Regardless of where I find myself, I’m often asked where I’m from. Whether it is a question guided by curiosity, an understanding that most people don’t spend their lives in a single place, or a signal that my body does not belong with the preconceived understanding of who can inhabit that location, the inquiry often marks me as out of place. To be sure, it is a difficult question since borders and bordering practices have dislocated me across three different countries and consistently defined my presence as precarious and/or contingent. These boundaries have also been present within my experience in academia, and it is only because of three Latinas – a Cubana, a Chicana, and a Chilena – that I have found a space of belonging. Each provided guidance and caring throughout each stage of my academic training. They taught me the value of mentoring, as well as the impact our labor can have on our communities.

If you talk to my students, they will tell you that I often refer back to my mentors and apologize for being a copy of them, never as good as the original. I do this for two reasons. First, it shows my students that we are part of legacies that span across time and space, including geographic boundaries. That these roads have been traveled by our communities and that they are part of a greater network. Secondly, it shows them that the practices we employ are not always our own, many of them are modeled by those who facilitated our survival in the academic space where reward correlates with assimilation, and the maintenance of our ways of being and belonging lead to our subtraction. The presences of my mentors have taught me the value of representation within these spaces and the need to critically reimagine our work within them.

If you talk to my students, they will tell you that I often refer back to my mentors and apologize for being a copy of them, never as good as the original.

I arrived at the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education (AAHHE) national conference delighted to work with fellow faculty members, as well as graduate student colleagues. The latter, particularly, pushed us to be better: better scholars, mentors and community members. They highlighted the spaces of exclusion within locations where equity is taken for granted or at least imagined as further along than the rest of society. They reminded us that inclusion demands the recognition of more than presence in a space but the ability to be part of the group, free of imposition and on one’s own terms. In short, within our interactions with them and through witnessing their collaboration amongst each other, they modeled what community and inclusion looks like and displayed a firm methodology to achieve it. I am grateful to have been around wonderful colleagues who displayed courage and care while demanding that we recognize that resistance is more than a word on a paper. •