A best-selling author, a former White House aide to former President Barack Obama and a Harvard graduate. These are all major accomplishments in Alejandra Campoverdi’s life, but they are not what defines her, Campoverdi said in a talk at Wichita State on Wednesday.
Wichita State’s Academic Affairs division hosted an author talk focused on Campoverdi’s 2023 memoir “First Gen.” The memoir details the trials and tribulations of growing up as a Mexican American woman in Los Angeles and a first-generation college student.
“It was like a Hallmark (movie) or tell the truths of what happened and I chose to (tell the truth),” Campoverdi said.
Jacob Mendez is the assistant dean of Student Success for the College of Engineering at WSU. Mendez helped organize the event, saying it was important for students to hear Campoverdi’s story.
“I read the book in one day, actually, in the airport, and I just knew that it would impact students,” Mendez said.
WSU Provost Monica Lounsbery said it’s important for students to hear about the struggles others have faced.
“I think these are struggles that people have, and I think it’s important to share real stories about the human struggle,” Lounsbery said.
Campoverdi said she shared her story to explain the “spaces between those bullet points” of her life. She detailed that her accomplishments were not achieved without hardships.
“You heard I went to Harvard, right?” Campoverdi said. “Did you hear I had six figures worth of student loans? That was left out of the (book’s) bio, right? And you heard I worked at the White House. Did you hear that I had to live off my credit card to take an unpaid volunteer position in (Obama’s) ‘08 campaign in order to be able to work in the campaign, which is how I eventually get to the White House?”
Campoverdi said, that before writing the memoir, she had spoken at schools, hoping to inspire fellow first-generation students to push through their hardships and accomplish all of their dreams. But she felt that only listing the accomplishments in her life without including the “spaces between” was not the right way to go about it.
“There was sometimes some guilt there for me,” she said. “So I would start changing the way I would talk (at these schools), and I start saying some of the things that eventually became this book. And when I would say those things, I would see nodding heads. I would see … a lot of tears.”
Campoverdi then decided to write “First Gen.”
Campoverdi said “First Gen” was not written to say, “I know what I did, and this is how you do it.”
Instead, she said it was to say, “How is it that we can help each other? It’s by being honest.”
