hall and turn in notes every week. Watkins, feeling uncharacteristically rebellious, was less than enthused.

“I was like, I’m not doing any of that,’ ” she said. “That whole first semester, her and I beefed so bad.”

Larson persisted, pushing Watkins, encouraging her to take AP classes and sign up for clubs, handing her the tools to succeed that her parents didn’t know existed. By the time she graduated from Point Loma, Watkins had amassed more than $35,000 in scholarships.

“Mrs. Larson and I are still in touch to this day,” she said. “If it weren’t for that choir class not having enough people, who knows where I would be now?”

The appearance of mentors at just the right time would become a pattern for Watkins. After her academic withdrawal from UC Davis – “I was up against a lot of first-gen struggles,” she says – she returned home to attend MiraCosta College, then transferred to CSUSM. As a senior in fall 2012, she gave birth to her son, Seiji, and thought she might have to drop out, again derailing her academic ambitions.

But a group of sociology professors – Watkins called out Karen Glover, Kathy Shellhammer, Sharon Cullity, Mary Roche and Gary Rollison – rallied to her side, pointing her toward maternal services, helping her postpone certain courses, letting her bring her baby to class. One even made a quilt for Seiji.

“The faculty in the sociology department loved on me in places that I needed to be loved on,” Watkins said. “It made me really grateful for my CSUSM experience.”

And when she came back to CSUSM as a staff member eight years later, in 2021, she discovered another invaluable mentor in Gail Cole-Avent, the university’s interim associate vice president for student health and wellness. Watkins says Cole-Avent, her supervisor, taught her how to occupy a leadership role without sacrificing her identity or sense of authenticity.

Watkins’ return to CSUSM was the first in a series of gratifying full-circle moments that have marked the last few years. Her hiring at UCSD brought her to the place where her father worked for a generation before his retirement in 2019 – where she first learned what college was and how life-changing it could be. Even now, she encounters former colleagues of her dad, professors whose labs he cleaned, and they urge her to reach out if she ever needs assistance.

Also, when Watkins decided that she wanted to add a board membership to her expanding resume, she sought out a San Diego nonprofit named CRASH (Community Resources and Self-Help). CRASH happens to be the organization that helped her father kick his drug addiction and begin his life anew way back when. In December, CRASH hosted a holiday party at one of its houses, and Watkins went with her dad, who had been invited as an alumnus of the program.

“Everyone who he ran into, he was like, ‘This is my daughter, she’s on the board, she’s a doctor,’ ” she said. “My dad doesn’t smile a lot, but I could see the pride on his face.”

And here’s one more full-circle moment. Watkins is a business owner, she’s a higher education administrator, she’s a leader. Above all, though, she’s a mother. Seiji is 13 now, almost the same age as the young Shanelle who Watkins often reflects on. He’s in seventh grade, he’s an ardent athlete and, like most teenagers, he thinks he’s too cool for his mom.

“I was a single mom from the time he was three months old, and I would say I think I did a good job,” Watkins said. “He’s a wonderful kid and he’s my best friend. I see a lot of me in him. I always tell him, ‘You’re the greatest thing I’ve ever done.’ ”

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

The event was organized similar to a college fair, with 30 tables filled with faculty and staff who helped educate prospective transfer students about CSUSM. This is the first time that CSUSM's four colleges have collaborated for an exclusive event like this. Various organizations from CSUSM were present, including Housing, the Office of Financial Aid, and New Student and Family Programs. Members of the sociology department also visited classrooms to engage with Mesa students.

Prospective students attending were encouraged to meet with representatives, faculty members and Crash, CSUSM's mascot. The event was a fantastic opportunity to learn more about CSUSM and show why students should continue their education at the university. 

“CSUSM Day at San Diego Mesa College was an incredible success, and I am immensely proud of our CSUSM community,” said Christina Montell, CSUSM's admissions adviser, who organized the event. “This event provided an outstanding opportunity to not just connect with San Diego Mesa College students, but also Mesa organizations and faculty, fostering a sense of collaboration and shared goals. I am excited about the future partnerships and pathways this event has opened up. It was truly inspiring to see the commitment to education and community from both CSUSM and San Diego Mesa College. ”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Interim assistant director of editorial and external affairs
ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

But before putting the finishing touches on your list of New Year’s resolutions, let’s take a look back at some of the most-talked-about stories of 2024.

CSUSM Receives Two Gifts Totaling $20 Million, Largest in 35-Year History

In a historic moment, Cal State San Marcos received two philanthropic donations totaling $20 million – the largest gifts in its 35-year history. $10 million from Price Philanthropies Foundation will create a first-of-its-kind, three-year accelerated bachelor's degree and workforce pipeline for behavioral and mental health. The other $10 million came from Daniel J. Epstein – a director of the CSUSM Foundation Board – and his wife, Phyllis. Their contribution will serve as a unique dollar-for-dollar matching gift opportunity for all CSUSM donors to double their impact across campus.

Balancing Act: Master's Grad Perseveres Through Challenges

A master’s of biological sciences student, Jocelyne Dates was selected last spring as the recipient of the 2024 President's Outstanding Graduate Award, the highest honor a graduating student can receive. She also received the Dean’s Award for Graduate Studies, which recognizes the accomplishments of one master’s student. Jocelyne is continuing her education by pursuing her Ph.D. at Vanderbilt.

'I Just Want to Make Him Proud and My Life to Count'

Last spring, at 76 years old, Kathryn Cook walked across the graduation stage as the oldest graduate of Cal State San Marcos' class of 2024. Her path to this accomplishment was not one of a traditional four-year-and-done experience. In fact, it was 50 years in the making, with monumental life transitions and rocky hardships in between. The passing of Cook’s husband in 2019 led her to continue her education at CSUSM and graduate with a sociology degree.

From the Baseball Diamond to 'The Bachelorette'

Austin Ott had never watched an episode of “The Bachelorette” when he received a DM on Instagram from the show encouraging him to apply. While nervous, his communication and media studies degree from Cal State San Marcos gave him a foundation to build on. Ott’s first speech in COMM 100 gave him an idea of what being in the public eye might look like. “My time at Cal State San Marcos was probably the best years of my life,” said Ott, who graduated in 2019. “There’s nothing better than playing the game you love and being around your best friends.”

American Indian Student Follows Passion for Animals, Environment

Aiden Valverde, an American Indian Studies major from the Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel, has made significant contributions through his engagement with the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center. As an intern for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Valverde was able to connect more with his culture, and his passion for animals and the environment. “Aiden exemplifies everything we strive to achieve in American Indian Studies and at the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center,” said Joely Proudfit, the department chair of American Indian Studies.

Computers a Lifelong Passion for Trustees' Award Winner

In 2009, Minh Tran’s family moved to Escondido from Vietnam, the only home that he, his parents and his two older siblings had ever known. Now, the fourth-year student who’s on track to graduate in May, was honored as CSUSM’s recipient of the 2024 CSU Trustees’ Award for Outstanding Achievement, the California State University’s highest recognition of student accomplishment. Students are selected based on academic achievements, financial need, excellence in community service and personal hardship. Awardees have all demonstrated inspirational resolve along the path to college success, and many are the first in their families to attend college.

Graduate Crafting Career on Helping Children

A child and adolescent development major at Cal State San Marcos, Tania Arceo spent the last year and a half working with Voices for Children, a nonprofit organization where volunteers are trained to become court-appointed special advocates. Volunteers like Arceo represent juvenile dependency cases in San Diego County. Since graduating last spring with her bachelor’s, Arceo has started her Master of Social Work program at CSUSM this fall. 

Alumnus Seeks Better Mental Health Through Better Cuts

John Edwards was only 12 years old when he taught himself how to cut his own hair. By the time Edwards enrolled at Cal State San Marcos as a transfer student returning to higher education in 2021, he was close to completing barber school. Now a licensed barber and a recent CSUSM graduate, he operates a small studio in San Diego, rotating about 25 clients through his single chair. Edwards studied psychology at CSUSM, and it was at the university that he dreamed up the idea of melding his longtime practice of barbering with his fledgling research on mental health treatment. 
 

CSUSM Earns Prestigious Seal for Serving Latinx Students

Cal State San Marcos has earned the prestigious Seal of Excelencia, a national certification for institutions that strive to go beyond enrollment and more intentionally serve Latinx students. CSUSM is one of only 17 colleges and universities to earn the Seal of Excelencia in 2024. In 2018, Excelencia introduced the seal to certify colleges and universities for their efforts to become learning environments where Latinx, and all, students thrive. This year marks the organization’s 20th year of service to accelerate Latinx student success in higher education.

Surfer Makes School History With National Title

Tanner Vodraska, a Cal State San Marcos business student, became the first surfer in university history to win an individual national title. The junior competed in the college men’s division of the 2024 National Scholastic Surfing Association interscholastic national championships at Salt Creek Beach in Dana Point. Vodraska dominated the field. He posted a two-wave score of 17.5 points in the final, far outdistancing his closest competitor. “I feel really proud of myself because I set a goal to win the national title before I graduate, and I accomplished it,” Vodraska said.

Incredible Mulk: Class Project Becomes Thriving Business

Melissa Finestone remembers the assignment in her business marketing class that started it all. Each student was required to develop a business plan based on a product they conceived. Finestone decided to curate a product that combined her passion for cooking with a childhood love of chocolate milk. But Finestone wanted to develop a healthy alternative to other chocolate milks on the market. When Finestone couldn’t find a product on the market that met her requirements, she chose to make her own. Using her Vitamix blender to grind almonds in her kitchen at home, Finestone crafted samples of chocolate- and strawberry-flavored, plant-based almond milk. She served it to each student in the class while presenting her product. The overwhelming support from her peers inspired Finestone to launch The Mulk Co. in June 2018, only one year after she graduated from Cal State San Marcos with a bachelor’s degree in global business management. 

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Interim Assistant Director of Editorial and External Affairs

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

A sociology major, Hawkins began her college journey at Mt. San Jacinto College before transferring to CSUSM where she was part of ACE, which supports former foster youth. However, Hawkins withdrew from CSUSM in 2017 feeling like she wasn’t ready and it was too much to handle. 

But in 2022, she was inspired to return by her 3-year-old son, Zion. 

“When I had my son, I was like, ‘No, I have to go back to where I started,’ ” Hawkins said. “I have to go back to my goals and I need my son to see that I can graduate. I need to have a career that I know I want, so I decided to buckle down and bear through the hardships.”

Hawkins was born into foster care and remained in the system until she was 18. Much about her past remained unknown to her. For example, she recently found her biological mom and nine siblings. 

Being in foster care put Hawkins through plenty of ups and downs. 

“I actually got a placement when I was 7 that was pretty stable so I was in that home for a long time,” Hawkins said. “However, there were a lot of things that went on inside that home that no one knew about, not even the social workers that came in. It was hidden. Social workers have a lot on their plate, and so growing up, I just knew that I wanted somebody to pay attention.”

Hawkins plans to be the person who pays attention toward people with stories like hers. She understood from a young age that school was the way out of the system, and the way to open a better future for herself and others.

“I didn't know what the next steps looked like for me when I turned 18,” said Hawkins, “but I knew I wanted somewhere stable to live. My goal was to finish high school and then go live at college. It didn't work out that way, but I think that one of my main motives to go to college was stable housing, because that was the only thing I knew would make me stable.”

Hawkins had almost no choice to attend school, and no choice to do so on her own timeline. 

“On graduation day in high school, I went home and my bags were packed outside of the house,” Hawkins said. “So it was ‘go time.’ I had no choice but to sink or swim. I was just trying to go to school and be stable. I didn't know I would graduate.”

When Hawkins, a first-generation student, reapplied to CSUSM after her son was born, Quijada was the first person to reach out to her, leaving Hawkins in shock.

“Leigh has been following me since day one, just walking with me. So I'm so grateful for that.” Hawkins said. “I didn't even know I still qualified. I'm older, so I didn't know I still qualified for the services. They were like, ‘No, once in ACE, always in ACE.’ ” 

This support from Quijada and Laurie Orr, an ACE counselor, helped give Hawkins the extra support and push to graduate this fall. 

Hawkins works as a social worker assistant in Riverside County, and her graduation this fall will open the opportunity for her to become a full-time social worker. Eventually, Hawkins’ goal is to open her own nonprofit helping foster youth. 

Specifically, she wants to help those who are about to age out of the system.  

“I remember that when I turned 16 in foster care it's when your wheels start spinning and you realize you’re going to be 18 in two years,” Hawkins said. “You don’t know where you’re gonna go. You don't have solid advice or people to help you. 

“So I would want to start with helping kids who are about to be former foster youth, and then help transitioning and former foster youth as well.”

Although Hawkins has gone through challenges, she is determined to make her son proud. 

“He was the main motivator, because it seemed daunting, especially having to withdraw and the weight of it all just felt bad,” Hawkins said. “But I knew I had to go back, so I reapplied.”

Zion will be attending commencement on Dec. 15 and will grow up to recognize how big of an accomplishment graduation is for his mom. 

“I'm still in shock,” she said. “I'm graduating. It sounds crazy to me, I still haven't processed it all yet, but I know it's gonna mean a lot.

“I am so grateful for my village that has become family that have helped me along the way. I couldn't have done this with out their support as well as the support of ACE.” 

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Interim Assistant Director of Editorial and External Affairs

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

CSUSM President Ellen Neufeldt made the announcement in a campus message Wednesday.

Clark-Ibáñez has been a faculty member at CSUSM since 2003, and she gained full professor status in 2016. In the sociology department, she serves as the associate chair of student success and student challenges, and was previously department chair, internship coordinator and graduate coordinator.

“I feel very overwhelmed and overjoyed,” Clark-Ibáñez said of winning the award. “Putting together the material for the nomination dossier was a big task – and it gave me meaningful reflection about how lucky I am to work with incredible colleagues and students since the moment I got here in 2003. I am really proud to contribute to many efforts creating meaningful change with and for students, for our campus, and in our communities. Thank you to the award committee and President Neufeldt for this humbling recognition.”

Clark-Ibáñez has served on committees at the college, university and California State University system levels, including as a member of the CHABSS Chicanx studies leadership committee (2012-18) and American Indian studies curriculum committee and advisory council (2012-16), as the faculty lead for the Hispanic-Serving Institutions grant Pathways to Academic Success and Opportunity (2015-17) and as a reviewer of sociology course descriptors from community colleges for the CSU Chancellor’s Office Lower-Division Transfer Patterns project (2006-08).

She also served from 2016-20 as Faculty Center director for the National Latino Research Center, where she and her team brought in nearly $10 million in external grants and contracts. Funded projects included civic engagement and leadership development for Latinx, immigrant and Spanish-speaking families as well as formerly incarcerated individuals.

Clark-Ibáñez’s research addresses critical social issues, with two major focuses: undocumented immigration and computer science education. Her work on undocumented immigration has resulted in published books, journal articles and practical guides that illuminate the educational experiences of undocumented and mixed-status students.

She co-led, with computer science professor Youwen Ouyang, a five-year, $1 million National Science Foundation grant project to provide scholarships, mentorship and career preparation for low-income computer science students, bridging gaps in student retention and the students' social capital and community cultural wealth.

“Over the past 21 years at CSUSM, Dr. Clark-Ibáñez has exemplified excellence through her impactful teaching, innovative initiatives to connect STEM fields and the social sciences, and dedicated service to the campus community, her colleagues and students,” Neufeldt said.

CSUSM has given out the Brakebill Award since 1998. It’s named for Harry E. Brakebill, a former executive vice chancellor of the CSU system and a valued adviser in the early years of CSUSM. The award was established by his daughter, Ann Bersi.

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist
bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Griffith’s research focuses on the sociology of queer life, cities and human agency. He examines what happens to the collective identity of queer neighborhoods as society's perception of LGBTQ+ people evolves.

“I investigate the material impacts that arise for individuals within these communities,” Griffith writes on the Master of Arts of Sociological Practice website. “By analyzing the genealogies of queer neighborhoods, I aim to understand the consequences of changes to both the physical and social spaces that exist within them.” 

The conference’s theme focused on human rights, policy threats, alliances and community resistance. The keynote speaker was UC San Diego sociology professor Camila Alvarez, who’s speech focused on environmental justice issues.

The mission of the California Sociological Association is to promote the scientific study of society among interested persons within the state of California; to stimulate discussion and encourage cooperative relations among persons engaged in the scientific study of society; and to further the aims of instruction, practice and research in the field of sociology.

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Interim assistant director of editorial and external affairs
ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

On a Thursday afternoon in mid-February, a group of residents at the Bayshire Carlsbad assisted living facility made the exotic trip for free when white virtual reality headsets were placed over their faces.  

“You better hold on to your seat!” a resident named Jim Conley exclaimed as he craned his neck back and forth and spotted elephants, gorillas and monkeys in his field of vision, with a spectacular mountain range as the backdrop. “Boy, that is one pretty picture.” 

While Conley, seated in the first row of chairs, grew increasingly enmeshed in the virtual paradise around him, Jeremy Ford walked among the couple dozen other residents on hand for the VR session, carefully fitting them with their own headsets. Nearby, Tracy Ford, Jeremy’s wife, chatted with a couple of the residents as if they were old friends.  

After the safari experience, the residents hopped on a (virtual) plane and traveled to Cuba, then to Argentina and South Africa. A little less than an hour later, they were back at Bayshire, their eyes transfixed, their spirits lifted.  

“Every month when they come, I’m one of the first people out there,” said Conley, 72, a former boxer who has trouble walking now. “We saw a lot of cool stuff today. How often do you get to be that close to an elephant? After a while, you have to remind yourself that it’s not real.” 

That type of transporting experience is just what Jeremy Ford himself went through three years ago when, on an ordinary shopping trip to Best Buy with his wife, he strapped on a VR headset and found himself soaring over the Golden Gate Bridge like an eagle. Jeremy is a technophile who always has been an early adopter when it comes to electronic gadgets – he has waited in line for multiple iterations of the iPhone – and this would be no exception. Tracy bought him an Oculus Quest 2 for his birthday, only a year after it had been released. 

Neither Jeremy nor Tracy studied business as students at Cal State San Marcos – Tracy graduated with a degree in criminology and justice studies in 2007, Jeremy with a degree in sociology in 2015 – but both possess an entrepreneurial bent that sees them frequently bounce ideas off each other. Here was a golden business idea staring them in the face: the opportunity to combine Jeremy’s technological savvy with Tracy’s interpersonal skills and their mutual desire to help people. 

Following a year dedicated to research and development, the Fords purchased 20 of the Quest 2 VR devices and in October 2022 launched Lightning Tours (the name was inspired by their son, Colton, now 5, and his love of the character Lightning McQueen from the Pixar film “Cars”). They considered multiple demographics as their target audience before deciding that senior living facilities made the most sense.  

“It started out with just putting on a headset, experiencing it for ourselves and wanting to share that with others,” Jeremy Ford said. “We’ve always had a passion for helping others and putting a smile on people’s faces. And that’s what we do, day in and day out.” 

Almost two years after the company was formed, Lightning Tours still hasn’t spent a penny on marketing. In the early days, the Fords pitched their concept to multiple facilities in North San Diego County by giving free virtual tours, and they gradually attracted paying customers by positive word of mouth. Now, they have grown to almost 40 VR experiences per month, and in total have given more than 500 throughout Southern California.  

As the tech guru, Jeremy handles the VR side of the business – buying and maintaining the headsets, selecting and loading the proprietary travel software, rigging the equipment so that it’s as comfortable and user-friendly as possible for an older clientele. He also has used his background in sales to drum up more customers, and he has personally directed all but one of the VR sessions (the single exception was when he had to travel for a funeral).  

Tracy, meanwhile, shoots photos and videos for the company’s social media channels while also taking the lead on communication with the residents of the facilities.  

“I try to build relationships with the seniors,” Tracy said. “I’m more of an emotional person, so I like to come in and see how they’re doing, how their day is going while he’s getting everything set up. I’d say he’s the brains of the operation, and I’m maybe more heart. 

“Although,” she added with a smile, “he does have heart.” 

Most of Lightning Tours’ clients value its service so much that they have booked standing monthly experiences. Each time, the tour is to a different country or region of the world – with rare exceptions, the destinations are places that the seniors are incapable of traveling to at this point in their lives.  

The effect can be powerful. Jeremy recalls a woman at a facility in Irvine who was initially reluctant to participate before he convinced her to give it a try. She agreed and sat quietly for the whole hour, turning her head in every direction. After the tour of Paris ended and Jeremy removed her headset, he saw that she was crying. When he asked her what was wrong, she related that her husband had died a few months earlier and that the sights during the tour brought back exhilarating memories of their frequent trips to the City of Light as a couple.  

“It was a moment that will stick out forever in terms of being able to provide that to her,” Jeremy said. “We want to bring joy to people, connect them to something that they might not otherwise be able to connect with, whether it’s the technology or whether it's the location.” 

Residents have been known to clap when the Fords enter the facility each month and to cheer after the experience. Some sites have introduced passport books, with seniors receiving stamps when they visit a new country. Olah Tupuola, the resident program director at Bayshire Carlsbad, said Lightning Tours has been a “transformative program” since the Fords first came to the center last September.  

“Their professionalism and kindness have made a significant impact on our community,” Tupuola said. “With Lightning Tours, the concept of a vacation is redefined, as residents can explore the world virtually, often while reliving cherished memories.”  

Jeremy and Tracy Ford are accidental entrepreneurs in more ways than one. A San Marcos native who’s the son of a Marine, Jeremy transferred to CSUSM from Palomar College and played on the first men’s basketball team in university history, coached by Jim Saia. He aspired to go to law school after graduation but ended up working in sales, first for a law firm and then for two large national life insurance companies.  

Tracy grew up in Oceanside and hoped to parlay her criminology degree into a career in law enforcement. But she graduated into a poor labor market caused by the 2007 recession and instead took a job in finance for 24 Hour Fitness. Unfulfilled by it, she transitioned into a role as a personal trainer for the same business. In fact, Tracy and Jeremy met at a 24 Hour Fitness gym, and they got married seven years ago.  

Both feeling boxed in by their corporate environments, they tried to turn a couple of their other late-night brainstorms into businesses, but nothing took off. Then came the fateful visit to Best Buy. Not that the birth of Lightning Tours came without hurdles. For the first 10 months of the company’s existence, Jeremy kept his full-time position at Ethos Life Insurance. 

“But there came a point where my wife was driving me to tours and I was working in the passenger seat, trying to do both jobs,” Jeremy said. “It was like, ‘OK, this isn’t sustainable. We’ve got to figure something out.’ ” 

That something was his decision to leave Ethos and dedicate himself fully to the startup in August 2023, which was accompanied by a different challenge in terms of the loss of his monthly paycheck. Jeremy called it a big leap of faith that makes him anxiety-ridden just by thinking about it.  

“They say it’s not easy to start a business, and they weren’t lying,” Tracy said. “But now we know exactly what to tell future entrepreneurs: If you think you’re ready to quit your job, wait at least six months, then do it.” 

Almost all of Lightning Tours’ clients are assisted living facilities, but the Fords have dipped their toes into other waters as well. They have brought their VR experiences to a few different daycare and after-school programs in the region, allowing children the same opportunity to see distant lands as the seniors get. This summer, they introduced a travel tour called “Around the World in Five Weeks” to the Boys & Girls Club of the South Coast Area in San Clemente, with passports and stamps for the kids to document their adventures. They also are in the process of getting approved by the San Marcos Unified School District to offer tours in local schools.  

Some of the sessions don’t even involve virtual travel. Lightning Tours has conducted some guided meditation experiences for the sales departments of businesses or for employees of high-stress jobs, such as firefighters and police officers. 

“Brick by brick, we’re building those partnerships,” Jeremy said.  

Yet the senior population remains the Fords’ primary focus, which makes sense given that there are more than 50,000 facilities for assisted living and memory care in California and they have been to only about 50 of them. The company’s growth continues apace.  Lightning Tours has two other partial owners (unpaid for now) specializing in partnerships and strategic innovation, and it’s on the verge of hiring an employee to run some of the tours and free Jeremy up to source more business.  

Last spring, the Fords bought 20 more Quest 2 headsets (the company is now owned by Meta, Facebook’s parent), doubling their inventory, and deployed them in the Inland Empire through a licensing agreement with a couple who lives there.  

“I think this will go as far as we can take it,” Jeremy said. “We’ve done things strategically because if we grow too fast, the base can be flimsy and it can all fall apart. But thinking big picture, Lightning Tours could be national, it could be in every state, every big city.  

“Where we are now is trying to put the pieces together, get this technology out there and in the hands of as many seniors as possible. We want to provide high-quality experiences and the joy of travel, get them outside of those four walls that they’re in daily.” 

Jeremy and Tracy Ford 

Major at CSUSM: Jeremy, sociology; Tracy, criminology and justice studies 

Graduation year: Tracy, 2007; Jeremy, 2015 

Company: Lightning Tours 

Website: lightningtours.co 

Founded: 2022 

Number of employees: Four 

 Talking Business With Jeremy Ford

What's the best advice you received about starting a business?  

Have goals. Having goals gives you strategic direction, and if you don't have them, you'll be spinning your wheels. When you have those goals, it enables you to focus on the main categories that will be the catalyst for your business moving forward.  

What advice would you give budding entrepreneurs? 

Be prepared for long hours, a lot of late nights. On those late nights, it can seem like you're on an island by yourself. What we learned the hard way is that having a team is very important – bringing others in to help support certain aspects of the business. Your reach expands when you let other people in to help. 

What's the greatest challenge in starting your own business? 

If you already have a full-time job, it can be difficult to decipher when it's time to quit and give your business the full attention.  

Knowing what you know now, is there anything you would have done differently? 

I would have waited longer to quit my full-time job. And I would have focused more heavily on the revenue-producing aspects of the business. Even though we do have quite a robust product now, there were times when we were building it up where the churn was at a higher rate than the income that was coming in.  

What are the qualities of a good entrepreneur? 

I can sum that up in one word: perseverance. If you do not have perseverance, you will not be an entrepreneur; you will go back into the workforce within months. If you have the ability to persevere, the ability to plan things out and execute that plan, you have a much better chance of being an entrepreneur for longer than just a few months.  

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Valdivia was in her second year at Cal State San Marcos, and she was thriving both in and out of the classroom. But she was also an undocumented student whose academic career was a fragile thing, always at risk of being thrown off course by seemingly endless dangers and challenges.  

It wasn’t built to withstand incidents like the crash Valdivia was the victim of while driving to campus in 2009. She was unconscious for a short period, and when she came to, the police were on the scene, tending to her and asking for her driver’s license. One problem: Because of her undocumented status, she didn’t have a driver’s license. 

Officers asked if she wanted to be taken to a hospital. No, she said. She didn’t have health insurance, and the prospect of the emergency room fees was terrifying.  

Valdivia came away from the accident with a fine for driving without a license, a hefty bill for recovering her car from the impound lot – and a belief that she had reached the end of the road in her quest to graduate from college. 

“It was a reminder of how vulnerable I was in my pursuit of an education,” Valdivia said. “At the time, I was struggling to pay for school in the first place. When that crash happened, I was like, ‘I guess this is as far along as I can go.’ ” 

In the end, Valdivia greatly underestimated her individual fortitude, the support of her family and the kindness of the community. After receiving a scholarship from a couple she calls her guardian angels, she graduated from CSUSM with a degree in sociology in 2011.  

But she didn’t stop there. She went on to earn a master’s from San Diego State and a Ph.D. from Harvard University, then received a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship. She's now a professor at UC Irvine, where she teaches courses on immigration, and law and society, and also mentors undergraduate and graduate students through the qualitative research process. 

Though she has gained more security in her immigration status, Valdivia remains passionate about issues affecting undocumented immigrants. At 35, she has emerged as one of the nation’s foremost young voices on the plight of undocumented students in America, determined to prevent future Carolinas from being waylaid before they have a chance to succeed – as she very nearly was. 

“She has a pretty deep moral compass in terms of what’s right and what’s just,” said Marisol Clark-Ibáñez, the associate chair of CSUSM’s sociology department and one of Valdivia’s mentors during her time at the university. “And what she does isn’t just for herself – it’s for her larger community. She’s very invested in the idea of the collective.” 

Valdivia has the collective in mind with every scholarly pursuit. She’s writing a book that examines how immigration enforcement impacts young adults and their families. She’s continuing to oversee the My Undocumented Life online platform, which she launched in 2011 and features up-to-date information and resources for undocumented students, their families and allies. 

As if that weren’t enough, Valdivia also led – with Clark-Ibáñez – a two-year research initiative that explored the experiences and needs of undocumented high school students in the county and the school personnel who work with them. Building on work that Valdivia did with Clark-Ibáñez when she was a student at CSUSM, the UndocuResearch Project – billed as by, for and about undocumented students – involves a team of about 35 researchers who have fanned out to dozens of high schools in the region to talk to students and educators about what it’s like to attend school during this era of stronger enforcement and anti-immigrant sentiment. 

The third and final phase of the project was an independent study sociology course that Valdivia taught with Clark-Ibáñez at CSUSM in which students were embedded in local high schools and took detailed field notes about the daily lives of undocumented students and educators. The team is continuing to disseminate the results through a research report, academic articles and presentations. 

“We knew from our own connection with students and their families that they were experiencing heightened levels of fear and stress and depression,” said Valdivia, adding that only a small percentage of undocumented students is able to enroll in college. “We wanted to be able to capture it so we could then tell the story of what’s happening and what needs to be done.” 

Born in Mexicali, Valdivia migrated to the United States with her family when she was 12. She was a Dreamer, the term for undocumented immigrants who were brought to America as children. That designation deeply shaped her educational trajectory, including her time at Orange Glen High School in Escondido. She was motivated to follow in her sister’s footsteps and pursue a college education, and to repay her parents for the endless sacrifices they had made. 

She applied to several universities in the state and liked the idea of following some of her friends to a school in Northern California, so she could escape her Escondido bubble. Her ineligibility for financial aid wasn’t the only hurdle, however, nor was her lack of a driver’s license. There was also the matter of Border Patrol checkpoints and the ever-present fear of deportation.  

Even to people who she knew and trusted, Valdivia didn’t exactly advertise her immigration status. 

“I remember feeling like there was this cloud hanging over her,” said Rita Guerra, who was a counselor at Orange Glen at the time. “It’s not that she was giving up, but it seemed that there was something worrying her and she didn’t want to talk about it.” 

Valdivia found her voice at CSUSM. She joined and later became president of an organization for undocumented students, the name of which the group later changed to STAND (Standing Together As oNe Dream) to sound more assertive. She became an intern for the National Latino Research Center, which fostered a fondness for research and activism that has only blossomed over the years.  

“I love learning. I love reading. I love writing,” Valdivia said. “In college, that’s when it hit me, and I was able to nurture it. My time at CSUSM provided the starting point for what I’m doing now.” 

Clark-Ibáñez encouraged Valdivia to carry her education into graduate school – “I had no idea what that was,” she said – but she remained undocumented, which meant barriers still blocked her path. To afford the exorbitant fees for grad school applications, she and a friend organized fundraisers, selling anything they could think of – T-shirts, bracelets, tamales. She was accepted to and wanted to attend Loyola University in Chicago, but she couldn’t afford the cost of out-of-state tuition. She also feared being questioned at the airport about her immigration status.   

Valdivia ended up at SDSU due to the proximity to home. In retrospect, she’s glad she did, as that’s where she gained invaluable research and teaching experience. By the time she was looking into options for her doctorate, she had acquired protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allowed her to obtain a driver’s license and work permit. She chose Harvard because of the presence of Roberto Gonzales, a leading immigration scholar who was Valdivia’s internship adviser after she was named a Sally Casanova Scholar through the California Pre-Doctoral Program for underrepresented students. 

With a Ph.D. from an Ivy League university in hand and a career as a professor, Valdivia is now in demand as a public speaker, telling the inspiring story of her educational journey. Guerra saw her give a keynote address at a counselors’ conference several years ago and was reduced to tears by pride for her former student. 

Despite all she has overcome and accomplished, Valdivia has no desire to sit back and take a breath. But her relentless drive takes a toll. In the course of dozens of interviews for her book and related projects, she has heard countless stories about people being detained and deported, causing her greater stress and costing her sleep. 

It reminds her of how far she has come. It reminds her of how far so many others still have to go.  

“Whenever I speak about what I went through, I’m always sure to emphasize how much support I had from my family, friends, mentors and the broader community, and how much I want to be able to help others in that sense,” she said. “Yes, I worked hard and had determination, but this is something millions of others are experiencing and they also need to have a community there to support them. I want to be part of that community.”  

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

 Salas felt like she didn’t have people around her to ask for help, and she wanted to dive deeper to see if others had similar struggles by conducting research on fellow first-generation students.  

 “I found that a student's college experience plays a significant role in determining their success in higher education,” said Salas, who will receive a bachelor’s degree in sociology this month. “For Latinx first-generation college students, factors such as family, FGCS status and representation all play a key role in determining their success and resilience in higher education.” 

 Salas has been recognized for her findings as one of seven winners of the 2023-24 CSUSM Library Award for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity, which comes with a $500 cash prize for each winning submission.  

 Salas’s paper is titled “'I Don't Belong Here': A Qualitative Study on the Experiences of Latinx First-Generation College Students.” Despite an increase in Latinx students enrolled in undergraduate programs, she found that graduation rates have remained stagnant, raising a concern.  

 Salas discovered that Latinx students are systematically disadvantaged in higher education, causing them to question their sense of belonging and hurting their chances of success. But even in the face of these challenges, Latinx first-generation college students remain resilient. 

 After graduation, Salas plans to take a gap year, then continue her research in a Ph.D. program.  

 “I will most likely do a combined program or just go straight for my Ph.D.,” she said. “I plan to focus on Latino/a sociology and the sociology of education.”  

Other winners 

 Creative works category  

 Submission: “MET” 

Student: Mary Elizabeth Handler 

Program: Art, media and design  

Summary: Handler’s project is inspired by the book “The Metropolitan Museum of Art” by Howard Hibbard. This piece is a testament to the creative process of the exhibit.  

Submission: “Exploring Mental Health Stigmatization Within AAPI Communities” 

Student: Kayla Lankford 

Program: Psychological science 

Summary: Lankford’s work is a creative capstone of poems about mental health stigmatization in Asian American communities. Through her research, she created three poems, titled “Dad,” “War Cry” and “Recycling Day.”  

 Empirical works category  

 Submission: “Community Cultural Wealth: The Care and Resilience of Mothers in Poverty” 

Student: Colleen Janey 

Program: Social sciences 

Summary: Janey’s project explores the lived experiences of women who have timed out of welfare. Her research reveals the resilience of mothers facing poverty and inequitable systems.  

Submission: “Best Practices for Sharing Photovoice Research Outcomes” 

Student: Shyane Masters and Brandon Warren-Fox  

Program: Environmental studies 

Summary: Masters and Warren-Fox discuss the best practices for sharing images online for sustained community engagement. Their findings emphasize social media's role and participatory approaches, aiding in digital dissemination and bridging researcher-participant gaps in conservation efforts. 

Interpretive analysis 

 Submission: “From Mexicas to Ancient Aztecs, Classical Nahuas, and Modern Indios/as: Early Modern Criollo/a Constructions and Understandings of Indigenous New Spain” 

Student: Hugo Daniel Peralta-Ramírez 

Program: History 

Summary: Peralta-Ramírez’s project analyzes early national narratives of Mexico that were constructed by Criollo intellectuals with Indigenous pasts. 

Submission: “Howard the Duck vs. the Modernity of Man: A Critical Analysis on the Attitudes and Metaphors in Howard the Duck” 

Student: Emilio Serrano 

Program: Communication 

Summary: Serrano’s work analyzes “Howard the Duck,” a comic created and published by Steve Gerber. The comic used satire to offer a social commentary of the times through the lens of an alien. Through genre and metaphoric rhetorical perspectives, Serrano argues that Gerber was a visionary who was frustrated with the medium and sought to point it out on the pages of “Howard the Duck.” 

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Interim Assistant Director of Editorial and External Affairs

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

They worked in collaboration with CSU Bakersfield professor Zachary Hays, Skybound Entertainment Editor Amanda LaFranco and Skydance Interactive Vice President Creative Shawn Kittelsen, who work on projects associated with “The Walking Dead.”

Inspired by the zombie sociology course that Kurisu teaches and “The Walking Dead” expertise from LaFranco and Kittlesen, the team created their panel based on examples that would engage the audience while also sparking deeper discussion about theory and research.

“We were able to help a casual audience learn in a fun way where they did not feel like they were in a classroom,” Atherton said.

The group created an interactive panel by integrating Poll Everywhere, a system that allowed the audience to answer questions using their phones. They challenged the audience with “several scenarios that involved ethical dilemmas set in a fictional zombie apocalypse. The scenarios involved issues of community, survival and punishment,” Atherton said.

By using engaging examples from popular culture, the panelists were able to discuss their academic knowledge and relevant contemporary social issues in a fun and interesting way.

“I am happy to say that our panel at San Diego Comic-Con filled all 160 seats in our room,” Atherton said.

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist
ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

To understand the reasoning behind this report, Cortes conducted empirical research examining important aspects of Latino wellness such as food and culture, sense of belonging and mental health treatment.  

“I wanted to further explore what made the Cougar Pantry such a great resource on campus,”  Cortes said. “And I wanted my research to be relevant to myself and my community.” 

His hard work paid off when he was announced as one of six winners of the 2022-23 CSUSM Library Award for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity award, which comes with a $600 cash prize for each recipient. 

“It is inspiring to see the work that our students are doing here at CSUSM,” said Rosa Rodriguez, CSUSM’s award chair and outreach librarian. "I am proud of our awardees and all those who submitted their amazing research and creative works.”  

Cortes was encouraged to apply by sociology professor Jill Weigt as this was an excellent opportunity to showcase his research and expand his professional experience.  

The library helped with his research process by providing access to the databases and resources on how to correctly write citations, literature reviews, abstracts and narrow down research questions. And there was one other advantage. 

“Everything was free,” he said.  

Cortes’ paper details that understanding the mechanisms beneath the reasons why Latinos reported mental health benefits from using the pantry can provide the university with information that can help it better support students. 

Other winners 

Creative works category 

Submission: Photographic Reflections on Landscape, Post-Colonial Society and Colonial Artifacts 

Student: Ken Waddy 

Program: Art, Media, and Design 

Adviser: Nancy diBenedetto 

Summary: This photobook highlights landscape, focusing on Rancho Guajome Adobe, the location of a settler colonial project that was built on the servitude of the Payómkawichum people (native to California). The photos reflect the different factors of settler colonialism, most notably how all of the subjects are a product of the process erasing and replacing.  

Submission: “Triggers” 

Student: Kelly Ibarra Perez 

Program: Art, Media, and Design 

Adviser: Siobhan Arnold 

Summary: “Triggers” (Transeúnte) is a short film that conveys how living somewhere between two places feels, physically and mentally. As an immigrant and a first-generation Mexican daughter, Perez portrays the relationship with her family and roots, and the distance between herself and her memory of home. 

Empirical research category 

Submission: Altruism and Mindfulness in Prosocial Helping Behavior 

Student: Alyssa Hudkins 

Program: Psychology 

Adviser: Virginia Tasulis 

Summary: This study’s results reveal how participants with higher mindfulness rates did not show significantly higher altruistic tendencies, and participants who rated themselves higher in altruism were not statistically more likely to help others in a high-risk situation.  

Submission: ‘Don't Jew Me’: How Antisemitism is Expressed, Experienced, and Ultimately Challenged 

Student: Eric Wilsker 

Program: Sociology 

Adviser: Mary Roche 

Summary: Through interviews, an in-depth literature review and a content analysis of items from contemporary American culture, this paper examines how Jewish people experience antisemitism, how antisemitism is expressed through various social mechanisms and a means by which antisemitism may be challenged.  

Interpretive analysis category 

Submission: Engendering Binaries: The Transhistorical Experiences of Catalina de Erauso 

Student: Hugo Daniel Peralta-Ramirez 

Program: History 

Adviser: Miriam Riggs 

Summary: This paper examines the crossdressing Basque Monja Alferéz Catalina de Erauso to demonstrate how gender performance iconography and symbolism are rooted in the way people experience and interact with Erauso and their performance within the archetypal standards of their contexts.  

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

That Mercado was in her first semester at Cal State San Marcos as a transfer student, was failing multiple classes while struggling mightily with the transition to online learning, was raising two boys and working three jobs, and seriously contemplating giving up her dream to become a lawyer.

The Mercado of today is just over a week away from graduating from CSUSM with a 3.7 GPA and a degree in criminology and justice studies, is brimming with experience and confidence thanks to a life-altering internship, and is the proud owner of a 173 score (out of 180) on the LSAT that puts her in the 99th percentile nationally and will allow her to have her pick of law schools.

What would this Mercado say to that Mercado?

“I would tell Danna in 2020 not to give up, to keep going,” she said. “That you are going to experience things that you have never experienced and so many doors are going to open for you.”

Near her lowest point during the fall 2020 semester, Mercado was referred to CSUSM’s Faculty Mentoring Program, which is designed for students (like her) who are the first generation in their families to attend college and are economically disadvantaged in their pursuit of a degree. She was assigned to Flor Saldana, a lecturer of sociology as well as criminology and justice studies.

As the pandemic raged, their first meeting was over Zoom, of course, and Mercado laid out her predicament in no uncertain terms. A full courseload on top of being a mother, a wife and an employee (times three) was too much. The road to being an attorney was too difficult. The dream was dead.

Saldana could relate to her mentee’s plight. She too was a Latina and a first-generation college student who had attended CSUSM while doubling as a mother. She too had faced her share of challenges and had turned to the Faculty Mentoring Program for assistance. She had overcome adversity en route to earning a job teaching at her alma mater in 2018, and she wasn’t about to let Mercado give up.

“She came in and was like, ‘No, you’re going to do it, and we’re going to do it together,’ ” Mercado said. “She was just amazing.”

During their twice-monthly meetings that began three years ago and continue into the present, Saldana supported Mercado emotionally, helped her navigate processes like registering for classes, and connected her with resources around campus. Saldana, though, is quick to downplay her role in Mercado’s accomplishments.

“She tells me, ‘Oh, Flor, you’ve been such an inspiration,’ ” Saldana said. “But I’m like, ‘You don’t get this. You have the inspiration within yourself. It’s your drive. You’re just a go-getter. You know what you want, and you keep going for it.’ ”

Saldana also encouraged Mercado to do an internship at CSUSM, preaching its benefits as a force for networking and for solidifying career goals. In January 2022, Mercado started a semester-long internship at the San Diego office of immigration lawyer Aaron Giron. Taking Mercado under his wing, Giron brought her along to immigration court and let her try her hand at writing legal briefs. He even paid for her LSAT registration and for a tutoring program to prepare for the test.

“That was the best experience of my life,” she said. “It gave me the stamp of approval of, yes, you are destined to be an attorney. And it opened my eyes to how I want to help my community and my people.”

Giron was so impressed by Mercado’s performance as an intern that he offered her a paid position as an administrative assistant. The long commute from her home in Vista made that opportunity unfeasible, but Giron connected her last June with a colleague, a family law attorney in Carlsbad. She landed a job with the firm of Pierre Domercq that same day.

Within two months, Mercado was promoted from an office assistant to a document processor. Come the fall, she returned for her final year at CSUSM while shuttling her two boys, Wesley (12) and Joseph (6), to baseball practices and games and feverishly studying for the LSAT. She took the test in October on a day when she was suffering from the stomach flu.

No matter. Mercado posted a score that was within range of the median figure for hallowed law schools like Yale and Harvard. (She plans to delay her applications until the fall 2024 cycle to give her time to rest and recover.)

“When she told me her score, I was blown away,” Saldana said. “It speaks to the power of internships. It validated the mentorship she had gotten in the attorneys’ offices, the practice that she had acquired in dealing with cases, the program that they gave her to study.”

Mercado’s family migrated from Mexico when she was a newborn, and she grew up in Carlsbad. She met her future husband, John, at Carlsbad High School. They got married in 2014, six years after they graduated and three years after Wesley was born.

Mercado always had wanted to go to college, but she decided that it would be better to support her husband’s career as an electrical engineer who was starting his own business. As she was working multiple jobs to help make ends meet and raising their two boys, however, the education bug never stopped nibbling at her.

“I remember telling John that I feel like my life is going nowhere,” Mercado said. “And he was like, ‘You need to go back to school because you love school.’ ”

She fought through impostor syndrome for two years at MiraCosta College before transferring to CSUSM, where even bigger roadblocks awaited. Enter Saldana, who was as much a guardian angel as a faculty mentor for Mercado. When she talks about the influence that Saldana has had on her life trajectory, Mercado can’t hold back the tears.

“She’s my rock, my everything,” she said.

Here’s the amazing part: Mentor and mentee never have met in person, their interactions always confined – through either the pandemic or overstuffed schedules – to rectangular boxes on their computers. Mercado and Saldana plan to change that on Friday, when the Faculty Mentoring Program holds a celebration for its graduates.

“You just never know where those relationships are going to take you,” Saldana said. “Opportunities are abundant when you start mentoring students.”

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

And then there’s the story of Juan Alva. And the simple but powerful motto he has lived by – you don’t know how tough you are until being tough is the only option you have. 

Staring death in the face 

Alva’s mom left when he was 12. He learned to be independent while relying on his father for most of his physical and emotional needs.  

Growing up in a broken home can break some people, but it only strengthened Alva and his relationship with his father. The void left him without things others take for granted. But it also turned him into the compassionate, resourceful and strong man who entered Cal State San Marcos with hope and a little chip on his shoulder. 

But the road became rougher when, in his second year on campus, his father was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis. This lung disease is brutal, especially when you must watch a loved one endure it. As it progresses, the lung tissue becomes damaged, which makes it more difficult for the lungs to work properly. A slow but gradual shortness of breath ensues, and the average survival is three to five years. 

Alva spent the next couple of years taking care of his father while juggling a double major in psychology and sociology.  

He watched his father slowly wither way until he died during what was supposed to be his final semester at CSUSM. 

Then it all came crashing down. 

So close to the finish line 

Distraught over the loss, the pandemic hit Alva even harder than most.  

He had put so much time, money and energy into caring for his father to the end, he was left unemployed due to the worldwide shutdown. Also without a place to live, Alva was unable to finish his final semester of college with about a month to go. 

To hear him describe it, the remainder of Alva’s extended family did not offer the necessary help. 

“My family fell apart after my father passed away,” he said. “But every single tragedy in our lives, those are just our next challenges. I think toughness is developed all the time. You should always look back and reflect about the things that you have overcome and realize that you are tougher than all that. So I remember all of my heartbreaks and disappointments and realize that I'm tougher, and that helped me know how to overcome.”

And then life knocked him down again, this time with an uppercut straight to the chin. 

Cancer diagnosis 

Shortly after quitting school, Alva started to have a chronic sore mouth. 

He saw doctors, but mostly via telehealth because of the pandemic. None of the doctors seemed concerned about his symptoms, mostly because he was not a smoker. 

But the soreness and uneasy feelings didn’t go away. Eventually he was able to be seen in person. A biopsy was ordered, and the tests came back with the worst possible news – cancer of the tongue.  

Facing obstacles that would destroy many of us, Alva underwent surgery to have almost half of his tongue removed.  

He also immediately began a course of treatment that included radiation and chemotherapy in hopes of the cancer not spreading to other parts of his body. 

The result has affected his ability to speak clearly, but it hasn’t changed his willingness to make the world a better place. 

“I promise you it’s going to be OK,” Alva said. “The reason? I'm still here. I've learned how tough I am. And we're 100% capable of rising to the occasion. Cancer is very painful. Chemotherapy is a pure poison. And they inject you with as much poison as possible that hopefully kills the cancer. And you feel the poison. You feel nostalgic, feel scared, feel tired. At one point I was so drowsy that I wasn't sure if I had enough energy to take a next breath. But I was so tired of that. I was too tired to be afraid of dying.” 

He spent more than two years fighting off a return of the cancer.

Then it came back. 

Staring death in the face, Part II 

Cancerous tumors were discovered in both of Alva’s lungs last fall.  

Most likely a result of the cancer traveling south, it meant a return to the treatments that made him sick in 2020. He eventually was diagnosed with stage four cancer, also known as metastatic cancer because it spread from its original location in the body. 

Stage four cancer doesn’t always mean impending death, but in Alva's case, the prognosis was grim. 

Doctors recommended hospice care to make him more comfortable at end of life. 

But those doctors seemed to forget how tough this patient was. 

“They told me I was done,” Alva said back in March. “And I said I’m not done as long as I have hope. And I kept fighting, and I'm still fighting at the moment.” 

Recently, immunotherapy has allowed his entire immune system to attack the cancer. 

He recently met with his oncologist, who alerted him that the CT scan showed no signs of cancer. 

“Your story has that positive ending you hoped for,” he wrote in a recent email.  

A culture of care 

Alva is quick to praise the faculty that has supported him in his long, winding journey at CSUSM. 

He remembers when psychology department chair Dustin Calvillo showed him compassion and grace when Alva was caring for his father. He said practically every faculty member he came in contact with in both psychology and sociology has positively influenced him in one way or another. 

He feels he’s better prepared for life thanks to the culture that exists among CSUSM faculty.  

“We are all awed by Juan's perseverance,” said Liora Gubkin, the dean of the College of Humanities, Arts, Behavioral and Social Sciences. “It’s a testament to the impact of science and the power of the human spirit, coupled with the support of key people and mentors in life, that Juan is still here with us. Watching him walk across the stage at next month’s graduation ceremony will be a proud moment for all of us.” 

He will walk at graduation with his head held high, knowing he is meant to be here. 

He stared death in the face multiple times and never blinked. 

“The end of hope is the end of new opportunities and of growth,” Alva said. “But life is the opposite. As long as you have life, you have a challenge for new love, new opportunities, new joy, new experiences. So as long as you have life, you have hope.” 

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

The first is the basketball court, where she was one of the driving forces behind the ascension of the Cougars’ women’s program into one of the most successful in NCAA Division II over the last few seasons.

The second is the Black Student Center, which long has been her oasis away from athletics.

“I am extremely grateful for the Black Student Center,” Buckner said. “It has been life-changing for me, honestly.”

Buckner has been involved with the center, at least sparingly, almost from the day she stepped foot on campus as a 17-year-old freshman back in 2018. But her participation ramped up during the COVID-19 pandemic when the campus was virtual and seemingly everyone was seeking ways to feel more connected with the CSUSM community and less isolated at home.

Now, as her five years at CSUSM come to a close, Buckner stands at the heart of the Black Student Center – she doesn’t work there, but she might as well given how much time she spends in it and how vital she is to its operations.

Buckner is one of 260 Black undergraduate and graduate students who have been invited to attend the annual Sankofa recognition ceremony for Black graduates. The event, which is celebrating its 25^th anniversary, will take place on Thursday, May 11.

“Dynnah radiates greatness,” said Shanelle Watkins, assistant director of the Black Student Center. “She’s so pleasant, professional and eager to learn and assist. As a student-athlete, she’s very busy but still makes time to serve in multiple roles for the center.”

Watkins met Buckner soon after she was hired as coordinator of Black student success initiatives in 2021. Watkins became the staff adviser for a new center program called Circle of Sisters, a support network for Black women at CSUSM, and Buckner quickly agreed to sign on as the first student coordinator.

Circle of Sisters now includes more than 30 members, and the program that launched virtually because of the pandemic meets monthly in person for gatherings on such topics as navigating Black girl friendships, reproductive wellness and group yoga.

“We serve each other,” Buckner said of the Circle of Sisters. “We push each other academically, and we support each other emotionally. It’s pretty much a connection community and making sure we’re all in line.”

Buckner also is a member of the Black Student Union, and last semester she joined the Ujamaa Achievement Program, a Black Student Center group that’s dedicated to academic excellence, leadership development, professional advancement and community engagement. An important component of the program is mentorship, and Buckner’s mentor is none other than Watkins.

Buckner describes Watkins as “one of the most inviting people I have ever met” and “like a light in the room.” Watkins, in turn, sees a lot of herself in Buckner as a fellow Black woman who graduated from CSUSM in 2013 with a degree in sociology (Buckner is a double major in sociology and psychology).

“Her courage and willingness to seek out mentorship and her personal morals, values and goals that she set for herself during her higher education journey and beyond remind me a lot of myself when I was in undergrad,” Watkins said.

Watkins says Buckner, as a fifth-year senior, has served as a kind of big sister to other women in the Black Student Center, but she’s a literal big sister to one of them. For the last two years, she has shared the center and the basketball court with Deannah Buckner, a member of the Circle of Sisters and a sophomore on the Cougars’ team.

“It’s the highlight of my college career to be able to be with my sister,” Dynnah Buckner said. “We definitely have gotten a lot closer, and to play with her at the collegiate level, that doesn’t happen often. That’s something that I will cherish forever.”

During her basketball career at CSUSM, Buckner started all 112 games in which she appeared across four seasons (her junior year was wiped out by the pandemic). She was named to the All-California Collegiate Athletic Association first team each of her last two years, and she was the Cougars’ leading scorer this past season as CSUSM went 25-6 and reached the Sweet 16 of the NCAA women’s tournament for the first time.

In her last three seasons, she helped lead the Cougars to a cumulative record of 72-16 and their first three trips to the NCAA tournament.

After graduation next month, Buckner plans to return to her hometown of Rancho Cucamonga to work as a substitute teacher before she heads overseas to continue her basketball career, likely in France or Spain. When she hangs up her sneakers for good, she aspires to earn a master’s degree in business administration or leadership management and enter a business field.

“I was able to be a part of something great. I was able to be a part of making history,” she said of playing basketball at CSUSM. “It's been life-changing, not just the basketball aspect, but in terms of community and leadership and working under pressure – all the valuable skills that I can take into the real world when I work with other people. I will always be thankful for that experience.”

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

“If you ever look at someone’s shoes or you ever lose anyone who is close to you,  you see their shoes left behind and remember their history and the journeys they've taken,” said Huerta, the communications specialist for Cal State San Marcos’ College of Education, Health and Human Services.

Huerta is sharing her work through a collection titled “The Red, Pride & Blues of a Military B.R.A.T,” which is part of CSUSM’s University Library Context Exhibit Series. Each semester, the library invites artists from all over the country to display their talent. The series is designed to support student learning and research and to foster community discussion and engagement through the use of art.

The third floor of the library features 22 of Huerta’s mixed-media art pieces on display. Her collection is inspired by proudly holding the title of a military B.R.A.T., an acronym for British Regiment Attached Traveler, which today refers to a child who grew up with a parent in the armed forces.

“My grandpa served in the Navy, my dad in the Air Force, my brother, nephew, uncles and cousins were in the Army, my son and husband were in the Marines, and my daughter served in the Coast Guard,” Huerta said. “We've got all bases covered.”

Huerta has fond memories of drawing with her father, a Vietnam veteran, when he wasn’t deployed overseas. She remembers her father once coloring a deer purple in a coloring book. Huerta, who was 7 at the time, told her father that he couldn’t color a deer purple because that’s not what they look like in real life. He explained to her that there are no rules in art and you can express yourself in any way you want. 

After that, Huerta used bright, bold colors in her paintings, and she paints using the colors that she feels. The exhibit includes a colorful painting of a bison that she said reminds her to tell others about exploring art materials and discovering themselves. Sometimes she adds collages to her paintings by using glue, clay, photos and natural materials.

“You don't have to be selling art to be an artist,” she said. “We all have creativity inside of us. You can use art in everything that you do.”

Huerta said one of her most meaningful paintings in the collection is a tribute to the 13 service members who were killed in the Kabul airport bombing in Afghanistan on Aug. 26, 2021. On the floor under this piece are 13 candles and a vase with poppies; sand and red marbles symbolize the sand of Afghanistan and the blood that was shed.

“Any time a military member is lost, it affects more than just that member’s immediate family,” Huerta said. “The loss is felt across the nation.”

Another large art piece titled “Family Bloodline” includes numerous family photos glued to paper and connected by red string that represents the bloodline. The installation hangs from a long tree branch. Huerta said “Family Bloodline” honors many of the veterans in her family.

Huerta likes to create her own art style, and she loves to facilitate art healing sessions with others who are struggling. In May, she hosted an art workshop with 48 children from Santa Margarita Elementary School at Camp Pendleton. It was important for her to include military children in her work. Together, they created face masks with paint and mixed materials while sharing how it feels when their parents are deployed or when they move from one home to another.

Huerta is familiar with these experiences from her own upbringing. As a child, she would wear a bracelet with the name of a prisoner of war until they were freed. Her family welcomed service members to Thanksgiving dinner every year.

One of the art installation pieces in the exhibit is an acrylic painting of combat boots representing several veterans in her family. Under it and on the floor are four pairs of plaster baby shoes made from her children’s shoes. It not only represents her family, but all the youth sent to combat. Huerta said these thoughts weighed heavily on her when two of her children enlisted.

Huerta is a first-generation college graduate and a double CSUSM alumna with a bachelor’s degree in visual art. For her Master of Arts in Sociological Practice, Huerta focused her research on post-traumatic stress disorder, military suicide rates, and educating civilians about the military lifestyle. As a continuing advocate for veterans, she stresses the importance of hearing their stories.

Art helps Huerta process and tell her story. It always has been an escape for her, a way of getting through her most difficult times.

Huerta calls her mother the most creative person she knows; from her, she learned that art can be a coping mechanism.

“Sometimes family is all you have,” Huerta said.

Knowing how art helped with her struggles, Huerta was inspired to teach art healing at the CSU Shiley Haynes Institute for Palliative Care at CSUSM. She encourages her students not to focus on creating the perfect drawing or painting, but rather to use art as a form of expression.  

“I always hear people say, ‘I don't know how to draw,’ ” she said. “Drawing is about connecting and expressing. In my artwork, my story comes out. I encourage you to do the same even if it's for yourself. Fourteen years ago, I started taking art classes. I was told that contemporary artists don’t paint like me. That's not why I do art. I do it for me. I do it for others to help them connect.”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

Cal State San Marcos will have a contingency of students and support staff walking in July’s San Diego Pride Parade for the first time since 2019.

There will many returners representing CSUSM. A mixture of ages and cultural backgrounds will show the campus’ diversity.

One of the newcomers this year will be One Reks, a rising senior who is double majoring in sociology and women, gender and sexuality studies.

The smile has barely left their face since receiving the invitation. The excitement in their voice is palpable, a combination of nervous excitement and anticipation of a life-changing event.

Their journey to get there is one of perseverance, courage and relying on the kindness of others to walk with you through life’s most difficult challenges.

First steps

Growing up transgender in a family unit that didn’t know what that meant or entailed was confusing at its best, suffocating at its worst, and Reks didn’t have much support at home either emotionally or academically.

School was often a struggle. Reks' parents talked about going to college but there were no concrete discussions or steps made to get there.

Reks knew they weren’t heterosexual at a young age. Their gender didn’t feel right. There was nobody in their inner circle to assure them their feelings were valid, their inquiries were healthy.

“I was actually forced to come out quite a few times for different reasons,” Reks said. “I don't like to lie, and I don't like to hide things. So when someone asks me something, I'm very transparent. And so that happened a lot growing up. I just never felt like I had a choice to just express and be within myself.”

At Mission Vista High School in Oceanside, Reks said not that many students were out. The space that facilitates coming out comfortably didn’t exist in their mind.

They lost friends after coming out. A few stuck around but many didn’t know how to act. Their best friend didn’t become their best friend until after high school when they each came out.

Directionless and uninspired, Reks decided to give community college a go.

Nearby Palomar College was the destination, but that challenge was nowhere near easy. Failure came at nearly every turn, which included changing potential majors eight times.

In one of their final academic advising appointments, the adviser asked a simple question: What do you want to do?

“I was like, ‘I don't know, I kind of just want to help make the world a better place for people,’ ” Reks said. “It was just funny because from that she suggested sociology. Being able to be exposed to this field that really does look at people and look at how society is. Sociology really does try to work to make living everywhere better for everyone in the way that they need.

“Having a motivation and dealing with all of these not-great things that I was personally dealing with, other people shouldn't have to go through that. If I have to do something, I might as well do something that's going to also help other people’s lives.”

A mentor and a safe space

When Reks arrived at CSUSM after six years in and out of Palomar, they wanted to quit again.

It was a whole new world of responsibilities, intimidating class sizes and a social construct they were unfamiliar with.

But just when their faith in the journey was being tested, along came a place and a person. Both would change Reks' life forever.

Robert Aiello-Hauser is a lecturer and the director of student engagement and inclusion at the LGBTQA Pride Center. They were teaching a course titled gender and sexuality in pop culture and media in fall 2019 when a quiet transfer student tried to blend in without standing out.

Aiello-Hauser was transparent about being non-binary, the same identity as Reks. It didn’t take more than a few personal encounters before Reks figured this was the inspiration they had been waiting their entire life for.

A light bulb went on.

“Being in that class really opened my eyes that I can be really out and proud and advocate for other people who may not have the privilege to do that,” Reks said.

Aiello-Hauser encouraged them to apply for a job as a peer educator and administrative assistant at the Pride Center on campus after they were already a volunteer. When the pandemic hit, they messaged Reks all summer, keeping them in the loop about the plans to reopen.

When Reks grew frustrated and wanted to quit the center and school, which came at the same time they stopped talking to their parents, Aiello-Hauser provided the strength when Reks felt weak.

“One is the epitome of why I do what I do,” Aiello-Hauser said. “Assisting a student on their identity journey in finding their best self and seeing them empowered is the biggest reward. And then seeing how they want to give back to the community and ensure folks have a great experience by being that role model is the biggest reward. I know it’s not easy and there have been bumps in the road, especially with COVID and taking a semester off, but they have persevered.”

Said Reks: “I wouldn't be here now I don't think if it wasn't for Robert.”

Receiving recognition

To hear Reks describe their journey, it’s one of challenges instead of failures. Not roadblocks but detours.

“Sometimes it's hard for me to have faith in myself that I'm going to get to a point where I am really helping the community,” Reks said. “The moments like these are really meaningful and make me feel like I really can make a difference when I never really grew up thinking I could.”

Inspiration can come at any stage in life. What was a simple course in their first semester at CSUSM become an encounter with a mentor that forever changed Reks' career trajectory.

In addition to their work at the Pride Center, Reks also has a job as special consultant and student mentor for the Office of Inclusive Excellence on campus.

“I could not be prouder of the strong determined individual that One has become,” Aiello-Hauser said. “I learn from them every day on how to be stronger in my own identity and so I understand how our trans students look to One for guidance and support.”

An unselfish mentor and campus leader, Reks received some major recognition for their efforts a couple of weeks ago when they won the PFLAG San Diego County Mary Wagner Memorial Scholarship. It included a $3,000 award and put them in some impressive company of previous winners, including San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria.

“I'm really happy about the work that I do at school,” Reks said. “But actually being able to win money and visibility for the work that I do was definitely not something I expected. Career-wise, life-wise, I just I want to be an advocate. It’s always been hard seeing queer people, people like me with intersecting identities, you don't see a lot of variety. So being able to be queer and be trans and knowing that people who have done really great things also have received these awards, it gives me motivation, excitement and hope.”

The future begins now

Before Reks begins their senior year in the fall, an annual San Diego tradition will include them and a strong contingent of CSUSM students and staff.

CSUSM will be well represented in July’s Pride Parade, the Cougars first visit to the event since 2019. It will be the 14^th time in the event’s history that CSUSM has been represented. A crowd of more than 300,000 spectators is expected.

It will be a great opportunity for the county to see the support system in place for the LGBTQA community on campus.

“I've been going to San Diego Pride specifically since 2014,” Reks said. “Seeing how many people in the community, how many allies there are, even though the world isn't great. And it's not always super accepting, even in North County or San Diego County, but being able to see how many people you can stand with in solidarity. I'm just so excited because it's such a good feeling. My heart just feels so good every time I’m at Pride.”

The next 11 months are sure to be filled with new adventures for Reks.  Their senior year will be full of mentoring new students while continuing to shape a life.

Graduate school is most likely the next stop, although they aren’t sure where. Qualitative research, perhaps in their role as a professor, seems to be an area where they can make a significant impact in the lives of young people.

“Representation is probably most important,” Aiello-Hauser said. “For other trans students to see how One is succeeding and to hear and learn from their journey helps them to see and feel like they can succeed as well. In each role, they have forged a path for other students to follow in their footsteps and get involved in some aspect of the Pride Center.”

Although Reks takes tremendous pride in looking at issues through a queer lens, they want to advocate for all people in the future. Breaking down barriers and strict gender roles is on the agenda.

In what surprises nobody who knows their generous spirit, Reks is focused on finding a way for everyone to feel comfortable with who they are.

“Students come in to the Pride Center, and you start seeing the difference in them,” they said. “A lot of students recently have been coming up to me, and there's a handful of queer and even more specifically trans people that tell me, ‘You were not only exposing me to the community but making me really feel like I had a place and made me understand how to make sense of how I felt about my identity.’

“So winning the scholarship and then hearing students telling me that, I don't even have words. I'm getting emotional. It's really heartwarming because you never think that you can be that for someone else.”

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

He’s also a huge fan of Comic-Con International, having attended the wildly popular San Diego civic institution since the early 1990s.  

So when Atherton saw an opportunity to combine his academic expertise with his personal passion, he seized on it.  

Atherton created and appeared on a panel for the 2022 edition of Comic-Con, which took place July 21-24 at the San Diego Convention Center. Titled “Better Crimefighter? Superheroes or Their Billionaire Alter Egos,” the panel featured Atherton and two CSUSM colleagues: Sheri-Lynn Kurisu, a criminology and justice studies professor who was invited for her innovative use of pop culture in her courses, including one on zombie sociology; and Allison Carr, academic transitions librarian, who moderated the panel and helped plan the questions and topics for discussion.  

The final two panelists were Zachary Hays, a Cal State Bakersfield professor who does research on policing, and Alex Antone, an editor for Skybound Entertainment. 

“As someone who loves to teach and inspire intellectual curiosity in any form, it was an exciting and fulfilling opportunity for me,” Atherton said. “It allowed me to introduce the field that I love to a new audience. Also, as a Comic-Con attendee for decades, being on a panel was a dream come true. Discussing this topic with a talented and fun group of colleagues made the panel a success.” 

The panel concept built on a presentation that Atherton once did for prospective students and their families at Discover CSUSM to get them excited about the topic of criminology. The goal of the panel was to discuss ideas around addressing crime through the lens of superheroes and popular culture – comparing whether a superhero like Batman or his billionaire alter ego Bruce Wayne could stop more crime.  

“More specifically, we discussed the difference between fighting crime through the traditional reactive approach of punishment and deterrence, and the proactive approach of addressing the social factors associated with crime,” Atherton said. “The former concept deals with catching criminals and punishing them to deter them and others from committing crimes. It is the basis for much of our current criminal justice policy as well as superhero comics. The second concept would be the support and creation of programs that would address the social factors we know are associated with crime, like inequality, education, poverty and employment. This proactive approach could be accomplished through the philanthropy and lobbying of the superhero’s affluent alter egos like Bruce Wayne.”  

Atherton, who also works with a local nonprofit called Creators Assemble!, said he and his colleagues hope to return to Comic-Con for another panel next year. 

“Normally, discussing criminological theory would likely be dry and unappealing to a non-academic audience,” he said. “Yet by applying these concepts to popular culture and characters like Batman, we can engage a casual audience in an important discussion about current social justice issues.” 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

There will many returners representing CSUSM. A mixture of ages and cultural backgrounds will show the campus’ diversity.

One of the newcomers this year will be Ashton Lawson, a rising senior who is double majoring in sociology and women, gender and sexuality studies.

The smile has barely left their face since receiving the invitation. The excitement in their voice is palpable, a combination of nervous excitement and anticipation of a life-changing event.

Their journey to get there is one of perseverance, courage and relying on the kindness of others to walk with you through life’s most difficult challenges.

First steps

Growing up transgender in a family unit that didn’t know what that meant or entailed was confusing at its best, suffocating at its worst, and Lawson didn’t have much support at home either emotionally or academically.

School was often a struggle. Lawson’s parents talked about going to college but there were no concrete discussions or steps made to get there.

Lawson knew they weren’t heterosexual at a young age. Their gender didn’t feel right. There was nobody in their inner circle to assure them their feelings were valid, their inquiries were healthy.

“I was actually forced to come out quite a few times for different reasons,” Lawson said. “I don't like to lie, and I don't like to hide things. So when someone asks me something, I'm very transparent. And so that happened a lot growing up. I just never felt like I had a choice to just express and be within myself.”

At Mission Vista High School in Oceanside, Lawson said not that many students were out. The space that facilitates coming out comfortably didn’t exist in their mind.

They lost friends after coming out. A few stuck around but many didn’t know how to act. Their best friend didn’t become their best friend until after high school when they each came out.

Directionless and uninspired, Lawson decided to give community college a go.

Nearby Palomar College was the destination, but that challenge was nowhere near easy. Failure came at nearly every turn, which included changing potential majors eight times.

In one of their final academic advising appointments, the adviser asked a simple question: What do you want to do?

“I was like, ‘I don't know, I kind of just want to help make the world a better place for people,’ ” Lawson said. “It was just funny because from that she suggested sociology. Being able to be exposed to this field that really does look at people and look at how society is. Sociology really does try to work to make living everywhere better for everyone in the way that they need.

“Having a motivation and dealing with all of these not-great things that I was personally dealing with, other people shouldn't have to go through that. If I have to do something, I might as well do something that's going to also help other people’s lives.”

A mentor and a safe space

When Lawson arrived at CSUSM after six years in and out of Palomar, they wanted to quit again.

It was a whole new world of responsibilities, intimidating class sizes and a social construct they were unfamiliar with.

But just when their faith in the journey was being tested, along came a place and a person. Both would change Lawson’s life forever.

Robert Aiello-Hauser is a lecturer and the director of student engagement and inclusion at the LGBTQA Pride Center. They were teaching a course titled gender and sexuality in pop culture and media in fall 2019 when a quiet transfer student tried to blend in without standing out.

Aiello-Hauser was transparent about being non-binary, the same identity as Lawson. It didn’t take more than a few personal encounters before Lawson figured this was the inspiration they had been waiting their entire life for.

A light bulb went on.

“Being in that class really opened my eyes that I can be really out and proud and advocate for other people who may not have the privilege to do that,” Lawson said.

Aiello-Hauser encouraged them to apply for a job as a peer educator and administrative assistant at the Pride Center on campus after they were already a volunteer. When the pandemic hit, they messaged Lawson all summer, keeping them in the loop about the plans to reopen.

When Lawson grew frustrated and wanted to quit the center and school, which came at the same time they stopped talking to their parents, Aiello-Hauser provided the strength when Lawson felt weak.

“Ashton is the epitome of why I do what I do,” Aiello-Hauser said. “Assisting a student on their identity journey in finding their best self and seeing them empowered is the biggest reward. And then seeing how they want to give back to the community and ensure folks have a great experience by being that role model is the biggest reward. I know it’s not easy and there have been bumps in the road, especially with COVID and taking a semester off, but they have persevered.”

Said Lawson: “I wouldn't be here now I don't think if it wasn't for Robert.”

Receiving recognition

To hear Lawson describe their journey, it’s one of challenges instead of failures. Not roadblocks but detours.

“Sometimes it's hard for me to have faith in myself that I'm going to get to a point where I am really helping the community,” Lawson said. “The moments like these are really meaningful and make me feel like I really can make a difference when I never really grew up thinking I could.”

Inspiration can come at any stage in life. What was a simple course in their first semester at CSUSM become an encounter with a mentor that forever changed Lawson’s career trajectory.

In addition to their work at the Pride Center, Lawson also has a job as special consultant and student mentor for the Office of Inclusive Excellence on campus.

“I could not be prouder of the strong determined individual that Ashton has become,” Aiello-Hauser said. “I learn from them every day on how to be stronger in my own identity and so I understand how our trans students look to Ashton for guidance and support.”

An unselfish mentor and campus leader, Lawson received some major recognition for their efforts a couple of weeks ago when they won the PFLAG San Diego County Mary Wagner Memorial Scholarship. It included a $3,000 award and put them in some impressive company of previous winners, including San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria.

“I'm really happy about the work that I do at school,” Lawson said. “But actually being able to win money and visibility for the work that I do was definitely not something I expected. Career-wise, life-wise, I just I want to be an advocate. It’s always been hard seeing queer people, people like me with intersecting identities, you don't see a lot of variety. So being able to be queer and be trans and knowing that people who have done really great things also have received these awards, it gives me motivation, excitement and hope.”

The future begins now

Before Lawson begins their senior year in the fall, an annual San Diego tradition will include them and a strong contingent of CSUSM students and staff.

CSUSM will be well represented in July’s Pride Parade, the Cougars first visit to the event since 2019. It will be the 14^th time in the event’s history that CSUSM has been represented. A crowd of more than 300,000 spectators is expected.

It will be a great opportunity for the county to see the support system in place for the LGBTQA community on campus.

“I've been going to San Diego Pride specifically since 2014,” Lawson said. “Seeing how many people in the community, how many allies there are, even though the world isn't great. And it's not always super accepting, even in North County or San Diego County, but being able to see how many people you can stand with in solidarity. I'm just so excited because it's such a good feeling. My heart just feels so good every time I’m at Pride.”

The next 11 months are sure to be filled with new adventures for Lawson.  Their senior year will be full of mentoring new students while continuing to shape a life.

Graduate school is most likely the next stop, although they aren’t sure where. Qualitative research, perhaps in their role as a professor, seems to be an area where they can make a significant impact in the lives of young people.

“Representation is probably most important,” Aiello-Hauser said. “For other trans students to see how Ashton is succeeding and to hear and learn from their journey helps them to see and feel like they can succeed as well. In each role, they have forged a path for other students to follow in their footsteps and get involved in some aspect of the Pride Center.”

Although Lawson takes tremendous pride in looking at issues through a queer lens, they want to advocate for all people in the future. Breaking down barriers and strict gender roles is on the agenda.

In what surprises nobody who knows their generous spirit, Lawson is focused on finding a way for everyone to feel comfortable with who they are.

“Students come in to the Pride Center, and you start seeing the difference in them,” they said. “A lot of students recently have been coming up to me, and there's a handful of queer and even more specifically trans people that tell me, ‘You were not only exposing me to the community but making me really feel like I had a place and made me understand how to make sense of how I felt about my identity.’

“So winning the scholarship and then hearing students telling me that, I don't even have words. I'm getting emotional. It's really heartwarming because you never think that you can be that for someone else.”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

The Cal State San Marcos sociology student and volleyball player was in her hometown of Portland at the time, having completed her sophomore year at CSUSM. Several times that summer, she ventured downtown to join in some of the largest and most visible protests in the nation, with thousands of people making their voices heard and sometimes encountering police who deployed tear gas and riot gear against them.

“I felt like I had to do something,” Ridgeway said. “I knew that there were people standing up for what's right down the street from my house. I was like, ‘I have to go out there; I have to take a stand, physically take a stand, for all the injustice that's happening.’ I think that experience really empowered me to speak up for what's right.”

Her feeling of empowerment was no summer dalliance. Over the ensuing weeks, she spoke multiple times with her coach, Andrea Leonard, and teammates about how to translate her newfound activist voice into action. When she returned to San Marcos that August, she seized on the momentum within the athletic department and pushed for progress toward increased diversity and inclusion.

As a result of her efforts over the past year, Ridgeway was selected this month as one of two winners of the President’s Student Champion Award for Inclusive Excellence and Diversity. She received the award, along with co-winner Ashley Gallardo, at CSUSM’s All Peoples Luncheon on Oct. 12.

“It's not ever something that I thought I would get any recognition for. That was never my aim,” Ridgeway said. “I think it's really special that the school has an award like this to recognize student effort to make this campus more equitable and enhance the student experience. I'm really grateful that it exists and that I was chosen.”

When Ridgeway came back from Portland in the summer of 2020, Leonard connected her with Jennifer Milo, director of athletics, who was receptive to hearing Ridgeway’s ideas about how to help effect change in the department. Milo appointed Ridgeway as one of several athletes on the newly formed Cougars Against Racial inEquality (CARE) Squad, designed to ensure an inclusive, safe and diverse atmosphere for student-athletes.

Ridgeway also was chosen to serve as the diversity and inclusion contact on the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, through which she organized the athletic department’s statement of solidarity with the Black community after Floyd’s death. And she’s the only athlete from CSUSM, and one of only two in the 12-school California Collegiate Athletic Association, to be a member of the CCAA Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee.

Through her involvement with the latter group, Ridgeway developed a keen interest in diversity hiring practices that she brought back to the CARE Squad, working with the team to advocate for hiring committees with diversity as a major priority. With that focus in mind, the athletic department hired several assistant coaches last summer as competition was set to resume after a year lost to the pandemic, and Ridgeway is pleased with the outcome.

“I think Jen Milo took those points into consideration of really making sure that we don't just look locally, we look nationwide for people to come to a university that prides itself on diversity and protecting it,” she said. “It's making an impact where people are being intentional about that now – not just trying to show face, but really trying to take the time to look at how diversity can enhance an institution.”

Ridgeway imported other ideas to the CARE Squad, such as creating an open forum for student-athletes and department staff to discuss social justice and cultural diversity, and improving the collaboration between athletics and Student Life. To that end, she organized a wellness and equity resource fair that was held outside The Sports Center in late August. The fair featured student-athletes from every sports team mixing with representatives from all five Student Life Centers for Identity, Inclusion and Empowerment; Student Health and Counseling Services; and many other student organizations.  

Ridgeway was inspired to lay the groundwork for the event by her experience upon transferring to CSUSM in 2019 from Long Island University, which had moved to cut the volleyball program the previous year. She had been part of the Black Student Union at LIU and hoped to recreate that experience at her new school. But it proved to be harder than she expected. 

“I went in to the Black Student Center, and I was super intimidated,” Ridgeway said. “Not that I felt uncomfortable, but it was really hard for me to try to introduce myself and get myself acclimated in that space. My goal with the resource fair was to remove that intimidation factor, and I think it was really successful in making that connection between student-athletes and everything this campus has to offer.” 

Leonard, who nominated Ridgeway for the Student Champion Award, was struck by the drive that Ridgeway carried back from her summer of protest in Portland. 

“What impressed me was her commitment and her sense of urgency to act,” Leonard said. “She was involved and suggested things, created dialogue and established connections immediately without being guided. Kiora has the ability to bridge gaps, create understanding and provide unity in times of uncertainty.” 

Ridgeway credits that ability in part to her family and her hometown. The daughter of a Black father and a Filipino mother, she was exposed to a wealth of cultural diversity as a child. She attended a Catholic grade school and high school that drew from a wide range of races and ethnicities.  

“I got all ends of the spectrum growing up,” she said. “Coming here, I wanted to bring that along, experience as many different people as I could. Portland has definitely influenced me in that way.” 

Ridgeway had been aiming to complete her degree in May, but she’s enjoying her return to collegiate volleyball so much that she’s leaning toward playing one more season next fall and graduating that December. A Spanish minor, she afterward plans to pursue a Spanish immersion program in Central America. Her career ambition is to work as a community outreach coordinator for a sports team.  

“The work I’m doing now has helped me realize that I want to help people in the community,” Ridgeway said. “I would love to be a bridge between professional athletes and them working in the communities around them. I want to highlight marginalized people and help them get more opportunities while being around sports.” 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

These days, the once-obscure academic term is almost inescapable, on the lips of politicians, TV news hosts, public school officials and social media users far and wide. Several states have passed laws banning the teaching of critical race theory in K-12 schools. 

To learn what CRT is and why it has become so embedded in the national conversation, we turned to two professors in the Department of Sociology at Cal State San Marcos: Mohamed Abumaye and Lori Walkington. 

Question: The term critical race theory is inescapable these days, but a lot of people still don’t know what it means. What exactly is critical race theory? 

Mohamed Abumaye: Critical race theory is a theoretical framework developed by legal scholars to analyze and address institutional racism in the U.S. legal system. CRT is derived from critical legal studies, a field developed by legal specialists such as Kimberle Crenshaw to interrogate racial inequities in the criminal justice system. The scholarship and data produced by critical legal studies scholars revealed that Black people were disproportionally harmed by the criminal justice system. Scholars drew from the work of critical legal studies to reveal racial inequities in education, health care, employment and other sectors of life. This created what is known as critical race theory and was utilized in curriculum in college classrooms. Moreover, CRT shows through rigorous research that racism is not a relic of the past but a pernicious force that seeps into every institution.  

Q: How long have you been studying CRT? How did you first come to it, and is there a specific lens that you research it through? 

MA: I have been studying critical race theory for the past 15 years. I was first introduced to CRT in a sociology of race class during my first year in community college. This class provided a lens to understand the intersection between institutional racism and my individual biography. In graduate school, I focused on utilizing CRT to study police violence and its disproportionate impact on Black communities. I also utilize a global and diasporic approach to CRT to highlight the ways in which institutional racism operates through U.S. imperialism. I look at the ways in which racist discourses that Somalis are terrorists and pirates is utilized to justify U.S. military drone strikes on Somalia and its people. I look at the ways in which popular culture is deployed to legitimatize state violence against Black people domestically and globally.  

Q: What has it been like for you to see your field of study enter the popular lexicon to such an extreme degree?  

MA: It has been quite surprising to see critical race theory enter the lexicon as conservative politicians use the word without understanding it. CRT entered the popular lexicon as a term that is derided by some and defended by others. I hope that the emergence of CRT results in renewed public interest in learning about the ways in which systemic racism penetrates every institution in the United States. I hope that the publicity of CRT will result in more curriculum in university settings that highlight the histories and experiences of people of color. Moreover, the emergence of CRT as a point of contention for politicians in the South regarding school curriculum intersects with the emergence of ethnic studies in school curriculum in California. On one hand is a push to center curriculum in schools that highlight the experiences and histories of marginalized communities, and on the other is a resistance to any classes that tackle race and racism. Therefore, classrooms have become political epicenters of ideological conversations around whitewashed history disguised as patriotism and reckoning with the historical, contemporary and cumulative effects of intuitional racism. 

Q: Why do you think CRT has become this all-encompassing umbrella term that covers seemingly any racial issue? 

MA: CRT has become an umbrella term to capture any issues relating to race due to conservative critiques of higher education as a bastion of liberal indoctrination. In the last decade, there have been conservative students filming professors on college campuses throughout the country and accusing them of indoctrinating students to a “liberal agenda.” This has coincided with the resurgence of white nationalists during the Trump administration. On one end, you have the rise of white nationalism manifesting when the Capitol was stormed by Trump supporters and the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement during the summer of 2020. Therefore, to white nationalists, critical race theory represents everything that is wrong with America.  

Q: A lot of the criticism in political circles of CRT mentions the New York Times’ 1619 Project. What did you think about that project? 

Lori Walkington: Nicole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project was a well-researched and written, engaging piece of journalism. Hannah-Jones is a remarkable journalist. I am a sociologist who has a framework informed by CRT. For me, the conflation of Hannah-Jones’ piece with CRT is much more interesting. First a truth surfaces, then folks get to talking about the impact of that truth on their material realities, and once power and privilege are threatened, they strike with misinformation. In justice studies, we look at what is at stake for people/communities. What is the base fear? Usually this comes down to loss of power. The power related to the 1619 Project is clear – the truth about the mid-Atlantic slave trade was a source of intergenerational wealth for some, and a loss of personhood, worship, knowledge, histories, education and access to power for others. As a sociologist, I theorize that fear is rooted in the belief that all people function in the same ways; therefore, when any other racial group is in power, it will function similarly to the privileged and powerful elite do now. That group understands the power of knowledge, narrative and rhetoric very well. CRT has been packaged in some media recently as a method by which white children learn to hate themselves. We hear the dog-whistle refrain “not our babies!” when politicians and parents conflate ethnic studies for critical race theory. CRT is a theoretical perspective born from critical legal studies in the 1980s. It looks at how laws are used as tools of power and privilege, with the basic assumption that racism is institutionalized and normal to American society. There are no CRT mandates at any level of education. It is a complex theoretical framework usually taught in graduate school. So my answer is that I think it provided excellent data for sociological analysis of the public response it garnered. 

Q: How dangerous do you consider this spate of anti-CRT laws across the country to be to the ideas of liberal education and academic freedom? 

LW: I consider these laws as nothing new. The powerful have always tried to silence the voices of the oppressed. They are dangerous in the sense that they are fueling the anti-Black racism and white supremacist violence that has been raging in the U.S. since the colonists stole it and built it with stolen people. These laws serve as reactionary white fears on display that clearly show people in power cannot conceive any other way of existing than by the iron fist. Fears from the opposition to CRT harken back to fears of slave rebellions and laws that punished enslaved people from becoming educated. Knowledge is power. They knew this and still know this. These so-called fears are about maintaining power. 

Q: Do you have any concern about the CRT controversy coming to CSUSM? 

LW: It is already here in some form, although not at the national scale. Linking our history as a country to others allows us to see beyond our personal feelings, which helps move conversations forward. Over the past few years, our campus has been dealing with the same social issues as the rest of the nation. There are important institutional changes that reflect that our campus community is ready to address how systemic racism works and looks on our campus. If the CRT controversy bubbles up at CSUSM, I believe we as educators are ready to face it with compassion. 

Q: Is there anything you can do as a CRT expert to push back against some of the misinformation that you see out there? 

LW: I’m an educator. One of the connections that folks rarely make within a CRT framework is that it doesn’t teach hate. It explains our history from a different perspective. I can start right there. It is a tool in the box. CRT is simply an analytical tool, like Newton’s law or string theory. One of the muddier points for my students with theory is the misunderstanding that theories “do” something. A theory is a tinted lens that helps you recognize data relevant to a study that can replicate, improve and correct previous research. That’s it. So a more interesting point of entry for me is the pushback itself – what that represents and where it comes from. What can we do? We can talk about the fears with our students and colleagues. Keep our eyes on the prize. We must look at what reckoning with these truths means for people and understand that change rarely occurs without some resistance. This is a big shift in thinking for a lot of folks. The bootstrap mentality is real, and it can be difficult to see beyond our own and our community’s struggles, particularly for those who have privilege or proximity to it while struggling. We can be honest about our country’s history. We can be compassionate with one another. We can do what we do best – educate. 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

“College Access and Success for Undocumented Students” is a special edition of the Journal of College Access, which was launched at Western Michigan University in 2014. Set to be published on Sept. 22, it’s the second special issue, and the largest issue, that JCA has produced in its history.

Clark-Ibáñez edited the issue with Diana Camilo, a professor at Cal State San Bernardino whom she has worked with in the San Diego region regarding undocumented students.

The special edition includes 12 articles and features the work of nearly 30 researchers, scholars and practitioners. It focuses on research studies that increase awareness and deepen understanding about sustainable frameworks that support the success of undocumented students.

Clark-Ibáñez described the process of identifying and editing the manuscripts, which occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, as a “labor of love.”

“It's thrilling to see an entire journal issue dedicated to this topic because our students need this support and they need institutional agents (counselors, teachers, professors, teachers, admissions staff) to see them and work with them,” said Clark-Ibáñez, who’s also the chair of the sociology department at CSUSM. “Also, it was very important that we acknowledge research about undocumented parents and family members, and we have an article included by Stephanie Cuevas, who just published a book about this topic as well. I also am very proud that this journal is open access because they maintained rigorous review standards but make it accessible to all.” 

The Journal of College Access examines the current trends, research, practices and development of all types of programs, policies and activities related to the access of and success in postsecondary education. Since the first issue in January 2015, nearly 18,000 downloads of articles have been made in 148 countries.

“This special issue is our most robust research effort to date,” said Christopher W. Tremblay, co-editor and co-founder of JCA. “Camilo and Clark-Ibáñez are bringing to us cutting-edge research and raising the voices of undocumented students throughout the U.S. We need to take note of what this new and original research tells us and how it informs our policies and practices going forward.”

Mothé new director of CSU Student Success Network

Biology professor Bianca Mothé has been named the director of the CSU Student Success Network. A CSUSM faculty member since 2003, Mothé has also served as associate dean for undergraduate studies from 2016-18 and faculty director for service learning from 2013-16.

The CSU Student Success Network is an independent network that was developed by CSU faculty, staff and administrators and “creates spaces and provides resources for people in all levels of the CSU system in support of increasing graduation rates, equity-based inquiry and action, and closing critical opportunity and outcomes gaps.”

Rankings

• CSUSM is tied for ninth out of 122 schools on U.S. News and World Report’s list of “Top Performers on Social Mobility,” tied for 19^th in “Best Undergraduate Teaching Programs” and tied for 41^st among 126 schools on its list of “Best Regional Universities West.”
• The university is ranked 182^nd overall in Forbes magazine’s “America’s Top Colleges,” 46^th in the West and 86^th among public universities. There are 600 colleges and universities included in the rankings.
• CSUSM is 27^th out of 215 schools on Washington Monthly’s “2021 Best Bang for the Buck Rankings: West” list and 36^th out of 616 schools in its “2021 Master’s University Rankings.”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

Khyati Kansagra hailed from Gujarat, a state on the western coast of India. Bayan Sairafi was from the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. Placed in the same icebreaker activity, they immediately hit it off, and their bond only grew through subsequent international coffee hours and cultural fests.

This fall, more than two years after they graduated from CSUSM, Kansagra and Sairafi will be reunited at one of the premier academic institutions in the United States. Kansagra actually has already enrolled at Johns Hopkins University and is living in Maryland, having started in January a two-year master’s program in biotechnology with a specialization in regulatory affairs.

She will be joined in a few months by Sairafi, who plans to return from her home country to begin pursuing a Master of Public Health degree with a concentration in health communication and health education.

“For us, it was definitely a coincidence,” Kansagra said. “But it feels really good to see that someone who I know from undergrad is also coming to Johns Hopkins. And Bayan clearly deserves it. It’s a great university, so I’m so glad we’ll be there together.”

Sairafi was in the process of applying to Johns Hopkins last winter when she noticed that Kansagra had been one of the subjects of the international alumni spotlight on CSUSM’s Global Programs and Services webpage and that the feature mentioned her impending studies at the Baltimore school famous for being America’s first research university. Sairafi decided to reach out to Kansagra to seek advice on the statement of purpose for her application.

“It was like a motivation for me,” Sairafi said. “When I saw that Khyati got accepted, my desire to get accepted went up because we come from the same school with the same kind of experience. And I am so proud of her because I know how hard she has worked.”

The news that two international alumna of CSUSM will soon be brought together again at Johns Hopkins was greeted enthusiastically by Danielle McMartin, director of the Office of Global Education, who became close with both of the women during their time on campus.

“They were both fiercely focused on their education and long-term goals,” McMartin said. “However, they both also realized the value of getting everything they possibly could out of their time here at CSUSM and in the U.S. They were both engaged with their faculty, with student organizations, with volunteering when opportunities were presented.

“Lucky for CSUSM, Bayan and Khyati graciously also shared their culture with our community. Neither student wanted to ‘set their culture aside’ to participate in ours. They both seemed to understand the balance maintaining their cultural norms while learning and interacting with ours.”

Kansagra moved to the United States on a student visa in 2014, the year before she started at CSUSM. She chose the university because of the opportunities for growth as a person and student and because of the proximity to Orange County, where relatives of her family lived. She was only 18, and it was her first time traveling to another county and leaving her parents, who still live in India.

“It had been a dream since I was a kid,” Kansagra said. “I always wanted to be independent and on my own, just able to support myself and grow up. The culture I come from isn’t like that; Indians are really sheltered and pampered. The other driving factor is that I was really interested in biotech, and India doesn’t have many options to pursue that.” 

At CSUSM, Kansagra majored in biological sciences with a minor in chemistry. Besides her involvement with the Office of Global Education, she worked as a biology research assistant and as a tutor for the STEM Center. After graduating in December 2018 (she participated in commencement the following spring), she found a job as a lab technician for Kyowa Kirin, a pharmaceutical research company in La Jolla.  

Upon completing her master’s program at Johns Hopkins, Kansagra plans to return to working in the pharmaceutical industry, where she’d like to help shepherd to market a treatment for pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease that occurs when lung tissue becomes damaged and scarred. Her mother was diagnosed with the disease when Kansagra was a young girl.  

“I’ve seen her struggling through it for all these years,” she said. “There’s no cure, and she has been on medication for 21 years. That has always been a big factor for me to do research in that particular field.” 

Like Kansagra, Sairafi grew up wanting to journey to the U.S. for her higher education. Sponsored by the Saudi Arabian government to attend college, she had to choose a school from an approved list, and CSUSM happened to have been added to the list around the time that she was filling out her applications. Many students from her country matriculate to CSU campuses such as Long Beach and Bakersfield, but Sairafi decided to leave her comfort zone and head to San Marcos. 

She studied human development and sociology at CSUSM, and served as an intern for both the Cross-Cultural Center and the American Red Cross of San Diego and Imperial Counties. She left her mark such that by the time she graduated in May 2019, she was invited to be the first-ever international student to speak at commencement.  

“When I remember it, it seems like yesterday,” Sairafi said. “I really enjoyed every moment, from writing my speech to rehearsing to the actual commencement. It was truly a life-changing experience.” 

In contrast to Kansagra, Sairafi elected to go back to her home nation following graduation. For the last year, she has worked as a document control specialist for the Ministry of Health in Saudi Arabia. In that role, she manages policies, clinical guidelines and other types of documents while also learning to prepare hospitals for visits from accrediting bodies.  

Her time at Johns Hopkins, though impactful, could be a brief hiatus as Sairafi plans to pursue a career in public health in Saudi Arabia.  

“With the knowledge I’ll be getting from Hopkins, we will do magnificent work here,” she said. “I want to give people awareness about the things they can do that promote health and give them better lives and a better environment. That’s what I’m really passionate about.” 

But first, Sairafi will get reacquainted with an old friend in Baltimore, and she can hardly wait. 

“It’s a new city and a big city and a new school,” she said. “And it’s good to have a friend there so we can support each other and talk to each other when loneliness sets in.” 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Honorees were nominated by faculty or staff and endorsed by their college’s dean. Here is a closer look at each award recipient:

Kodie Gerritsen, visual and performing arts and physics

President's Outstanding Graduate

Dean’s Award, College of Humanities, Arts, Behavioral and Social Sciences

Gerritsen is a double major who was lauded for their avid curiosity and adventurous scholarship.

Nominating professor Lucy HG Solomon noted that Gerritsen is not only an outstanding student, but a talented artist and a curious scientist who is engaged with the community. Since 2017, Solomon has worked closely with Gerritsen on digital art projects that tie into the environment and social justice and on interdisciplinary endeavors that combine art and science.

Among Gerritsen’s accomplishments are the work they did with Solomon on an interactive art piece called “Degenerative Cultures” that uses living organisms and artificial intelligence to comment on social networks. Gerritsen also worked on the Jaguar Umbrella Project, which included kits for schoolchildren to explain the importance of jaguars as umbrella species in the Amazon rainforest.

Gerritsen was a STEAM ambassador who designed and delivered curriculum on art and science to K-12 students, bringing craft, sculpture, color theory and the science of rainbows together in an engaging hands-on activity.

Learn more about Gerritsen’s achievements here.

Christine Briggs, literature and writing studies

Dean’s Award, Office of Graduate Studies and Research

Briggs stood out for her outstanding record of achievement in the literature and writing studies master’s program, which included presenting award-winning original research, serving as an exemplary teaching associate and addressing timely issues in the original research for her master’s thesis.

Rebecca Lush, who served as research director of Briggs’ thesis and taught her in two advanced-level courses, noted that Briggs has shown the makings of a promising research career during her time in the master’s program, and the work she produced is suitable for consideration for peer-review publication.

Briggs presented her original literary research at major national conferences and was awarded the “Best Essay” prize by the Margaret Atwood Society in 2018 for her research on the novel “Cat’s Eye,” a project that started her graduate-level work in feminist literary studies and paved the way for the methodological concerns and practices that she used in what eventually became her culminating thesis.

Sofia Davis, Master of Public Health

Dean’s Award, College of Education, Health and Human Services

Davis had a stellar academic career while also supporting friends, family and community members during the pandemic.

After earning her bachelor’s in global health from UC San Diego, Davis maintained a 4.0 grade-point average while being consistently lauded by her instructors at CSUSM.

Davis has worked as a volunteer contact tracer for the CSUSM COVID Management Team, which helps infected individuals understand the virus and care options. Her efforts help keep the campus community safe while minimizing the risk of virus transmission.

Davis also works with different agencies to help provide services and coordinate care. She has been an intern at Palomar Medical Center for seven years, including nearly four years as part of the internship’s leadership team. She has also served as a medical scribe at a family medicine clinic in Escondido, ensuring that patient needs are documented accurately as they go through care and treatment.

Davis plans to attend medical school to become a primary care pediatrician.

Zsuzsanna Dianovics, computer science and information systems

Dean’s Award, College of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics

Dianovics was honored for her exceptional academic record, undergraduate research experience, impressive leadership achievements and significant participation in community outreach.

Dianovics excelled in two computer science courses taught by professor Nahid Majd, which led Majd to encourage Dianovics to apply to the 2020 Summer Scholars research program. Dianovics was accepted into the program and worked on a research project on blockchain technology, an emerging technology in cybersecurity. She presented her research at both the Summer Scholar showcase last August and the CSUSM undergraduate research showcase in December.

Dianovics also prepared a scholarly manuscript based on the research she did in the summer program and submitted it to the 2021 Computer Science Conference for CSU Undergraduates hosted by CSU Monterey Bay. The paper was accepted, and she presented her research at the conference in March.

Dianovics plans to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science.

Christian Galvis, global supply chain management

Dean’s Award, College of Business Administration

Galvis excelled both academically and through his numerous service accomplishments.

A veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, Galvis credits his military experience for helping to hone his values of commitment, perseverance, self-worth and volunteering.

Those values were at the forefront of his time at CSUSM. In his first semester, Galvis helped revive the Student Veterans Organization after a two-year absence. Galvis also served as president of the Global Supply Chain Management Society for the past year, keeping members engaged virtually throughout the pandemic. He also helped spearhead CoBA’s first virtual career fair and a second successful event this spring.

Galvis collaborated with other student organizations to develop best practices on retaining members during the virtual environment, and he served as a resource for other student society presidents who are new to their positions.

Galvis has accepted a position at global communications company Viasat as a procurements specialist upon graduation.

Gladys Guzman Guizar, sociology and criminology and justice studies

Dean’s Award, Dean of Students

Guzman Guizar excelled academically while also making lasting contributions to student life at CSUSM.

Guzman Guizar has been dedicated to social justice initiatives, including the DREAMer Resource Office and the creation of the HUMAN Club. She is also an active member of University Without Borders, playing a key role in providing support to students from diverse backgrounds and ensuring that CSUSM provides a diverse, equitable and inclusive space where all students can be comfortable and successful. Her contributions to diversity and inclusiveness were recognized last fall as a 2020 recipient of the President’s Student Champion Award for Inclusive Excellence and Diversity.

Guzman Guizar has worked to help students develop a sense of belonging on campus through her roles as a peer adviser for the Office of Academic Advising and a student assistant at the DREAMer Resource Office.

Guzman Guizar plans to attend law school to pursue immigration law so she can help the undocumented community.

Read more about Guzman Guizar here.

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

And every afternoon, she had the same vision, terrifying for a young girl: her waiting outside the school to be picked up, and him never showing up in his familiar gray pickup truck. More specifically, and alarmingly, him never showing up because he had been detained by U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents. 

“That never happened, thankfully,” Guzman said. “But that’s the image that was instilled in my head.” 

Guzman is from a mixed-status family. She and her two sisters are U.S. citizens because they were born in California. Her parents, both natives of Mexico who immigrated to America as teenagers, were undocumented until a couple of years ago, when they became permanent residents.  

Seeking to insulate their daughters from fear and uncertainty, Guzman’s parents never told them that they were undocumented. But they didn’t really need to. It was obvious to Gladys at least. When she wanted to visit relatives in Mexico, her parents couldn’t come with her. The family never took vacations outside the country.  

Growing up in such an environment had a profound influence on Guzman. It made her want to take advantage of her privilege as a citizen and attend college. Once at Cal State San Marcos, it prompted her to get involved on campus and work as an ally of the undocumented community. And it has helped her choose a career path of pursuing immigration law.  

All of the experiences and emotions of living in a mixed-status family came to a head last month, when Guzman was recognized as one of two recipients of the President’s Student Champion Award for Inclusive Excellence and Diversity during the All Peoples Luncheon. She shared the honor with teaching credential student Nancy Meza. 

Guzman delivered her award speech from her bedroom, where she has been attending school during the coronavirus pandemic, while her parents watched the virtual ceremony down the hall. Guzman knew she couldn’t speak from the same room as her parents without breaking down in tears. When she had finished, she walked to the living room, sat down next to her mother and father, and they all shared a poignant moment together.  

“It was a beautiful experience,” said Guzman, who will graduate in May with a double major in sociology and criminology and justice studies. “They’re my inspiration. I feel like my work at CSUSM is one of the ways that I am an ally not only to my community, but for them. And it’s my way of showing them that the sacrifices they made for my sisters and me are not in vain.” 

Guzman’s father, Maximino, works in landscaping. Her mother, Angelica, is an independent distributor for Herbalife Nutrition. Her older sister, Mireya, has attended college but is taking a break, which means that Gladys will be the first in her family to earn a four-year degree. She wants to set just that example for the “baby” of the family, Jazmin, 13.  

Because of her father’s occupational background, Guzman was eligible for the College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP), which helps students from migrant and seasonal farm worker backgrounds succeed in college. Thanks to CAMP, she was able to get a head start at CSUSM in the summer of 2017, and the program continued to support her with resources and a sense of community throughout her first year on campus.  

It was through CAMP that Guzman discovered the Office of Academic Advising, and by spring 2018, she had become a peer adviser, a position she still holds almost three years later. In that role, she and her colleagues are the first line of contact for students who come to the office seeking direction, which means that she has had to educate herself about many different departments across the university. 

Around the time that Guzman began working as an adviser, her parents attained their green cards with the assistance of an immigration attorney whose impact on her family’s lives inspired Guzman. Perhaps she could provide to other families the peace of mind that this lawyer had given hers.  

So last fall, she started volunteering for the DREAMer Resource Office, which offers a variety of services to undocumented and mixed-status students and their loved ones. Initially the lead volunteer, she since has been hired as a student assistant. She describes her work as “a little bit of everything,” including leading presentations for UndocuAlly training, meeting with students to assist them in understanding and completing complex documents related to tuition and residency, and generally learning all she can about the ins and outs of immigration policy.  

Maria Chiem, the former coordinator of the DRO, said Guzman had a direct role in helping about 40 incoming students correctly fill out forms crucial to receiving financial aid, meeting with some of them in multiple hour-long sessions.  

“Gladys is a selfless, compassionate and visionary student, woman and person who stands for equity, diversity and inclusion,” Chiem said. “She brings love, care and passion to her conversations at CSUSM, to the classroom and to her volunteer work at the DREAMer Resource Office.” 

Hoping to extend her contributions at the DRO, Guzman has formed a new student club that will officially launch next semester. It’s called HUMAN (Highlighting the humanity of our Undocumented and Minority communities through Allyship and coNversation), and her goal is to create a space where students can amplify their voices and shine a light on campus issues they think are receiving insufficient attention.  

After graduation in the spring, Guzman plans to take a year off to make sure that immigration law is indeed her preferred career route while she applies to law school at UCLA. Her parents’ reaction to that news? 

“My mom was like, ‘You’re gonna leave us?’ ” Guzman said with a laugh. “But they’re really excited. My mom always says, ‘Every time you talk about what you do on campus or people ask me about you, I feel like a peacock because I’m so proud.’ No matter what I decide to do with my future, they just want me to be happy and they’re going to support me 100%.” 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

On Thursday, July 16, history professor Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall will be part of a watch party, Twitter conversation and public Zoom discussion about the 2016 award-winning documentary film “I Am Not Your Negro,” based on an unfinished book by famed writer James Baldwin. 

On Wednesday, July 22, sociology professor Dreama Moon will be one of the panelists on a webinar presented by INSIGHT Into Diversity magazine that will bring Black and white women together to share experiences, perspectives and solutions to common and often challenging interactions.  

The Baldwin event is sponsored by the Forum for Scholars and Publics (FSP) at Duke University, which has hosted more than 300 conversations, performances, workshops and panel discussions, and welcomed over 500 invited guest speakers from around the world since its founding in 2013. Its #docuhistory series began this summer as an initiative by Joe Schmidt, the social studies curriculum specialist for the New York City Department of Education, who has gathered groups of scholars to help lead discussions for K-12 teachers on particular historical documentaries.  

At 1 p.m. Pacific time, the FSP will stream the documentary on Netflix (there are other ways to watch listed on the website). During the stream, viewers are invited to browse and join the discussion on Twitter by searching the #docuhistory hashtag or checking the Twitter feeds of Sepinwall and Schmidt, the discussion moderators. After the screening, at 3 p.m., Sepinwall will be one of the guests for a moderated Zoom conversation about the film.  

The event is free, but registration is required. If you can’t watch it live, a video of the panel discussion will be posted afterward.  

“I Am Not Your Negro,” by Haitian-born filmmaker Raoul Peck, envisions the book Baldwin never finished, “Remember This House.” The result, according to the FSP website, is a “radical, up-to-the-minute examination of race in America, using Baldwin’s original words and a flood of rich archival material.” The documentary “is a journey into Black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights movement to the present of #BlackLivesMatter.” 

The INSIGHT Into Diversity event takes place on July 22 from 10 a.m. to noon. The webinar is titled “Women of Color Need Courageous Allies in the Academy: An Open Dialogue with White and Black Women,” and it will be moderated by Holly Mendelson, co-publisher of the magazine. The description reads, in part, “At a time when many people are overwhelmed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the recent racial unrest throughout our country, the willingness and knowledge of how to effectively engage with one another is essential.” 

Registration for the Zoom event is closed, but members of the public can watch of the livestream on Facebook by “liking” and following INSIGHT Into Diversity on its Facebook page. The webinar will also be recorded and posted to the publication’s website in the future. 

Viewers are encouraged to send questions for the panelists beforehand to lpearlstein@insightintodiversity.com. 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Glover has spent much of her career researching and teaching about police and the criminal legal system in America, with a particular focus on racial profiling. In 2009, she wrote a book titled “Racial Profiling: Research, Racism and Resistance” in which she investigates the influence of the practice in shaping public understanding of race, law and law enforcement.

The importance of research like that, of course, took on greater urgency over the past month, as protests of police brutality and racial inequality spread like wildfire in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Memorial Day.

The protests have died down to some extent, but the national dialogue about the proper and just role of police in our society continues.

Question: How did you first come to the subject of racial profiling, and why does it so interest you?

Karen Glover: I was beat up by the police, officially reported it with photos documenting my injuries, and was told by officials that the event did not happen. It changed my understanding of belonging and my relationship with the state. Particularly the lack of accountability, which is justice. I knew my experience with this as a white woman was an anomaly. I thought about what those experiences must do to whole communities, like our Black and Brown communities. I eventually wanted to know what creates the conditions for racialized state violence to occur – racial profiling creates the conditions. Because of racial profiling, communities of color, particularly Black communities, are disproportionately exposed to state agents who have been authorized to use lethal force. Because racial profiling is about criminalization, the threat and fear born of that criminalization facilitates force. This all is sounding kind of academic; it basically comes down to a love for the people.

Q: Can you articulate the main themes of your book? What would you want a reader to take away from it?

KG: It’s basically a two-part book. Racial profiling was a “hot” agenda item in police studies at that time. The first part of the book is a critique, as one of the reviewers stated, of the “epistemological, methodological, theoretical and substantive limitations of mainstream work…” on racial profiling. Much of the literature out there was not race conscious, even though the researchers were studying racial profiling, so it was a critique of my discipline. I tend to do that. Readers would take away that racialization and criminalization processes happen during the “production of knowledge” in part because the researchers themselves are not race conscious. Police studies, for instance, were and are largely still a white male realm. They analyze race “as a variable” without going deep, and that limits the accuracy of our knowledge about how race operates. The second half of the book analyzes interview data from people of color who experienced racial profiling with law enforcement. Readers would take away that these experiences are watershed moments in folks’ lives that dismantle one’s sense of belonging, rights and protections – nothing less. It also leads to resistance to the injustice.

Q: How do you think society has changed, if at all, in terms of racial profiling since the book came out 11 years ago?

KG: Racial profiling, in the limited sense of traffic stops as I focused on in the book, is still very much in play. Traffic stops are considered a “seizure” under constitutional protections against unwarranted searches and seizures by the state. We have much more scientific data on racialized patterns of traffic stops, which are important to focus on because they capture our everydayness and have potential to be a point that formally introduces folks to the criminal legal system. The research is pretty settled now. Blacks in particular, but people of color more generally, experience intervention by the state disproportionate to their representation in the general population. They also experience more punitive practices following the initial traffic stop. In San Diego, for instance, we have a very recent traffic stop analysis – not without its problems – that showed this trend. Unfortunately, the San Diego State researchers have just come out publicly and stated that their report on the study to the City of San Diego and the San Diego Police Department was “immediately shelved.” So we are also not only having consistent data documenting racial profiling in these intervening years, but that data is often not used as it needs to be. There is research suggesting that some research, policy and institutional public efforts to appear responsive to racial profiling only serves to legitimize law enforcement without changing actual practices.

We’ve also had a least two high-profile peaks of anti-immigrant sentiment and practice in the U.S. since the time data was collected for the book. I moved to North County in 2007 when one peak was going on, and the campaign and presidency of Trump in recent times has created more recent hostile conditions. It affects our powerful students who may be in the country without the permission of the U.S. government, and it affects their families and their communities. Law enforcement discrimination takes on another level of surveillance with the Latinx community because of the issue of documentation in addition to being Brown. This surveillance is more intense than when data for the book was gathered.

As well, the emergence of Black Lives Matter since Trayvon Martin’s death and social media have amplified awareness of police brutality in the Black community and resistance to that racialized state violence. There has been a lot of good justice work there. I teach on BLM a lot in classes, often in connection with the Black Panther Party and its origins in protecting the community from police abuses of power. When she visited CSUSM a few years back, our students were able to give Alicia Garza, one of the founders of BLM, personal letters they’d written reflecting on what BLM meant to them! It was a very powerful moment.

Q: You recently wrote a campus article about two pieces of law enforcement-related legislation that local Assemblymember Shirley Weber was integral in getting passed. Can you describe those two state laws and explain why you think they’re so important?

KG: Assembly Bill 953, the Racial and Identity Profiling Act of 2015 (known as RIPA), mandates that law enforcement agencies in California collect and report data about their contacts with community members. The data is the officer’s perception of things like race/ethnicity, gender, national origin and mental health of the community member. Law enforcement agencies are required to work with the RIPA advisory board (community advocates, law enforcement practitioners, academics) and the California Department of Justice to analyze, consult and develop policy around the data to help prevent unjust practices by law enforcement. It is called the strictest law of its kind in the country. I work it into my classes a lot.

AB 392, the California Act to Save Lives of 2019 (sometimes called the Stephon Clark law), was a hard-fought battle changing some language in the law on when law enforcement use of lethal force is justified. The law now reflects the “necessity” of using lethal force, so theoretically there is a stricter standard for law enforcement to meet when using lethal force in California.

Both are important because they are race conscious.

Q: What has been your main reaction to the protests taking place across the country, and the world, since the police killing of George Floyd?

KG: Contradicting feelings of deep pain because of the brutality and joy at the actions of the people is a main reaction. We must be witnesses to both. I think this is a huge showing of Black love.

Another main reaction is fear that this is being consumed and commodified by whites and the media. There is a sea of white faces. People are asking me: Isn’t that what we want? But I’m just putting two and two together. My sense is that the world would look different already if even a small percentage of whites out there now were acting in more racially just economic, political and social ways in their everyday lives. White folks have to do something real now – economically, politically and socially – for this to be authentic on our part. There has to be white aftermath to what is going down. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it does have to be real and sustained.

The conditions of the last four years and COVID-19 may have helped open up this much-needed political space. I protested at the White House, left my Amadou Diallo sign at the black fence that surrounds the White House, and marched with thousands of folks. So much purpose in the air. My brilliant niece and nephew, people of color, are very involved in the protests. She is in the Oakland area and just texted me a picture of activist Angela Davis, who was standing next to her in the crowd, masked and with fist raised. He is in New York City and exhausted. I’m extremely proud of them!

While this action is necessary and generating some powerful energy and love, we have to anticipate and prepare for the pushback and backlash. It is coming.

Q: What do you think of the “defund the police” movement? If you could design your ideal law enforcement system, what would it look like?

KG: I value the urgency of the phrase. The phrase is disruptive, and folks who are already conjuring up things in their heads are scared by it. It is not a new idea – it is a critique of capitalism and the prison industrial complex. It is totally something we should do – re-envision and change the whole institution. I recently heard it described from the Critical Resistance organization that abolition is not just about tearing things down but about building other things up. A related idea is “justice reinvestment” that divests from incarcerative racial projects and invests in community building on economic, political and social levels. That is not too much to ask. Criminology research tells us that good housing; stable, meaningful and decent wages and employment; and access to quality, relevant education are three things we actually need for well-being. Folks with solid access to those few things are less likely to be incarcerated or return to incarceration. That is not too much to ask.

I sometimes ask my students to imagine a world where each country is rated for “well-being” based on the smallness of their incarcerated population. Today, the U.S. would be ranked at the bottom. My ideal law enforcement system would have a very small punitive footprint. There are alternative ways, more loving ways, to hold folks accountable for transgression. We have a lot of work to do. Of course, this law enforcement system could be born only after the current economic, political and social system gets turned on its head.

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

That story happened on Memorial Day, when a white police officer from Minneapolis killed a Black man named George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes, the brutal encounter captured on video and quickly beamed across the internet. 

Almost instantly, protests broke out around the United States and the world, with masses of people gathering in the streets of big cities and small towns alike to rail against police brutality and racial injustice. One month later, the protests continue, marking the longest and most sustained action on this front since the civil rights era of the 1960s.  

The terms that many Americans are just now awakening to – things like systemic racism, anti-racist, white privilege and “defund the police” – make up much of the life’s work of Sharon Elise. The longtime Cal State San Marcos sociology professor has spent decades teaching and researching such subjects as critical race theory, colonialism, inequality and white supremacy. 

Perhaps more than anyone else on the CSUSM campus, Elise is best suited to put the ground-breaking events of the past few weeks into the proper social and historical perspective.  

Question: Have you been surprised by the size and scope of the nationwide protests since the killing of George Floyd?  

Sharon Elise: I have been pleasantly surprised that people are taking great risks during a pandemic that is disproportionately affecting Black and Native/Indigenous people to come into the streets to protest the police lynching of George Floyd. We watched him die on our television sets as a white police officer calculatedly pressed his knee onto the neck of George Floyd, aided by other police officers and despite protests of observers for close to nine agonizing minutes, until he was dead. It is important to note that these protests also call out other recent police attacks on Black people, including trans woman Toni McDade in Florida, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, and attacks by white supremacists who hunted and murdered Ahmaud Arbery. The movement names white supremacy, systemic racism and anti-Black racism as roots of the problem. Video images, cast and recast, bring persistent white supremacy and its integral relation to policing into the public gaze, and a growing number of people of all races and ages and circumstances are demanding change now.  

Yet it is not surprising because this protest is built upon years of organizing in the Black Lives Matter movement, which was founded by Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi. The movement began first around the 2012 vigilante killing of Trayvon Martin and was further galvanized by the 2014 police lynching of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, dehumanized even in death as his body was left lying in the street for hours after his murder, and of Eric Garner, whose dying words, “I can’t breathe,” have become a rallying cry.  

Q: A lot of people are saying that this time “feels different,” whether it’s the protests being sustained over a long period of time, the composition of the crowds, or polls showing greater support for Black Lives Matter. Does it feel different to you? 

SE: Yes, the size is impressive, and the protests are persistent for almost a month now. It seems the protests are growing despite the militaristic response of police who have attacked protestors with batons, tear gas and rubber bullets. As the crowds grow and as people witness the multiracial composition of the protestors, the movement is attracting more attention and support, unfortunately fueled by the unabated police and white vigilante attacks that continue to murder and brutalize Black people. The movement is having an impact: No longer can Black people be shot down by police (or choked or any other means of murder) with impunity and silence. We follow the movement adage to “say their names” and demand justice and social change, and we are seeing results. A new “Breonna’s Law” was passed in Louisville banning the no-knock warrant, and the chokehold is banned now in San Diego and elsewhere in the country. Protests are influencing public opinion, as polls in 2014 showed 51% finding police killings to be “isolated incidents” while recent polls show 69% of those polled see these murders as indicative of a broad problem in policing.  

The Black Lives Matter movement is also bringing other forms of change, as some of our California legislators referred to George Floyd or the protests as influencing them to pass AB 1460 as a way to “do the right thing,” to make an ethnic studies course a graduation requirement for all CSU students. This means all CSU students will take at least one class in an ethnic studies department or program (includes Africana/Black Studies, American Indian Studies, Chicanx/Latinx and Asian/Pacific Islander Studies) and, as one legislator said, it means they will have to learn about race and racism and about the experience, history and culture of racialized people in our society. 

Q: Do you think the effects of COVID-19 and its disproportionate effect on people of color has played a role in the intensity of the protests? 

SE: There is no research on this as yet, though it may well be in process, so I can only theorize that it may play a role since it is certainly the case that COVID-19 is not killing us randomly. Black people are disproportionately casualties of the pandemic. It is killing us more often, and when people say, “Oh, it is due to underlying conditions,” it must be understood that those underlying conditions were created by systemic racism, particularly the virulent racism that has beset Black people throughout our history here. That anti-Black racism dehumanizes us so that our lives do not matter, nor does the persistent poverty, poorly resourced schools, hypersegregation and poor access to health care that beset us. It is these things that lead to the high rates of hypertension, heart disease, diabetes and stress associated with poor chances of surviving COVID-19. We see the same thing in Native/Indigenous communities, which have similar relations with the police. So if you are paying attention to systemic racism, attacks resulting in Black death represent trauma on top of trauma in the midst of the pandemic, and that may well be driving people to protest. But they are not doing it just because they want to get out of the house after months of quarantine, like some of the quarantine protests we have seen.  

Q: What do you see as the greatest importance of the Black Lives Matter movement? 

SE: I love the refusal of the movement to settle for anything short of systemic change — to proclaim we are not looking for reforms, we are tired of waiting for justice! The movement is pushing all of us to be bold, to demand justice, to actually make Black lives matter, which requires us to address systemic racism, to call out white supremacy and anti-Black racism specifically. And it is effecting change as I noted earlier. The movement is influencing the public discourse: I have seldom heard phrases and concepts like “white supremacy,” “white fragility,” “anti-Black racism” and “systemic racism” in the public discourse, not just among movement activists but also legislators, city officials and even some police administrators. As part of this change in discourse, the movement has popularized police abolition as a legitimate stance.  

The movement echoes many of the tactics of the civil rights movement — like direct, nonviolent confrontation — and in some ways is an extension of that and the Black Power movement. It is recreating a strong sense of community — the beloved community Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of where hierarchies and competitive individualism are discouraged in the ways people are relating and supporting each other. The movement is impacting the white supremacist culture that has allowed statues of slaveholders and heroes of the Confederacy to adorn our public parks and universities. The Pioneer and Pioneer Mother statues that I used to flip off as I walked the campus at the University of Oregon are standing no more. The Confederate flags are gone from NASCAR, and a Black driver has “Black Lives Matter” painted on his race car. Even the president now lives at 1600 Black Lives Matter Plaza.  

Q: It seems that this time we’re seeing less of a backlash to the Black Lives Matter cause with people saying, “blue lives matter” and “all lives matter.” Do you agree with that, and why are those terms problematic? 

SE: Unfortunately, there is a backlash both in the aforementioned militarism of the police responses at some protests and in isolated fits of white supremacist hate. Police stood by recently while whites painted a blue line over a Black Lives Matter street painting as a way of saying “blue lives matter.” With over 1,000 police killings annually and most of those being killings of Blacks, there is an obvious reason why we need to make Black lives matter. Nooses are being hung — one of the most egregious cases would be in Milwaukee, where there were six nooses with photos of Black people who were victims of police or vigilante violence, including Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Botham Jean, Ahmaud Arbery, Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin. There are reports of hangings of Black people that have been labeled suicides but need to be fully investigated. 

I have not heard or seen the “n-word” as frequently as I have in recent weeks, including some Zoom-bombing that seems often to include a mix of swastikas, the n-word and pornography to target anti-racism webinars and even private celebrations among Black people, including graduations and birthday parties. Some white people feel emboldened by their anger to either call the police on Black people (e.g., Amy Cooper and the birdwatcher in New York) or to curse and n-word Black people on the street as happened recently in San Diego. White individuals have driven their cars right into the midst of peaceful protesters in other incidents. These are flailing attempts to stem the overwhelming tide of protest against systemic racism, hopefully just the last gasp of a dying white supremacist culture. One can hope. 

Q: The protests have mostly been peaceful since the first few days, but what do you think about the ones that turned into rioting? Is that counterproductive to the cause or an understandable manifestation of pent-up anger? 

SE: We need to decode this question since it suggests more concern for property than for Black lives and because “rioting” to many people is racially coded as a Black thing. When I think of “rioting,” I think of Tulsa in 1921, I think of Rosewood in 1923, I think of the first decades of the 20th century when whites attacked Black bodies and Black communities, burning their property to the ground and killing off as many Black people as they could. What we have seen recently looks nothing like that, and violence has been primarily police against protestors. Moreover, there are reports of white supremacist infiltration to try to instigate violence. It is the movement’s goal to practice nonviolent protest, and I do not consider looting from businesses a form of violence in the face of historic violence against Black bodies.  

In a recent show, Trevor Noah proclaimed that Black people are being looted from their bodies (killed) and we should be more concerned with the looting of bodies than the looting of property. Perhaps it is also a protest against global racialized capitalism and the enduring poverty that some have been consigned to. Noah argues, quite sociologically, that there is no reason why we should expect people who have been shut out of the social contract to honor that social contract, that agreement that we will follow the norms and values of society in return for what society provides us. If society, for multiple generations, has shut some whole groups of people out of benefiting from the distribution of power, status and material resources, why should they honor the social contract? If we want people to adhere, there has to be a sense that they will share in the social benefits that have been so inequitably distributed. As long as “the game is rigged,” there will be players who do not play by the rules. Meanwhile, elites get away with breaking the rules, corporations are allowed to loot the people, and the government stands by the side of elites and corporations. 

Q: What do you think of the “defund the police” cause? How important is that, and what would it look like to you? 

SE: Calls to defund and demilitarize the police are related to the police and prison abolitionist movement. A move to begin this process by defunding policing and prisons and closing detention centers is significant for those of us in education who saw our public higher education budgets depleted as funds were diverted to a build-up of policing and prisons in what scholars describe as a carceral state, a “prison industrial complex” in a period that writer Michelle Alexander describes as “the New Jim Crow” because of its disproportionate impact on Black and Latinx people. The schools attended by poor Black and Latinx students are “pipelines to prison” or, as activist Angela Davis describes them, “prep schools for prison.” There, children encounter police and punishment regimes that result in racialized penalties for their clothing and culture, and ultimately disproportionate suspensions and expulsions of Black and Latinx youth, effectively pushing them out of school in too many cases.  

Money moved from education to policing and imprisonment as California schools went “from first to worst.” The California Faculty Association, which represents the 29,000 faculty in the CSU, released a report, “Equity, Interrupted,” that found as the student bodies in the CSU went from white to brown, the funding grew lighter. Tuitions rose and students became reliant on loans, not grants as grant funding declined. At the same time, as we learn in Davis’ book, “Are Prisons Obsolete?” California doubled the number of prisons. In the ’90s, California added 12 new prisons and only three new CSU campuses and one new UC. These educational institutions spend millions on policing while failing to meet the standards for mental health resources for their students. The standard is one counselor per 1,000 students; in fact, some CSUs have one counselor per 3,000-5,000 students. Meanwhile, there has been a failure to provide adequate instructional resources for students, and then administrators wonder why students don’t graduate in four years.  

There are multiple reasons to defund the police: We need to stop using “law and order” solutions to social problems that would be better addressed with mental health counseling and funding for housing, health and education. This requires a shift in our thinking so that we move from policing, which frankly emerged historically from the policing, capture and control of enslaved Africans. This requires radical social and cultural change, putting people before property and creating systems of community care and accountability. 

Q: How would you define “anti-racist,” and what are ways that people can work toward that? 

SE: Anti-racism is a concept that contests the notion that racism is individual prejudice. Racism is systemic in our society. It is based on white supremacy where, as activist Peggy McIntosh argued, white people can count on cashing in on their whiteness; one where, as scholar Cheryl Harris says, whiteness is form of property that they can invest in and draw from, while being racialized as people of color, we can only count on accumulating disadvantage. We have all been impacted by white supremacy and have learned the dominant racial narratives that explain the poor footing that Black, Native/Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and Pacific Islander peoples have in society by referencing their cultures instead of the system of white advantage that is historic and enduring. Racial narratives suggest that people of color could get ahead if only they would just behave and operate like white people. But of course that is not true. Even when Cherokee people spoke English, engaged farming, had written language and schools, and tried to make peace, they were removed.  

Racism is not about the cultures of people of color and not about our looks; it is tied to capitalism and it is about getting our labor (free or cheap) and stealing our lands so that white people can have better resources and keeping power in white hands so that this arrangement is secured — that is the “American way.” It is not possible to be non-racist; we are mired in a racial system, and if we are not actively learning to identify and contest white supremacist culture in our institutions, policies and practices, we are reproducing that white supremacist system. Anti-racism is an active engagement against white supremacy, noticing the whiteness at the top of our organizations, noticing the predominance of whiteness among the faculty, noticing how white things/people/culture are given greater value, and refusing to normalize that. Anti-racism means acknowledging we need a power shift so that people of color can be valued, so Black lives can matter, so we people of color can have a major voice in our social arrangements. It is not just about “diversity” given that, for some people, a room is diverse when there are all white people and one Black person and one Latinx person whose voices are ignored. Racism functions best in silence; it must be called out and interrupted whether it is policy, a practice or a social interaction. 

Q: What would you like to see happen next, both at CSUSM and nationally?  

SE: At CSUSM, we have too few faculty, staff and administrators of color, so even if the majority/white group is well-intentioned, as they may be, they are making decisions that impact a student body which is primarily working-class Latino and other students of color, and too often those decisions do not reflect their values and needs. Black people, Pacific Islanders and Native/American Indian people are severely underrepresented in the student body and among faculty, staff and administration. White people tend to predominate on every single hiring committee for every single kind of position, and that tends to reproduce whiteness. White administrators, staff and faculty need to educate themselves to be anti-racist and need to center anti-racism and social justice in their work or they cannot lead fairly and effectively. Faculty and staff of color seldom are evaluated/reviewed by people who understand our experiences, especially experiences of racism and are often uncomfortable talking about it. Some white faculty and administrators seem to have a hard time even saying “race” or “racism,” so there is real room for education there.  

We need to be clear about racism, especially anti-Black racism, which cuts across all groups. We need a clear strategy for targeted hires and targeted programming to support students, staff and faculty of color. We have a tiny ethnic studies program with only one tenure-track faculty line assigned to it — we need a department of ethnic studies (San Francisco State has a whole College of Ethnic Studies!) and we need to grow that curriculum and hire more faculty to deliver it. We should follow the lead of San Diego State, which has a targeted hiring program and is engaging cluster hires — such an approach to hiring Black and other faculty of color would assure that they’re not an isolated individual in a sea of whiteness in their academic unit. We need a larger team of tenure-track mental health counselors that reflect our student body, and each group needs representation among that team. We need a plan to convert lecturer faculty to permanent positions to stabilize instruction and to fairly compensate these educational workers. We need to defund and demilitarize the police — they look like a SWAT team, they have racially profiled some of my colleagues and students, and they do not foster a welcoming environment. We need a cultural shift just to notice these issues.  

Nationally, we need a retreat from law-and-order approaches to social and interpersonal issues. Invest in the people, not corporations, policing and prisons. We need to provide free health care and mental health care, free education, putting people over property and profits, and giving all people a living wage that allows them to overcome housing and food insecurity so they don’t have to work two poorly paid jobs to pay rent, and benefits to support workers who are caretaking and parenting. We need a culture of compassion for each other and a culture of care for our planet if it is to sustain us. I favor abolition of policing as we know it, and abolition of the prisons that are caging most Black and Latinx people. We need a path to citizenship for immigrants. We need a reconciliation, apology, atonement and reparations for the injustices meted out to people of color for hundreds of years. We need real change, not just reform. But in the short run, we need to look at legislative policies that bring back affirmative action to redress the racism and sexism of the system and push for a national program as well. We need national programs for mail-in voting, and we need to restore the vote for people who have served time in prison. We need to restructure our taxes so that we can reallocate resources away from corporations and the one percent, and we need a body of legislators that truly represents the needs of the people.  

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Know someone who deserves special recognition for their efforts? Email details to publicity@csusm.edu and we’ll include them in an upcoming edition of this ongoing series.

Christopher Bickel, associate professor, sociology

Bickel has gone out of his way to ensure that students are aware of critical resources, showing them how to apply for unemployment, how to make a mask, even how to grow their own food.

“Professor Bickel has been extremely helpful, kind, understanding, and overall an amazing professor to have during this pandemic,” said the student nominator. “I can say with complete certainty that Professor Bickel is one of the most humane professors that I have had.”

Char Booth, associate dean, library

Booth was instrumental in ensuring a smooth departure from the library building for faculty and staff, even remaining on site to make sure library staff and faculty got everything needed to work remotely.

"They exemplify grace and courage under pressure," the nominator said. "They find ways to get the work done (and done well) in a timely manner, especially in these uncharted waters!"

Susan Eldridge, senior instructional developer, IITS

Eldridge has “been an absolute lifesaver” for faculty during the transition to virtual learning, responding promptly to all questions with detailed information so that faculty know exactly how to proceed.

“I know that Susan is there to support me, and as a result, I have very little anxiety about virtual teaching,” said the nominating faculty member. “I imagine that Susan and the rest of the IITS team are incredibly overwhelmed by emails and phone calls during this time of COVID-19, but you would never know it from Susan's prompt and patient responses.”

Holly Hampton, head of user services, library

Hampton has worked tirelessly to ensure that students and faculty have been able to continue to access the library materials they need despite not having access to the physical space in the library.

"I can say without a doubt that Holly puts students first ... always!" the nominator wrote. "For that, and so much more, I am proud to call her a colleague."

Lauren Magnuson, head of collections, delivery and access, library

Magnuson quickly led a major expansion of the library’s digital collections, making a huge amount of content accessible through free, open-access resources and by working with publishers and vendors.

"Through her tireless efforts and outstanding leadership, Lauren has provided access to online academic materials needed to support the campus’ successful transition to virtual instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic," said a nominating staff member.

Barbara Taylor, director, Academic Technology Services

Even before all the details related to virtual instruction were determined, Taylor was providing training and visiting departments in preparation. She continues to be available around the clock to address questions and concerns.

"She responds so quickly to questions," the nominating faculty member said. "She is super helpful and never seems frustrated when we have the most basic tech questions."

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

Hanging on the walls were drawings and timelines that told the stories of the residents of the academy, a boarding house for high school-age girls from disadvantaged backgrounds. In those stories were descriptions of the many challenges, significant events and future goals.

“It was so beautiful to me to see the struggles these students had come out of and read their future goals and see the pathway that they were taking to get there,” Nazaroff said. “It was truly inspiring.”

What struck Nazaroff was the parallel to her own upbringing. From that day forward, she had no doubts this is where she was supposed to be.

“The students at Sisu are such a great group of young ones,” Nazaroff said. “So bright and full of life, caring and smart. Each one brings something different to the table, and they have really opened my eyes and my heart.”

The name Sisu comes from the Finnish concept for stoic determination, grit, bravery, resilience and hardiness.

Nazaroff’s resilient path to CSUSM is one of struggle, meandering trails and, ultimately, service to others. Growing up in Northern California, school wasn’t a priority for her. Following high school graduation in 2001, she attended a local community college, but “quickly lost interest.”

She then joined the workforce, and in 2015, gave birth to her first child. While many in her shoes would have drifted even further from college, it instead motivated her to return. She moved south, attended Palomar College and then transferred to CSUSM.

“Growing up, I didn’t have anyone that I looked up to or viewed as a positive role model,” said Nazaroff, who is a single mom. “I have overcome tough challenges in my life, and I wanted the students of Sisu to know they are not alone. I want to serve as a positive role model for these students and be someone they can reach out to in need.”

Sisu Academy is a tuition-free all-girls school serving young San Diego County women in need. Students can choose to live on campus or to attend the day program inside a 5,200-square-foot home in the Scripps Ranch neighborhood.

Launched in 2019, it provides an all-encompassing environment that includes support services, healthy food, farming curriculum, project-based learning, career training education, social-emotional learning, life skills development, service-learning, STEAM education and counseling.

Nazaroff was introduced to Sisu Academy by professor Kevin Kilpatrick in his sociology 360 course. Kilpatrick introduced the importance of serving one’s community in the first week of class, and Nazaroff was intrigued. That intrigue turned to commitment when she spoke to Sisu Academy Director Becky LeBret.

She was immediately impressed with the academy’s focus on entrepreneurship as an agent of change.

“Students that come out of hardships or have had to struggle more in life possess the characteristics of grit, determination and willpower,” Nazaroff said. “These characteristics are the same in entrepreneurs. Sisu’s goal is to make entrepreneurs out of their students. Each student is given the chance to build their own company which in turn will help to build a self-sustainable model for the school so they do not have to rely on donations or grants to keep the school running.”

One of the tasks Nazaroff is in charge of is implementing a cellphone safety plan for each student. She researches and compiles data regarding safe cellphone use and teaches the students about why responsible cellphone usage is important to their security and health.

Online bullying, proper postings, appropriately sharing your location and helping your peers have been some of the key areas of focus.

“Teaching students the need for balance and helping them set smart goals regarding their cellphone usage has been a challenge,” said Nazaroff, who is mentored by professor Kathy Shellhammer as part of the Faculty Mentor Program at CSUSM. “Much like students at CSUSM, we are all connected to our phones. These devices can take us away from our study time, focus and goals. They also can provide us with comic relief and help us find the answer to a question we are unsure of. I understand balance is needed but getting that across to teenagers has been a challenge. They are so connected and don’t see cellphones as much of a distraction.”

Another unexpected challenge has been the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced the academy to close and thus put her internship on hold.

“Staying positive and laughing as much as possible through this difficult time is what is helping me,” Nazaroff said. “Also knowing that this is just another challenge in my life that I will overcome and come out stronger to reach my goals. We got this!”

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

Dunn’s work resulted in a detailed analysis titled “Building Your American Dream: An Ethnographic Study of the Exploitation of Undocumented Laborers” that earned a 4th Annual CSUSM Library Award for Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity in the category of Empirical Research. The 17-page paper resulted from interviewing undocumented immigrants, those who assist them, employers, and intense research into the subject while validating source material.

“It was a process of discovery,” said Dunn, who is 48 and owns his own construction site cleanup business. “I had a vague awareness of what was going on, but I really didn’t know the half of it. I didn’t know about the sexual exploitation. I knew about the wage theft, but there was much I didn’t know concerning the other myriad ways they are exploited and just as importantly how the cumulative trauma of daily living having to deal with constant hostility and microaggressions impacts themselves and their families.”

Dunn’s experience underscores the importance of the University Library’s annual competition.

“Being able to engage in library research lends itself to building critical thinking skills, and especially today it is important for people to have critical thinking skills to be able to make informed decisions,” said Toni Olivas, Engagement and Inclusion Librarian who chaired this year's judging panel and planning committee.

A CSUSM junior who aspires to earn a graduate degree in social work and launch a new career as an LCSW, Dunn was not a neophyte in the subject of undocumented workers before he began his study. What Dunn found, however, was undocumented workers who get no benefits or pensions but suffer through more than their share of exploitation. Like a worker who was driven to a construction site and asked to perform oral sex. Or a day laborer who was confronted by a scantily clad woman urging him to perform work inside her home.

“They want to work, they want to support their families,” he wrote. “They want to get ahead. But what ends up happening they are working to just survive and once the utility of their labor has been exploited and they can no longer continue the hard labor that is construction they are cast aside with little services or even dignity. They are constantly under the spotlight with targets on their backs as they just try to make it to another day. My research specifically documented the ways they are exploited, be it wage theft from homeowners, contractors or just as frequently from employers with shared ethnicity. With few if any rights they have no recourse from law enforcement. Exposed to so many vulnerabilities it is not a surprise that many times the men find themselves falling into, ‘desesparacion,’ loosely translated as a feeling of anxiety, desperation and a sense of disappearing.”

Dunn is hoping his work will spark further discussion at CSUSM and elsewhere. His was one of three projects that were honored. A judging panel of volunteer subject and library faculty selected the winners from several submissions. Following is an overview of the other two entries.

CATEGORY: Empirical Research

SUBMISSION: Comparison of Affective Response to Physical Activity Through Reduced Exertion High Intensity Training Among Active and Inactive Individuals

STUDENTS: Rasmus Clausen

ADVISOR: Todd Astorino

SUMMARY: Regular participation in physical activity is effective in reducing chronic disease and mortality risk. Meanwhile, more than half of the American population is classified as sedentary and are therefore at increased risk. High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) has been proposed as a time-efficient mode of exercise, but the exhaustive nature of it makes it impractical and intolerable for the sedentary population. Reduced Exertion High Intensity Training (REHIT) is a new, less exerting mode of exercise similar to HIIT that offers comparable health benefits and less negative affective responses, potentially making it suitable for the sedentary person. The aim of the present study was to examine how individuals of different fitness levels tolerate a single bout of REHIT.

CATEGORY: Interpretive Analysis

SUBMISSION: Race, Riot, and Recovery Identifying Motive and Methods of Response to the Violence of the 1863 New York City Draft Riots

STUDENT: Lynda Vernia

ADVISOR: Ann Elwood

SUMMARY: The 1863 New York City drafts riots occurred July 13-16, 1863 as a response to three factors: The Enrollment Act, which drafted men into the Union Army; the economic inequality of the times in which the rich could pay a commutation fee to be exempt from the draft while immigrants lived in abject poverty; and the racial unrest caused by issues relating to the Emancipation Proclamation, citizenship, and perceived threats to immigrant jobs. This paper focuses on the four days of mob violence that comprised the 1863 New York City Draft Riot, identifies groups who responded with assistance to those attacked, and examine the motives and methods of that assistance given during the riot and the recovery period immediately afterward.

Media Contact

Eric Breier, Public Affairs Specialist

ebreier@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7314

Her heart was pounding. She was racked with self-doubt. Would the kids like her? Would she fit in? 

It was the fall of 2010, and Robertson was standing outside an LGBTQ youth drop-in center somewhere in the Rocky Mountain West (she’s not able to be more specific because of privacy issues). A graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Colorado, she was about to embark on a long period of research on LGBTQ youth for her dissertation. 

And she was scared stiff. 

“I remember it being so awkward and feeling so uncomfortable and having to get outside my comfort zone and be vulnerable,” Robertson said. 

Over the next three years, starting as an adult volunteer before her research began in earnest, Robertson spent hundreds of hours at the center. She observed, she developed relationships, she interviewed more than 30 LGBTQ youth in depth.  

Now an assistant professor of sociology at Cal State San Marcos, Robertson has transformed the material that became her dissertation into her first book. Released last November, “Growing Up Queer: Kids and the Remaking of LGBTQ Identity” is based on those three years of ethnographic research and explores the changing ways that young people are now becoming LGBTQ-identified in the United States. 

“The book is still academic like a dissertation, but there’s a process of transforming it into something that’s more readable,” Robertson said. “My primary audience is undergraduate and graduate students, the idea being that it’s usable as a classroom tool. So it’s about making it sociological but also accessible to a non-expert audience.” 

The biggest challenge in adapting her dissertation, Robertson said, was taking a series of “choppy” concepts and turning them into a cohesive story with a central theme. What she settled on was the notion that, although mainstream society tends to think of LGBTQ people as one large, homogenous group, not all LGBTQ youth are the same, and that “queer” as a descriptor doesn’t refer just to sexuality and gender, but also to other characteristics that veer from the so-called normal.  

The youth of the drop-in center, Robertson writes in the book’s introduction, “are not like the television cast of ‘Glee,’ a group of pitch-perfect, attractive, happy theater geeks. The youth are more likely to refer to themselves as ‘Little Monsters,’ a term of endearment coined by the mega pop star Lady Gaga to refer to her queer fans. One’s access to ‘normal’ depends on race, class, ability, citizenship, language, geography, education, skills and more.” 

“I’m really trying to complicate the idea of what an LGBTQ youth looks like,” Robertson said. “It’s important for us to keep distinguishing among young people to say what results in young people being marginalized. It’s not simply being gay because there are a lot of gay kids who are doing just fine.” 

Robertson is quick to point out in the book that her identity as a straight person – she has a longtime male partner who lives in Seattle – contributed to her initial discomfort at the center and makes it harder to write about LGBTQ issues.  

“Since the day I started to this very moment, there’s always tension for me about what it means to be a straight, cisgender person talking about LGBTQ people,” she said. “But I also write about my own experiences with queerness. For example, being in our mid-40s and in a long-term relationship and not having kids makes you queer.” 

Robertson was born and raised in Denver. After earning an associate degree, she spent most of her 20s working in concert promotion, handling day-to-day operations for small music venues. Frustrated by the sexism she experienced in the industry, she decided to go back to school and got a bachelor’s in women’s studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver, a college that she compares to CSUSM for its wealth of diversity and nontraditional students. 

Having found her niche in academia – “I’m a philosopher at heart,” she said – Robertson went on to earn her doctorate from the University of Colorado in 2014 and was hired by CSUSM later that year. She said the opening at the university was the ideal fit for her field of expertise and that she feels supported here despite working in a discipline that tends to be controversial. 

“It’s a risky area to teach and do research in, and in the interview process, I asked a lot of questions about that,” Robertson said. “Since I’ve gotten here, I’ve definitely seen an increase in hires of people doing sexuality research. I’d love to see more. It’s important to know you’re supported and safe in doing that kind of work.” 

Media Contact

Brian Hiro, Communications Specialist

bhiro@csusm.edu | Office: 760-750-7306

Teusch failed most of her high school classes as a freshman and sophomore. She spent her final two years of high school transitioning to a new school, a new living situation and trying to complete her normal coursework while simultaneously making up for the classes she flunked.

“I wasn’t one of those students who was saying, ‘Let’s do college applications,’ ” Teusch said.

But nearly 10 years later, Teusch has her bachelor’s. She graduated from Cal State San Marcos at the end of the fall semester with a degree in sociology and has already started work toward her Master of Social Work through Arizona State’s online program.

Teusch is grateful for many things on the path to her degree. For the support of ACE Scholars Services. For extra financial assistance through a Pardee Foundation Scholarship. And certainly for her son, Javius, who inspired her pursuit of a bachelor’s and master’s.

“Tiffany is one of the most dedicated and hard-working individuals I have had the opportunity to work with,” said Leigh Quijada, coordinator/counselor for ACE Scholars Services, which supports former foster youth at CSUSM.

“She excelled in her academics at CSUSM all while raising her young son and growing both personally and professionally. She has overcome challenges with such positivity and resourcefulness.”

Teusch grew up in Julian, a town of about 1,500 an hour east of CSUSM. Her parents both struggled with drugs, and her mother left when Teusch was still a toddler. By the time she started high school, she was mostly taking care of herself. School wasn’t a priority, and her grades suffered as she attended sporadically.

“I was kind of on my own,” Teusch said. “I was responsible and I was working, but I was also partying a lot. It’s a very small town, so there’s really nothing else to do. I was just partying a lot and drinking a lot and smoking a lot, which I didn’t even really like. I don’t like being high, so I don’t know why I was doing that. I think it was just an escape or something to do.”

Teusch stopped drinking and smoking before the end of her sophomore year. She stopped showing up at parties. She focused on doing better. But as summer vacation was about to begin, life took a dramatic turn for Teusch and her younger brother.

Someone at her school called Child Protective Services.

“They said, ‘They’re not going to survive summer at home when they’re not coming to school,’ ” Teusch said.

Teusch spent a few months in a foster home before being placed in San Pasqual Academy, a residential education campus in Escondido for foster teens. Teusch spent her days in school, her afternoons working and her nights at an adult school to make up the classes she had failed.

During her post-high school transition to a housing program, she learned about financial aid for college and decided to take a few classes at Palomar College. Teusch took a break from Palomar to obtain a certificate in medical billing and insurance coding from UEI College, which offers vocational and trade school programs, so she could better support herself. At 23, she learned she was pregnant. Looming parenthood fueled her desire to finish her associate degree and transfer to CSUSM to complete her bachelor’s.

Juggling motherhood, school and work was challenging. But ACE provided a strong support system, and the Pardee Foundation Scholarship, awarded to students with a financial need who have at least a 3.25 grade-point average, alleviated some of the financial stress.

“The scholarship was very helpful since I couldn’t work as much,” Teusch said. “It really helped cover the gap between what I made at work and financial aid.”

But Teusch faced another unexpected challenge. For the first time, she was starting to understand how the difficulties she faced as a child were impacting her as an adult.

“I don’t think that I really felt my struggle until I was an adult,” she said. “I didn’t feel all the internal stuff, the depression and anxiety. I didn’t have a name to put to it. I just kind of lived through it. I think when I had my son is when I realized, ‘OK, there’s some stuff going on here.’ ”

Teusch credits CSUSM’s Student Health and Counseling Services for helping her work through those issues. Her goal is to pursue a career in clinical therapy after receiving her Master of Social Work.

She has already been working to help others, including students at a familiar place. Almost a decade after graduating from San Pasqual Academy, Teusch returned last fall to work as a peer mentor.

“One of their favorite things to throw out is, ‘You don’t know what I’m going through.’ And I say, ‘Actually, I do,’ ” Teusch said. “They can’t use that with me. They realize, ‘Here’s someone who left and has come back, and so they are here for me.’ I think it’s a big deal for them.

“I know when I was there, a lot of people who came back were just looking for services, looking for housing, looking for help. They were kind of struggling. I’ve had my own struggles, too, but I think that being able to come back and show them that you can succeed is a big deal.”

-- Marisol Clark-Ibáñez

Marisol Clark-Ibáñez was wrapping up the courses needed for a bachelor’s degree in literature when she took a sociology class during her junior year at UC San Diego. It changed her life.

“I had never taken a sociology class before, and I was hooked,” she said.

Good thing. Today, Clark-Ibáñez is a full professor in the Department of Sociology at Cal State San Marcos who is involving students and the community in her groundbreaking research. Among her works is "Undocumented Latino Youth: Navigating Their Worlds," a book detailing the obstacles and challenges facing undocumented immigrants while trying to get a public education. In addition, Clark-Ibáñez and the CSUSM-based National Latino Research Center – where she serves as faculty director – are in the midst of a three-year project dubbed Cultivando Liderazgo (Nurturing Leadership) that is aimed at building civic engagement in Hispanic communities.

Clark-Ibáñez earned her bachelor’s in Literature from UCSD and her Master of Arts Degree and Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Davis. She has been at CSUSM since 2003 and was recognized with the President’s Outstanding Faculty Award for Teaching Innovation and Excellence in 2015. She’s also the faculty adviser for STAND, a student club dedicated to issues impacting undocumented immigrants.

“I love working here because the mission of the university has social justice written all over it,” Clark-Ibáñez said. “My department is staffed with scholars of color who are committed to excellence and equity. I came here because I knew my work would be supported by the college and by my colleagues, and I have not been disappointed.”

When you’re arrested for the first time at age 13 and you spend the next two decades in and out of jail and prison, it’s easy to become accustomed to life behind bars.

No, terrifying for Leyva was stepping on to a college campus for the first time.

“I didn’t speak the language, I didn’t look like anybody else, I didn’t feel like anybody else,” Leyva said of starting classes at Santa Barbara City College in 2007.

It didn’t take long for Leyva to realize he wasn’t alone in those feelings, that there were others on campus who could relate to his struggles with alcohol, drugs and incarceration.

It soon became Leyva’s mission to help those who faced struggles similar to his own. A mentor in prison told him as much during what Leyva vowed would be his final stretch locked up.

“My elder said, ‘When you get out of prison, you help the people. Help the people,’ ” said Leyva, who was released in April 2007. “I always think to myself, ‘I have to help the people. Whoever my path crosses, I’m going to help them out.’ ”

It’s a mission that started a decade ago at Santa Barbara City College. That mission didn’t end after Leyva earned his associate’s degree. It didn’t end after he obtained his bachelor’s from Antioch University. And it certainly isn’t ending now that he’s at Cal State San Marcos preparing for his final year in the Master of Arts in Sociological Practice program. Nor will he stop when he continues his education next year as a doctoral student.

“I’ve been clean and sober going on 15 years,” said Leyva, who is 44 years old and was recently named a Sally Casanova Scholar, a CSU award that helps students explore and prepare for doctoral programs.

“I’m no longer on probation. I’m not on parole. I go to sleep at night knowing I’ve helped another person and I’ve done some good. And I wake up with the ambition to go out and continue that work. It’s my routine. Helping another person is helping myself.”

‘I became my environment’

It was the summer between sixth and seventh grade. A friend asked Leyva if he wanted to smoke pot in a creek where kids in his neighborhood often hung out.

“No, I can’t do that,” Leyva told his friend. “But I’ll go with you.”

Seeing his friend and another acquaintance smoking, Leyva changed his mind.

“Why not?” he said.

Santa Barbara is often referred to as the “American Riviera,” home to upscale boutique stores and restaurants, multimillion-dollar homes and a favorite for celebrities seeking a getaway from Los Angeles.

But the Santa Barbara that Leyva knew was nothing like the idyllic beach-side setting most envision.

“I was born around drugs and violence,” he said. “I had a loving mother, but she worked a lot. I had no good male role models. My male role models were into negative things. I became my environment.”

While Leyva was accustomed to the chaos of his neighborhood, something was different when he got home after smoking pot for the first time. He felt free of the turmoil and the chaos faded.

“I attached my drugs and my drinking to emotions,” Leyva said. “If I was sad or angry or anxious, I taught myself at a very young age, just use drugs and it will go away.

“But it never goes away. It just gets temporarily covered up.”

It wasn’t long after getting high for the first time that Leyva had another first, one that would define his life for the next 20-plus years. At 13, he was arrested for possession of a stolen moped. A friend stole the moped, but it was Leyva who was caught while cruising around on it.

The arrest, coupled with his drug and alcohol use, began a spiral that was difficult to escape. There was a DUI. An arrest for gun sales. Parole violations.

Leyva’s substance abuse became so bad that his mother began to view his incarceration almost as a blessing.

“I must have been in my mid 20s and my mom said, ‘I actually like it when you’re in jail because I know you’re sleeping and I know you’re eating,’ ” he said. “It makes me emotional just thinking about it.”

Clean and sober

Leyva stopped drinking about a year before he went to prison for the final time in 2004. He kicked his drug habit shortly before beginning his sentence on a robbery charge.

He remained clean and sober while locked up, no easy task given the proliferation of drugs in prison.

“It’s so easy to stay high in prison,” he said. “Any drug you could want. People even make their own alcohol. It’s a big issue in the prison system. As long as you have the money to pay for it, you can stay high.”

Leyva said he made a conscious decision to stay clean in prison, and he stuck to it. It wasn’t the only conscious decision he was making to improve his life – he also was determined to make this the last time he would ever be locked up.

The words of his prison elder – “Help the people” – were a guiding force, and a newspaper article he received from his mother shortly before his release in April 2007 provided a final push toward change.

The story detailed the death of 15-year-old Luis Angel Linares, who was stabbed in the middle of the day on Santa Barbara’s renowned State Street. A 14-year-old was charged with the murder, which was part of large gang brawl.

Leyva had never been a gang member, but the story resonated all the same.

“I said, ‘I can go home and continue being part of the problem – even by staying silent – or I can go home and do something to help the young people in the community,’ ” he said. “That article really put me in a different place.

“I didn’t know what I was going to do, I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I was going to do something positive when I got out.”

A new life

Less than five months after his release from prison, Leyva walked on to a college campus for the first time.

It was a short stay.

Leyva got off the bus at Santa Barbara City College and just stared at the buildings. He began pacing while he continued to eye the administration and student services buildings.

When the next bus rolled up to the stop, Leyva got on.

“I can’t do this,” he told himself.

But the next day, his niece, also a student at Santa Barbara City College, told him to get in the car. She was going to drive him to school.

Leyva met with an academic adviser, who suggested a drug and alcohol treatment certificate program. Reading his class material was like reading his autobiography.

“I was thinking about my neighborhood, my family dynamics, the people I met in prison,” Leyva said. “Everything I was reading was about me. And I fell in love with education.”

Considered a high-risk parole offender as he began college, Leyva was required to report to the parole office twice a month. Each time he was there, he saw two men he recognized from Santa Barbara City College. Eventually, he approached one of the men. Leyva told him about the anxiety he felt at school, the feeling of not belonging, of not wanting to raise his hand in class for fear of being labeled stupid. That’s when Leyva learned he wasn’t alone in those feelings. Together, they approached the third person they had seen at the parole office, and he, too, echoed their sentiments.

By the end of the semester, Leyva approached the administration about starting a formal support group for formerly incarcerated men and women. By the summer of 2008, the group had its first cohort of the Transitions Program, whose mission would be to provide access to higher education for formerly incarcerated individuals and create a smooth transition from prison to community college.

Making Transitions

Santa Barbara City College recently graduated its 10^th Transitions Program cohort. Leyva has helped launch a program at MiraCosta College and is hoping to do the same at Palomar College.

“Martin aspires to erase the margins and empower society’s underdog by helping them become successful through higher education,” said Dr. Xuan Santos, a CSUSM assistant professor of sociology who has known Leyva for more than 10 years.

“As a graduate student, Martin has worked tirelessly to bring the Transitions Program to North San Diego County as more men and women experience mass incarceration and the tentacles of the Prison Industrial Complex. As more people are re-entering society, we are looking for felony-friendly employers and institutions of higher learning to become OGs – Opportunity Givers.”

Leyva wants to create a pipeline that will help formerly incarcerated individuals transfer to four-year colleges and universities. To help facilitate this transition and the transfer process, Santos said they are planning to start a CSUSM chapter of Project Rebound, a program being used at nine other CSU campuses. Santos noted that Leyva also has spearheaded a student organization at CSUSM called “The Transitions Collective” for formally incarcerated students and their allies.

Leyva plans to continue his work, and his education, after he graduates from CSUSM in May. He’s looking at a Ph.D. program at the University of New Mexico as one possibility. Regardless of where he attends school for his doctorate, he will continue to follow the directive his prison elder gave him – “Help the people.”

It’s a mantra that guides him every day.

His mother, once relieved when her son was incarcerated so that she knew he would have meals and a bed, now tells Leyva, “I don’t have to worry about you anymore.”

She knows he doesn’t drink. She knows he doesn’t use. She’s been at restaurants with Leyva and seen strangers approach to shake his hand and thank him.

“She sees a whole different side of me,” Leyva said. “I’m blessed to have her and blessed that she knows her only son is actually doing good.”

Turning his life around has also allowed Leyva to have a relationship with his daughters. Leyva calls it a “healing relationship” because he was on drugs or alcohol, incarcerated or simply absent for much of their lives. His older daughter, Alix, is 25 and lives in Santa Barbara, while younger daughter Kailani is finishing high school in Hawaii.

In June, all three were together for Father’s Day. Leyva took Alix and Kailani on a tour of CSUSM and all three donned University sweatshirts for their first Father’s Day photo together.

“It was absolutely beautiful,” Leyva said. “When my kids can see that the father that they knew or heard about is no longer that person, it’s a beautiful thing.

“Ten years ago, right out of prison trying to figure out what I was going to do, I couldn’t look in the mirror and say, ‘You’re a good man. I love you.’ Today, I look in the mirror and say, ‘You have a purpose in life. You love yourself and you love others.’ ”

Just look for the cap that has “We did it Luisito! 2%” proudly displayed.

Luisito refers to her 11-year-old son Luis. The 2 percent represents the small number of teenage mothers who earn their college degree, a group Erica is joining this month by earning her bachelor’s in psychology. But it’s more than a statistic for Erica. It’s what drove her to complete college and keep a promise she made to Luis on a cold November night when he was just 8 months old and the two of them were forced out of their home by Erica’s abusive boyfriend.

You’re going to make it. You’re going to do it. You’ll be part of that 2 percent.

Erica repeated the mantra countless times while at CSUSM.

She never thought of her journey as unique and certainly not inspirational -- at least not until she saw the reaction of classmates last fall to a presentation she gave in CSUSM professor Rita Naranjo’s Sociology 345 class.

Naranjo began the semester by sharing her life story with the class. Afterward, she told her students that their assignment was to put together a 25-minute presentation to share their life story.

Erica’s first thought was, “What can I share? There’s nothing interesting about me.”

It didn’t immediately occur to her to share what it was like discovering that she was pregnant at age 15. Or about how she dropped out of high school and moved from Oceanside to Fresno with the baby’s father. Or about the years of domestic violence. Or about that cold November night when her boyfriend threw Erica and Luis out to sleep on the street. Or about the epiphany she had as she tried to keep Luis warm that night. Or about how that night would put her on a decade-long path to her degree.

The more Erica thought about the assignment, the more her past came into focus. She ended up sharing those details of an often harrowing journey and she saw the impact it had on her classmates.

“I feel like my life has changed and I’m a different person,” Erica said. “I’m very happy with who I am. I don’t feel like a victim like I used to.

“When I shared my story, my classmates were asking me if they could give me a hug and they were asking me a lot of questions. One of them cried and said, ‘Wow, you truly inspired me.’ I never thought of my story as something that could inspire someone.”

You’re going to make it. You’re going to do it. You’ll be part of that 2 percent.

Long before Erica became aware of the statistical improbability that she would earn her bachelor’s, she was struggling to learn English.

Neither of Erica’s parents attended school as children. Both have spent their lives working in the fields trying to support three children. While Erica and her siblings were born in the United States, they spent most of their childhood living in Tijuana because they couldn’t afford to live here. When her parents brought them here permanently in hopes that their children would get a good education, Erica was 13 years old and spoke no English.

Erica was in an English Language Development program, but her grades suffered as she struggled to understand her teachers. She was often home alone with her siblings while her parents worked 12-hour days, six days a week.

At 15, Erica learned she was pregnant.

Erica dropped out of school and moved to Fresno with her boyfriend. She had no family or friends there. She was a teenager with a baby and a boyfriend who was using drugs and beating her on a daily basis. She never called the police out of fear that it would ultimately lead to a worse beating.

“Even though I needed help, I was scared,” she said. “I was just always afraid of asking for help.”

Then came that November night when Erica’s boyfriend threw her and Luis out into the cold. Erica sobbed as she repeatedly apologized to her son for the life they were living. As she sat outside holding Luis, her crying eventually subsided as she stared into the night sky and recalled two vivid memories.

She remembered going to work with her mother in the tomato fields a few years earlier. Erica had complained to her mother that day about the tiring work.

“My mom said, ‘This is our life. The only people who have a good life are the ones who got a good education,’ ” Erica said. “Even though my parents never went to school and they barely know how to read or write, they always told us that it was important to get a good education.”

The other memory was of a field trip to CSUSM during Erica’s first year at Lincoln Middle School in Oceanside. After spending most of her youth growing up in a poor Tijuana neighborhood, the size and scope of CSUSM was breathtaking.

Erica describes that November night as her rock bottom. It was the moment she knew she had to take action if she was going to change her life, and she knew an education was the only way to make it happen.

You’re going to make it. You’re going to do it. You’ll be part of that 2 percent.

Becoming part of the 2 percent wouldn’t be easy, but that night spurred Erica to find a way to finish high school. She researched a home school program and enrolled – no small feat for a minor with no parents or guardian present to sign off on all of the paperwork. Erica was also contending with a violent boyfriend who didn’t like the idea of her being in school.

“He always used to say, ‘You’re never going to make it. Do you really think you can finish high school? You don’t even know how to speak English.’ But I just kept going,” she said. “I did it for my son. I think I was able to get through because of my teachers.”

It was one of her teachers who encouraged Erica to continue her education after high school. She convinced her boyfriend to move back to Oceanside after graduating from high school, telling him it was only to be closer to family and that she had no intention of pursuing college.

But once back in Oceanside, she enrolled at MiraCosta College where she met Candy Owens, a counselor and facilitator at the school.

“I am beyond proud of Erica,” Owens said. “I have personally witnessed a beautiful transformation; from quiet and shy to an empowered young lady. When I first met her, she didn’t really speak to too many people. In class, she didn’t participate much. Throughout the semester I kept encouraging her to participate in campus clubs, and she did.”

Erica joined the Parents on Campus Club and the Latina Leadership Network Club, and Owens could see a difference.

“Her leadership skills blossomed and she started to believe that she had every right to be in college and that she was smart enough for college,” Owens said.

Owens gave Erica a journal to write down her goals. Among those goals was to stop living under domestic violence.

“That’s when I decided to leave,” said Erica, noting that her brother, a 2012 CSUSM graduate, also played an integral role in helping her escape the abusive relationship.

As Erica thrived at MiraCosta, CSUSM remained her long-term dream. She constantly told her brother how lucky he was to be at CSUSM, often asking to tag along with him just to walk around campus.

Though she longed to attend CSUSM, Erica said there was always self-doubt about whether she was smart enough.

“But it was also my dream, so I kept pushing,” she said. “My first semester here, I started crying when I got my student ID. I couldn’t believe I was here.”

You’re going to make it. You’re going to do it. You’ll be part of that 2 percent.

It was shortly after Erica started at CSUSM that she learned about the 2 percent. She started reading about teen pregnancy and discovered that fewer than 2 percent of teenage mothers earn a college degree by the time they’re 30.

“When I read that I got scared,” said Erica, now 27 years old. “I thought, ‘Wow, the possibilities are so small.’ I knew I needed to work harder to do it.”

It hasn’t been an easy road.

During Erica’s first semester at CSUSM, Luis was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. Not only does she attend school full time, but she also works full time as a translator for a San Marcos-based company -- she smiles as she notes that it wasn’t so long ago that she didn’t speak any English and now she’s working as a translator. Her days begin at 3:30 a.m. so she can be to work by 5 each morning.

Twice a week, Erica goes from work to campus for six-plus hours of classes. She tries to take care of studying and homework before the weekend so that she can devote herself completely to Luis on Saturdays and Sundays. She is also serving as a mentor for high-risk teenage girls through Vista-based Solutions for Change.

Whenever she had doubts, whenever she thought about giving up, she repeated those familiar words:

You’re going to make it. You’re going to do it. You’ll be part of that 2 percent.

While Erica’s undergraduate days are coming to an end, her education will continue. She is planning to pursue her master’s in public administration at San Diego State next year with the goal of being part of a nonprofit women’s resource center or even founding one herself.

The experience of sharing her story in Naranjo’s class has inspired her to take communications classes to improve her public-speaking skills in hopes of sharing her story with others and serving as an example that it’s possible to escape domestic violence.

“Erica is an eager learner and listener,” Naranjo said. “She may be quiet and soft spoken, but she is courageous and passionate beyond measure, which brings her to have a powerful message when spoken.

“I am truly inspired by her because she has shown dedication in many aspects of her life as a mother, daughter, student and role model in the community. I consider her an amazing ally on this path to empower, build, and create community connections and well-being.”

Erica’s ex-boyfriend hasn’t been part of her or Luis’ life for years. They haven’t seen him since she graduated from MiraCosta. She heard he was in jail with several more years to serve.

Luis, now a fifth grader, will be there on May 19 for his mom’s graduation. Before Erica walks across the commencement stage to shake the hand of President Karen Haynes, she will be the student speaker for the College of Humanities, Arts, Behavioral & Social Sciences morning ceremony. As she did in Naranjo’s class, she’ll share the story of her journey from pregnant teen to college graduate.

It will be another step in fulfilling the promise she made to Luis over a decade ago when they sat in the cold and she told him she would go back to school, free him of the life they were in and do her best to make him proud of her.

Luis smiles as he affirms his pride in his mom’s accomplishment. He hopes to follow in her footsteps and attend CSUSM, perhaps beginning a journey to his current goal of becoming a doctor.

Much like the personal mantra of joining the 2 percent of teenage mothers who earn their college degree, Erica has an oft-repeated mantra for Luis.

“I’m always telling him, ‘You can do whatever you want as long as you’re willing to work hard,’ ” she said. “That’s one of the reasons why I always try my best, because I want to inspire my son. I can’t tell him to go after his dreams if I’m not following my dreams. And my dream is to be a role model to him and a role model to other people in my community.

“Sometimes I wonder, ‘Is this really happening? Am I really graduating?’ I just can’t believe it.”

Now in her third year at Cal State San Marcos, Brandy was close to joining the military before her mom stepped in and encouraged her to try school first.

Looking at a list of Brandy’s accomplishments at CSUSM, it’s difficult to imagine her not being part of the Cougar family.

From Alpha Lambda Delta to the Social Justice Summit to the Black Student Union, Brandy has participated in countless clubs and activities.

“I love a lot of things and I like trying things,” said Brandy, who is a sociology major.

Social justice issues are of particular interest to Brandy, and her activism led to her being awarded the President’s Student Champion Award for Inclusive Excellence and Diversity during the All People’s Luncheon on Oct. 25.

“Brandy understands the importance of her peers breaking down the barriers that keep them from working together and learning from each other,” said Robert Aiello-Hauser, CSUSM’s director of Student Engagement and Inclusion.

Brandy was among a group of CSUSM students who advocated for the creation of the Black Student Center on campus, work that will come to fruition with the grand opening of a dedicated space later this academic year.

Brandy’s interest in trying and participating in a variety of activities stems from her experience moving frequently while growing up. Even an A-frame on campus doesn’t escape her eyes, often leading to an impromptu visit to a lecture or event. That’s how she happened upon a lecture featuring a mother talking about her child living with autism.

“I stayed because I didn’t know anything about autism,” Brandy said. “I cried. It was so beautiful and so inspirational.”

Brandy has overcome many challenges of her own growing up, from financial difficulties to contending with learning disabilities. She learned at an early age the importance of asking for help in order to succeed.

“It’s not hard for me to admit, ‘OK, this is hard and I need help,’ ” she said.

Brandy credits her mother for getting her prepared for college, often taking action that Brandy didn’t learn about until years later. Her mom insisted that Brandy receive an Individualized Education Program and worked with Brandy’s teachers to ensure she received any necessary help to deal with her learning disabilities.

“My mom is the reason why I’m here,” Brandy said.

Brandy chose to attend CSUSM sight unseen. While she had no concerns about attending a school she hadn’t visited, she was a bit surprised the first time she arrived on campus with her mom for orientation.

“We were like, ‘What is up with all the stairs?’ ” she said.

But even the stairs are a positive in her mind as she notes that they provide a good workout when needed. And, despite not seeing the campus before she committed to attend CSUSM, she never had any concerns about whether it would be the right fit.

“I’ve always had an optimistic outlook,” she said. “If it’s bad, it’s going to be good eventually. If you see this place as dark and hollow, then it’s going to be dark and hollow. If you see it as light and full, then it’s going to be light and full.

“We got here and it was beautiful. The stairs were insane, but it was beautiful.”

Brandy quickly built a village of people at CSUSM who could provide support and advice. And, of course, she dived right in when it came to getting involved.

Brandy doesn’t want to limit herself when it comes to finding a post-college career. However, she said she will always be a voice for groups that are being oppressed and she wants to have a role in education.

“I want to be that one teacher where kids look back and say, ‘If it had not been for Ms. Williams …’ I want to be the professor that kids say, ‘She believed in me.’ ”

The study, Cultivando Liderazgo (Nurturing Leadership), is being undertaken through a partnership involving CSUSM and the National Latino Research Center (NLRC), the latter of which is based at the San Marcos campus. The Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal agency that administers AmeriCorps and other national service programs, is funding the three-year study.

“Our ultimate goal is to get a better idea to see what tools are most useful in getting people involved, finding out what challenges people are facing in trying to get involved, and what we can do to keep them involved,” said NLRC Research Director Arcela Nuñez­-Alvárez.

The project comes during a time of sustained growth in the local Latino population. Over the past decade, the number of Latinos calling San Diego County home has increased from a little more than one in four residents to a little less than one in three. In some cities and neighborhoods, Latinos account for well more than half of the population, yet locally collected data indicate they generally are disengaged from civic life, and they have the lowest voter turnout of any group.

The study evolved from an earlier effort known as Universidad Popular, or People’s University, in which students and professors visited local libraries and community centers for seminars with grandparents, parents, and their children on various topics with titles such as The Latino Experience and the Importance of Education and Chicano History and Culture.

“We just felt there was a need for more educational opportunities in the community, especially among the Latino immigrant communities,” Nuñez­-Alvárez said.

Before long, 70 or more people were turning out for the weekly seminars. When Universidad Popular last year tackled the subject of Latino civic engagement, interest spiked even further.

“It became very clear to us that this was an area where people were unaware of the process,” Nuñez­-Alvárez said. “And even if they were aware of the process, they weren’t involved politically or involved in civic affairs.”

That’s when Nuñez­-Alvárez and Marisol Clark­-Ibáñez, a CSUSM associate professor of sociology, began thinking about expanding their effort to include a study measuring the impact the civic engagement courses were having.

“Community participation in civic leadership for Latinos is especially relevant in San Diego County given that civic engagement among Latinos lags far behind their white, Asian and African-American counterparts both in California and nationally,” said Nuñez­-Alvárez. “Although individual experiences that motivate civic engagement are well­ documented, research on factors such as age, educational background, socio­economic status, familial upbringing, cultural context and geographic locale, which are also related to civic engagement, have not been studied empirically.”

The study comes as campaigning begins to heat up for the 2016 presidential election—an election in which Latinos are expected to play a pivotal role regardless of their turnout. Under current plans, the Universidad Popular model will be expanded to neighborhoods from coastal to inland North County.

“This will allow us to duplicate the curriculum we’ve been using and take it to many different communities and see if it is having any kind of impact on civic involvement,” Nuñez­-Alvárez said.

Milestones for the first year include finalizing the research design and implementation plan with advisory groups, starting to enroll people taking part in the study, and collecting data. Milestones for the second year include training data collectors and continuing with enrollment. Milestones for the third year include final data analysis and dissemination, holding a summit on Latino civic engagement, and presenting findings to community members. Grant amounts are for $284,067 annually.

A long list of collaborating campus departments, offices and student organizations are involved in the project, including the Departments of Anthropology, Sociology, Modern Language Studies, Human Development (Spanish), the Latin@ Center, the Latino Association of Faculty and Staff, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA) and S.T.A.N.D. Other regional organizations involved include the San Diego County Library, the American Civil Liberties Union, the San Diego Registrar of Voters, Alliance San Diego, Alianza Comunitaria, Vista Community Clinic Poder Popular, Latinos y Latinas en Accion, the North County Immigration Taskforce and the Farmworker CARE Coalition.

Both Clark­-Ibáñez and Nuñez-­Alvárez have extensive experience in promoting education and civic literacy. The research team at the NLRC has more than 15 years of experience conducting nationally­recognized research in education, civic engagement, youth empowerment and justice, health education, and disaster­ preparedness among migrant and Latino families in the region. NLRC’s on­going, close collaborative work among hard-­to-­reach communities in the region has earned it noteworthy credibility among the Spanish­-speaking migrant and Latino communities of Southern California. For the Cultivando Liderazgo project, collaborating organizations include the San Diego County Public Library and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Lead researchers, Marisol Clark-Ibáñez, CSUSM associate professor of sociology, and Arcela Nuñez-Alvárez, research director at NLRC, are building on the Universidad Popular: Cultivando Liderazgo (People’s University: Nurturing Leadership) program, an initiative designed to demonstrate feasible and effective methods for promoting lifelong civic engagement among Latino participants, particularly low-income adults with low formal education levels.

“Community participation in civic leadership for Latinos is especially relevant in San Diego County given that civic engagement among Latinos lags far behind their White, Asian and African American counterparts both in California and nationally,” said Nuñez-Alvárez. “Although individual experiences that motivate civic engagement are well-documented, research on factors such as age, educational background, socio-economic status, familial upbringing, cultural context and geographic locale, which are also related to civic engagement, have not been studied empirically.”

Both Clark-Ibáñez and Nuñez-Alvárez have extensive and demonstrated experience in promoting education and civic literacy. The research team at NLRC has over 15 years of experience conducting nationally-recognized research in education, civic engagement, youth empowerment and justice, health education, and disaster-preparedness among migrant and Latino families in the region. NLRC’s on-going, close collaborative work among hard-to-reach communities in the region has earned it noteworthy credibility among the Spanish-speaking migrant and Latino communities of Southern California. For the Cultivando Liderazgo project, collaborating organizations include the San Diego County Public Library and the American Civil Liberties Union.

“Comprehensive approaches to understanding the civic engagement of Latinos are needed so that we can recognize the strengths of this population in order to build upon them and understand what factors will lead to their increased civic engagement,” noted Nuñez-Alvárez. “Clearly Cultivando Liderazgo can help us to understand the dynamics behind the civic engagement of this important and growing community of the region.”

About the National Latino Research Center

The National Latino Research Center (NLRC) is committed to contributing to the knowledge and understanding of rapidly growing U.S. Latino populations through applied research, training, technical assistance, research-based services, and information exchange. The NLRC envisions a diverse, just and equitable society that provides a healthy environment through universal quality healthcare, education, technology and political representation. Specializing in applied research, the NLRC brings together key stakeholders from the community, government, NGO sector, and private industry to identify solutions and develop strategies to address local and regional challenges. The NLRC conducts research and training in the areas of education, civic engagement, cultural competency, health, environmental issues, public policy, and community development. In addition to research projects, the NLRC provides technical assistance to a range of organizations and actively supports multi-agency collaborations that seek to leverage resources and expertise.

Authored by Cal State San Marcos Associate Professor of Sociology Marisol Clark-Ibáñez, Undocumented Latino Youth: Navigating Their Worlds, is a 273-page edition detailing the obstacles and challenges undocumented immigrants face while trying to get a public education, along with the resiliency they exhibit. The book, published in July, was written in collaboration with seven current and former CSUSM students, some of whom are undocumented themselves.

“It’s important that their stories be told, that their challenges be understood,” said Clark-Ibáñez.

Research included interviewing undocumented students in elementary, middle and high school, and college. Some 100 students in all were queried but first CSUSM researchers had to build trust with the students they were interviewing.

“Some people are very open about their immigration status if they’re an undocumented immigrant,” Clark-Ibanez said. “But others are very protective of their status and are not so willing to talk about it openly.”

The book evolved from Clark-Ibanez’s work as an advisor to the CSUSM student organization Standing Together As oNe Dream (S.T.A.N.D.). Several students in the group said they were interested in researching the plight of undocumented immigrants and asked her for guidance.

That resulted in a chapter (A passport to education: Undocumented Latino university students navigating their invisible status) published in the International Handbook of Migration, Minorities, and Education: Understanding Cultural and Social Differences in Process of Learning.

One involved student was Gricelda Alva, who graduated in 2009 with a bachelor’s degree in human development with an emphasis in counseling services.

“By highlighting people’s testimony and experiences, and by detailing what individuals are going through, we’re humanizing and personalizing the immigrant experience, illustrating what it means to be undocumented and what it means to face these challenges that they are facing,” Alva said.

Those experiences are a far cry from what Clark-Ibáñez faced as an immigrant from Peru born to educated parents. Her father was an American who worked for the Peace Corps. When she was four years old the family moved to Berkeley, later settling in Davis.

“I had a very privileged immigrant experience,” she said.

Clark-Ibáñez joined the sociology department at CSUSM in September 2003, and she earned tenure in June 2009. Currently she serves as the graduate coordinator for the Master of Arts in Sociological Practice (MASP). Her general research interests are in education, childhood, immigration, inequality, qualitative methodology, visual sociology, gender, race and relationships.

Undocumented Latino Youth: Navigating Their Worlds has taken on added meaning, being published at a time when undocumented immigration has been thrust to the forefront of presidential campaigning. “This rhetoric is negatively affecting a lot of people unnecessarily,” Clark-Ibanez said. “It is irresponsible and disheartening.”

Yeraldin Montiel, who collaborated on the book and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 2014, said the issue is too complex for sound bites.

“People need to know that we came here as children, it wasn’t our choice,” Montiel reflected. “It wasn’t until high school that I even knew I was undocumented. I only learned when I was filling out my financial information when I was applying to college.”

And that, Montiel said, meant she was ineligible for financial help when attending CSUSM. She worked full time at fast food restaurants and cleaning houses to make ends meet.

“Everybody has struggles, but many people don’t understand the struggles we are going through,” she said.

For many, one of those struggles entails just getting to school. In many neighborhoods, for example, undocumented immigrants have been targeted while taking their children to or from campus.

“Many of the participants voiced concerns about the dilemmas of walking to school or work, driving, trying to get by, and working hard to succeed in the face of intense stress about their immigrant status,” Clark-Ibáñez said. “Life for these students involves risk and faith. Immigration for them means coping with daily life-altering decisions, the sense of being from neither here nor there, and the enduring quest for a better life.”

In fact, researchers say that only half of undocumented immigrants graduate high school, and their college-going rate is far less than the rates of their naturalized Mexican peers. What’s more, about half of the undocumented youth who do go to college leave school without earning a degree.

“These youths are part of our region,” said Clark-Ibáñez. “They are part of our community. And they are entitled to an education.”

“For the most part, my students like it,” said Atherton of the role comic books play in the curriculum of his criminology courses. “It’s a way for them to get more engaged in the subject matter. But I suppose some people may see it as kind of weird.”

Perhaps so, but the lessons are real—and often profound. During a discussion on police culture, for example, students were asked to read a Gotham Central story detailing the consequences surrounding a policewoman who is a lesbian and outed by someone on the force. That was followed by assigned academic papers about the challenges facing gay law enforcement officers.

“Everything the academic papers dealt with was touched on in the comic,” Atherton said.

“We’re not doing this as an alternative to learning. It’s a part of the learning.”

One of his more popular lessons, titled, “Who Could Prevent More Crime—Batman or Bruce Wayne?” offers another example. At first blush, some may wonder: Really? This is a criminology course? In fact, the lesson involves an abundance of academic investigation.

“Research shows that all of the punishment and deterrence we invest in doesn’t really have an impact on crime,” Atherton said, equating such punishment and deterrence to the Batman approach. “Criminals really don’t think about those things when they’re robbing a liquor store. Things like education and economic opportunity—the type of things a billionaire like Bruce Wayne might invest in—are clearly more effective.”

Integrating comics into his work was probably just a matter of time. It grew from his practice of using movies to help illustrate concepts of criminal justice, a practice that led to a Crime, Films & Society course (Sociology 490) and included such films as Copland, Minority Report, and V for Vendetta.

“Films and comics reach a wider, broader audience,” Atherton said. “They can affect discussion more than any academic article you could write in a journal.”

He added: “I’ve probably been collecting comics since I was seven or eight years old. It’s been a lifelong interest.”

Atherton, who attends Comic-Con each year, added he’d like to someday take part in an academic panel at the annual San Diego event.

An Escondido native who graduated from San Pasqual High School, Atherton has been collecting and reading comics since he was a young child. He’s also a first-generation college student who attended Palomar College in San Marcos before earning his Bachelor of Arts in sociology from UC San Diego, his Master of Arts in sociological practice from CSUSM, and his Ph.D. in crime, law and justice from The Pennsylvania State University. His dissertation investigated Hispanic outcomes in federal courts, a study that found Hispanic defendants receive significantly more punitive sentences than do white defendants, and that black Hispanics experience different levels of disparity in sentencing outcomes.

Atherton taught at Central Connecticut State University for two years as an assistant professor before moving back home to Cal State San Marcos. He currently is a Faculty Fellow for Teaching & Learning for the 21st Century, and he is not beyond thinking outside the proverbial box. He received media attention a few years ago for his practice of incorporating Twitter into his lesson plans.

Wrote Atherton at the time: “Given the complex nature of criminological theories, it may seem like reductionism to simplify it down to 140 characters. However, the exercise is not about presenting theories in the most simplistic manner, rather it is an exercise in being able to synthesize the numerous aspects of the theory into a succinct statement.”

Students would earn points for being able to conceptualize concepts and articulate their thoughts in a single tweet.

“I really like it,” student Mark Hirata told San Diego Union-Tribune reporter Deborah Sullivan Brennan in 2012. “He’s basically using it so we can study and understand it better. It is pretty challenging to condense an entire book of hundreds of pages down to one sentence of 140 characters. It’s a good way to help you understand the theories better.”