ABSTRACT
Tristana came to university hoping to become an agent of change. But she recognized that while university can be “empowering” and transformative, it can also be a site of alienation and challenge for many marginalized students facing systemic barriers. Tristana's family, including her two older sisters, emigrated from El Salvador in the late 1970s; Tristana, the youngest, was born in Canada. She lived with her mother and worked in her mother's small beauty shop located in a low-income, high-immigrant neighborhood in downtown Toronto. Highly perceptive, she had an awareness of the challenges and discriminatory barriers she faced as a Latinx woman that came through in her candid comments about herself and her family, for whom she had deep commitment and love. Having become educated about the “tools” of the inequitable, exploitive system, Tristana believed that she would be able to help create a process of social change, and with her university education, perseverance, and social activism, would be able to give back to her family and community. She completed her MA in social and political thought and at the time of writing was working on her PhD.
