“You can’t just lump everyone together,” she says, adding that even without the new department, she would still like to see more Latino professors being hired and more course offerings in the field.

AN INTEREST IN IMMIGRATION

Having matriculated to Exeter thanks to a minority recruitment program, Hernandez has spent her college years seeking to help minority and underprivileged high school students take advantage of similar opportunities at Harvard.

As the Mexican-American coordinator for the undergraduate admissions office, she spoke with prospective students and made recruiting trips to high schools in poor areas, encouraging kids to set their sights on college.

“We encourage them to go beyond what they see in

their communities,” she says.

Hernandez used her social studies senior thesis as a way to examine the lives of immigrants from an intellectual perspective.

For her research, Hernandez documented the lives of 22 illegal Mexican immigrants and their families in Los Angeles.

She found that—contrary to many of the arguments made by Weatherhead University Professor Samuel P. Huntington in his recent work, Who Are We?—these undocumented immigrants developed a type of citizenship not described by their legal status by becoming active members in their communities.

“By examining the ways in which undocumented immigrants are already living lives that have features we associate with citizenship—involvement in civic activities, political participation through activism and (clearly) economic integration—Hernandez is showing how merely legal understandings of citizenship are out of step with people’s lived reality,” Christopher Sturr, a lecturer in social studies who advised Hernandez’s thesis, wrote in an e-mail.

The experience of writing the thesis has also led Hernandez to change her postgraduate plans. After working at Goldman Sachs last summer, she had planned to take a two-year analyst position there and use her earnings to help out at home. Now she is planning a year-long stay in France—where she will study that nation’s immigration patterns on a Rockefeller fellowship—after which she will pursue a master’s degree in public policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton.

Hernandez says she hopes that she will eventually be able to start an NGO in Mexico that will give students the resources to focus on their studies, just as her scholarship to Exeter allowed her to do.

“I have to do something, I cannot remain quiet,” she says.

—Staff writer Christopher M. Loomis can be reached at cloomis@fas.alumni.harvard.edu.