Oral history interview, Ana Karina Casas Ibarra, 2013 (video and transcript)

Ana Karina Casas Ibarra was born in a small town in Zacatecas, Mexico in 1986. She came to the United Sates when she was 11 with her younger brothers and her mother, who was escaping from an abusive marriage. She describes vividly the difficulty of crossing the border illegally, walking across a desert. Her family settled in Boulder, and she went to Casey Middle School and Boulder High School before starting college. Her progress through college is slow because of the need to work and save money to pay out-of-state tuition. She talks about the challenges of going to school initially as a non-English speaker, the assumption that Mexicans are less intelligent than whites, and the struggle for undocumented students who want to attend college because they cannot get scholarships or loans even if they do well in school. As an adult she wants to help people, especially kids who are in trouble with the law.