UC Santa Cruz

As more Latinx First Generation College Students (LFGCS) attend college, they can face a cultural, academic, and social university context that focuses on individuality and competitiveness that may differ from their own cultural values of communality and cooperation. In this dissertation, I used Community Cultural Wealth and Latinx Critical Race theories to address the experiences of LFGCS in college. In a survey of 110 LFGCS, I investigated if college organization support predicted their perceived persistence in college through the sequential mediation of navigational capital and academic self-efficacy. As predicted, the relationship between college organization support and perceived persistence in college was significantly and sequentially mediated by navigational capital and academic self-efficacy. These findings contribute to the literature by showing how participation in college organizations helps LFGCS’ develop navigational capital and academic self-efficacy and promotes their confidence in persisting to graduation. Further, the results also underscore how focusing on LFCGS’ strengths challenges the deficit perspective that has often been applied to Latinx students in higher education.