She navigated her way from “wannabe chola” to first-gen college student to White House aide to President Obama. But those bullet-points fail to capture the messiness and pain that exist in making the leap from one to the other. In her new memoir, First Gen, Alejandra is naming everything from the “Invisible Inheritances” we each contend with, to the “Trailblazer Toll” we pay for breaking those cycles and becoming the first.
Find First Gen here. Follow Alejandra on Instagram @acampoverdi. If you liked this episode, listen to Why Aida Rodriguez Believes in Giving Grace and Julissa Natzely Arce Raya Wants You to Reclaim Your Identity.
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Alicia Menendez: Alejandra Campoverdi and I have known each other for more than a decade. We met as 20-somethings working in politics in DC. She was an aide to then-President Obama, and then we worked together at Fusion, the ABC/Univision cable channel. I've always perceived Alejandra to be smart and ambitious. What I failed to pick up on was just how alone she felt navigating what it meant to be first and only. She's giving those experiences name and language in her new memoir, First Gen. In it, Alejandra shares not just the achievements, and there are many, but also the messiness that exists between those high points and the price we pay for social ascension. Alejandra, congratulations. Thank you so much for being here.
Alejandra Campoverdi: Thank you so much for having me. I cannot wait for this conversation.
Menendez: It would be very easy to sort of tell your story as first gen at the Obama White House. I think something that's really important to pull back is how you got to the Obama White House, specifically getting on the campaign, and then you already had a plan to go back to grad school. Everyone was like, "What do you mean you're leaving?" And then you make the decision to come back, and I want to dig in on that because I think that it's a really high risk, high reward choice for a young person to make. Can you go back to the calculus that you were making in your mind about that decision, and what you were telling yourself you would do if it did not go your way?
Campoverdi: I started operating a lot from my gut at a certain point in my 20s, and that's something that I think, as first and onlys, is hugely important because we don't have a lot of direction. I was going to go and start studying for the GMAT in order to go to grad school because a number of things that happened. My mom developed cancer, I thought I might have to raise my sister alone in my mid-20s, and I was trying to find a way to have some level of financial stability. One thing is the existential level feeling of not only, "Do I possibly compromise my future, but my family's future that's depending on me for their own stability?" but you also are in the position where you're almost being dissuaded from taking the very risks that you need to take that you see your peers being celebrated for. "You want to apply to grad school? Let me help you. Let me fund your apartment while you take some time off and volunteer to fluff up your application."
But it doesn't make sense sometimes to our loved ones that we went and got this undergrad degree, and now we're going to go and volunteer somewhere or take an internship or try to start a company. You're dissuaded from taking professional risks sometimes. So I started creating professional boundaries in my life, which I couldn't have articulated then. But I started saying, "Okay, I'm not going to tell a lot of people what I'm doing. I'm not going to ask a lot of people for their opinion. I'm going to just listen to my gut because otherwise, it's too confusing. I'm getting these conflicting messages." So to honor my commitment to the business school I had already signed up for ... I had a lease, I had roommates, I was in classes, I had homework. But you know that old parable with there's a pea under the mattress and this woman can't sleep because she can feel the pee under the mattress? I couldn't get settled in business school because I felt there was something off. And I learned, sometimes the hard way, that when I feel that, I'm off-course.
Menendez: And there is a period, which you write about extensively in First Gen, where there is this weird waiting game.
Campoverdi: Absolutely.
Menendez: And then you do get it. I mean, it's this huge opportunity. The stars do align. You were right to trust your gut. And I want to flash-forward a little bit, and I promise we won't linger here long, but I think it's important. Which is you sort of wake up one day, and you had been a model during earlier periods in your life, and all of a sudden, Gawker has unearthed those photos of you and you become the White House hottie. And the reason I bring it up is, one, because it is a reminder of how we all feel and know that we could be undermined at any moment. And to some degree, that anxiety can just be as catastrophizing.
And so to some degree, there's just the reality that our access and proximity to power is more tenuous than a lot of other people's, that what we have to do to prove our competency is a higher bar and always at greater jeopardy than a lot of other people. But also, as I've said to you, I remember reading that and thinking, "This girl seems super cool. How cool that she has done all of these things in her young precious life and now gets to be at the White House?" and that is not how it felt at all to you on the other side of it.
Campoverdi: Yeah, it's not how it felt. It's also not how it read at the time. It is interesting because a lot of the innuendo, and we know what this is like, was it wasn't just like, "Oh, here's this former model at the White House." It was the idea that, "Is she even smart? Does she even deserve to be there? Why is she there?" And I wrote something about this topic while I ran for Congress because at the time, I couldn't say anything. We were a week into a new administration. The last thing you want to be is a distraction. And that's one of the reasons why it was so mortifying, beyond the fact that it was a takedown of my character and my capacity as a intelligent woman, but it was also the last thing you wanted anyone to be focusing on during the first week of this historic administration.
And so I didn't say anything at the time. Nothing. I put my head down and worked. So I wrote this op-ed when I was running years later, when I finally felt like, "You know what? I'm going to say something," because it kept even coming up. But years after the White House, years after I had gone to Harvard and all these different things, it still didn't matter when it came to the sexism that women constantly face. And I pushed back against the idea that femininity and intelligence are seen to be inversely related in some way, that we're made to feel, again, that we check a box and we pick what box. To your point, to use your word, are we going to be the hottie? Are we going to be the intelligent one? Are we going to be the respectable one? Are we going to be the girl next door? These are all false choices that we actually don't have to make. We're multidimensional. At the time, the implication in that article was that I had picked my box, and how dare I get out of it.
Menendez: Your anxiety and your grappling with your anxiety almost becomes a character in the book itself, right? I think your anxiety sort of rears up over and over again, where I'm like, "Oh, there it is. There it is. This character from chapter one, this character from childhood." And I wonder for other people who are first gen, your experience of navigating your own mental health, specifically given that you're navigating it in really elite institutions where regardless of who you are, you're generally not welcome to lead with those challenges, what it stirred up for you. And what was most useful to you in the way of learning to live with it?
Campoverdi: I started having panic attacks at six years old. It was something that I kind of shoved down and we kind of looked another way. But when it came to a head and we realized that I couldn't ignore it and my mom couldn't ignore it because it was going to derail, in a lot of ways, my life, was starting college. And what that looked like for me was it was freshman orientation. All of a sudden, I felt what I know is now not a unique experience of, "Oh my God. I have to sit in this chair and do this perfectly for the next four years. This is my shot." College, college, college, college. It's drilled into a lot of us. Even if it's not our families saying, you must go to college, it's the societal understanding that that is the means to social mobility.
So I'm sitting there and I feel this all closing down on me, and all I could think of to do was run out of that auditorium and into the middle of campus. I run into the middle of campus and ears ringing, things go black, pass out. And when I wake up, they've called my mom, there's strangers around me. And she takes me to the health center who promptly hands me a bottle of Xanax at 17 years old and says, "Take this every four to six hours. Make an appointment with health services for therapy." But the modalities and the resources that I eventually learned to be able to manage my anxiety and get ahold of it and basically unshackle myself from it, which finally came when I moved to Boston to go to Harvard, it was kind of like that final frontier that also changed the life that I felt that I had access to beyond the socioeconomic piece.
So it's all intertwined. It's so interesting, Alicia, because how do you unpack all that? Yes, there's the things you go through as a child and the kind of poverty cycles and the cycles of struggles that you're trying to break. But then there's the mental health piece which is intertwined with the struggles that you go through as a child. I hit these summits. I'd get the award or the job, or whatever that was, and I wouldn't feel happy, or I'd feel happy and sad or happy and guilty. It was always some permutation of things that I thought and was like, "What's wrong with me?" And the reality is there's nothing wrong with any of us. We're actually feeling, in a lot of ways, the echoes of these experiences that weren't acknowledged while they were happening.
Menendez: When you think of the Trailblazer Toll and the various ways that show up, and I would love for you to articulate them to us, what, then, is the support? What is the thing you want First Gen readers to take away from what it is they can do for themselves?
Campoverdi: The Trailblazer Toll starts off with these invisible inheritances that is a part of the genogram experience that kind of unravel. There's parentification, something that I did not coin as a psychology term, but how a lot of times we see these movies like Encanto and hear that song, Surface Pressure, and we're like, "Oh my God. This is immigrant daughter duties." All these people identified with it, right? I saw how social media was blowing up. The biculturalism, I'm going through all this fast, the bicultural balancing act. I call it the chutes and social ladders. If you guys remember the game, Chutes and Ladders, where you land on the right spot and, damn, you're just going to shoot up. But if you happen to land on the wrong one, your head's going to spin by how fast you're putting your place. In a lot of ways, what happened to me at the White House.
The breakaway guilt. Once you've made it, once you kind of went off and you did your thing, whether it's a different state or whether it's across town, and you come home and you realize that your life is the only one that's really materially changed. These are parts that the average person, the average of our peers don't think about. They don't go on vacation and think, "God, I wish my mom could experience this." Again, these things are connected. The point is that we talk about it and that we engage in understanding that all of this is completely to be expected.
Menendez: If you want first gen students to succeed at your institution, then it has to become a part of your comprehensive plan. What would that look like?
Campoverdi: So I commissioned a national poll of students that were about to start school and that were in school within five years to get an idea of what was really going on and what did they really need, and there were several interesting things that are applicable to this question. One is we asked them, "Does being a first gen student have a negative impact on your mental and emotional health?" Surprise, surprise, 65% said yes, right? But the most interesting part was why. Imposter syndrome was the least cited reason. Number one reason, financial trauma, and number two reason, loneliness and isolation. Now we said, "Okay. Well, what is the support that would help you the most?" and academic support was not the top of the list either. Once again, it was mental health support.
So what I've seen in some of these schools is the ones who I think really have done a great job and really have been intentional about this mental health support, they have dedicated psychologists, therapists on campus on the first gen experience on call for students in their centers. They make it super accessible to have these conversations and to be able to recognize that the mental/emotional support is the most important part.
Menendez: I love that you push back against this idea of imposter syndrome because I do think it is too pat of an answer.
Campoverdi: And I'm not saying imposter syndrome doesn't exist. Yeah, of course it exists. I've been told imposter syndrome's coming for me, as if it's some sort of boogeyman, since I was 10 years old. "It's coming. You're going to feel it and this is how you deal with it." And it's like, "Okay, it's a crisis of confidence." Is it a crisis of confidence? Is it just that, or is it an actual insightfulness of these young people, of all of us, that there are systems we're operating in that we don't necessarily belong in or are made to feel that we belong in?
Menendez: There's sort of the early part of your life, I want to make sure I get the language right, where you refer to yourself as a "conflicted, wannabe chola," where you're dating a gang member and you're also the captain of the drill team and class president and a campus minister. To me, that there is a person who contains multitudes. But that, to me, shows up multiple times in your life and it's something that I really relate to, right? This idea of you do have a lot of interests and you do have a lot of passions. One of the things I, as someone who roots for you, felt that you were working through was aligning all of that. And I sense that writing First Gen was part of bringing all of it into alignment of showing how those threads tied together into a complete and to whole. And so I am just curious, if that is your experience of it, what you found most valuable in trying to come into alignment?
Campoverdi: You know what the funny thing is? It was actually the opposite. I feel this was not a book to align things or to make that make sense for anyone. It was almost the idea that it doesn't have to anymore because it did to me. It doesn't have to make sense to anyone.
Menendez: Okay. But what I want to know then is what it took to get you there. Because it seems that in the early part of your life, it did matter to you that people got it.
Campoverdi: Of course. It matters to all of us. We all want to be understood. We all want to be seen in all these different ways. I think a part of it was when I was running and I finally got to speak my truth, and I finally got to defend myself and broaden that truth into being something that was actually not even about me. The second part was being diagnosed with breast cancer. When you are diagnosed with breast cancer at 38 years old, I think that has a shocking effect. You think you have longer to figure it out, and, "What is it that I'm really doing here? What's really motivating me and how am I going to feel if this is what it is?" That was a big part of it for me.
And lastly, when COVID happened, I was living alone in the beginning and I remember all the things came up for me that I know came up for so many. And a lot of the work that I did started hitting me as something that was, "It's now or never." You either face these things as they come up or you shove them down again. And I had a lot of experiences, like I talk about in First Gen, that I had white-knuckled it through, but I hadn't fully excavated. I allowed myself to go to those places. And I'm not going to act like it wasn't super hard and super triggering not only for me, but for my family and the people that I talked to about that, but once you've also looked in the face, in the mirror, of a lot of these experiences, you can't put that back in a box. You just can't.
It allowed me to get comfortable in my skin in a way that I had never been and allowed me to realize that there was nothing to prove anymore. I don't know how to create a box for the space that I'm in now. I think the point is there isn't one.
Menendez: Alejandra, congratulations. Thank you so much for doing this.
Campoverdi: Thank you so much for having me.
Menendez: Thanks for listening. Latina to Latina is executive produced and owned by Juleyka Lantigua and me, Alicia Menendez. Paulina Velasco is our producer. Kojin Tashiro is our lead producer. Tren Lightburn mixed this episode.
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CITATION:
Menendez, Alicia, host. “How Alejandra Campoverdi Traced Her Family’s Invisible Inheritances.” Latina to Latina, LWC Studios, November 20, 2023. LatinaToLatina.com.