In this essay, Joe Robert González describes the process of his own growth as a Mexican American from Brownsville, Texas, who attended Villanova University. Coming from a majority-minority town, González identifies the importance of safe spaces for Mexican American youth, many of whom doubt their own potential to thrive within university settings. He laments the current push for cultural organizations on college campuses to educate the broader student body as well as the general inefficacy of these organizations due to the limited scope of their mission. At the same time, González celebrates the opportunities that his university gave him to interact with people from a variety of different cultures who hold different opinions about the world. Thinking about his friends from home, he laments the way that homogeneous experiences can nurture stereotypes and fear. González concludes by suggesting that college campuses must provide students with both safe spaces and opportunities for growth.

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Joe Robert González is a graduate student in the Teacher Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. As an undergraduate at Villanova University, he conducted research on Latino high school students, investigating the link between identity and family in Latino academic achievement. He presented his results at the 2008 National Association for Multicultural Education conference. Since 2004, he has worked and volunteered for the National Hispanic Institute, an international nonprofit organization based in Texas that provides leadership experiences for high school students.