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When Yolanda Valencia finished sixth grade, her family assumed her formal education was over. “Congratulations, you’re done,” her mother told her, since that was the expectation in their farming community in Michoacán, Mexico. Valencia cried at the thought. “I didn’t want to be done with school,” she recalls. “I wanted to keep going.”
And so she did. Earlier this month, Valencia earned her PhD in geography from the University of Washington. This fall she joins the University of Maryland-Baltimore County faculty as an assistant professor.
For her dissertation research, Yolanda Valencia interviewed more than 40 documented and undocumented immigrants in Pasco, Washington, where her family lived after...