Keidy Palma Ramirez, a senior double concentrating in Education and Social Analysis and Research, centered her capstone project on creating culturally affirming pathways to college access for youth in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Grounded in lived experience, borderlands scholarship, and deep community collaboration, her capstone built tangible resources for students in El Paso, Texas.
Designed as a four-part workshop series delivered over the summer in collaboration with the El Paso Mexican American Cultural Center (MACC), the project bridges theory and practice to help students recognize the strengths within their borderland, immigrant, and POC identities.
Palma Ramirez’s project was deeply shaped by her own upbringing. “I was born and raised in El Paso in a mixed-status immigrant family,” she shared, describing a childhood that often involved crossing the border to visit family or access healthcare. These experiences created significant barriers during the college application process, particularly around financial aid.
As a high school senior, Palma Ramirez was named an LEDA Scholar, an opportunity that provided intensive college counseling and resources. Her capstone emerged, in part, from a desire to return those tools to other students in her community facing similar challenges.
At Brown, Palma Ramirez noticed a disconnect between scholarship and practice. “I saw how many courses, articles, and books loved to talk about the border and the challenges immigrant students face, without actually working with the community or giving the community any tangible resources back,” she said. Originally conceived as a research project or proposed school curriculum, her capstone shifted direction after conversations with former teachers revealed that Texas policy and infrastructure would make implementation unlikely.
A turning point came when she connected with leaders at MACC. “Here, I learned the importance of listening to the community’s needs and advice on what to do,” Palma Ramirez said. She utilized advice from MACC in deciding the best route to design the workshops.
She began with a literature review on border formation, migration, and deservingness, identifying where scholarship fell short in translating theory into practice. She then treated lived experience as methodology, speaking with a veteran public-school educator and leaders at MACC. “These conversations helped me assess how well the literature reflected everyday realities,” she said, while also illuminating policy constraints and the urgent need for college-going resources.
One of Palma Ramirez’s most important conclusions challenged dominant academic norms. “I was told many times that I should not do ‘mesearch’ or do research on my own communities because it creates bias,” she said. “But to me, that has been the most essential and instrumental part of being a developing researcher at Brown.”
A particularly formative moment came during a conversation with a veteran El Paso educator who had taught for over 25 years. He cautioned that even well-intentioned educational programs can narrow students’ futures, warning that “by selling it so hard, there’s an emphasis…to stop at that degree. And I feel like we’ve wasted a lot of talent.”
When Palma Ramirez proposed creating a school-based syllabus, he responded plainly: “It is not enough to want to change things if there is no infrastructure to support them.” That insight reshaped her project. “It made me realize that as a Brown student, maybe my role is to help build infrastructure using the privilege and resources Brown has given me so that communities can build their own solutions,” she said.
Palma Ramirez will attend Oxford University this fall as a Rhodes Scholar, pursuing a master’s degree in Migration Studies followed by a master’s in Social Data Science. While her future trajectory is still evolving, she remains committed to community-centered research. “I hope to utilize both qualitative and quantitative methods to tell the stories of my community and other border and immigrant communities while creating infrastructures rooted in justice,” she said.