Summer 2007 Alumnae Quarterly Web Extra
From the Trailer Park to the Ivy League
By Corinna Yazbek ’01
The year I started at Mount Holyoke it was ranked the most beautiful campus in the nation. That same year, my mom went to housing court again and finally lost our home, the trailer in which I’d grown up in Southwest Florida.
My senior year in high school I’d visited Mount Holyoke. It looked exactly like my fantasy of a New England college—old brick buildings, snow on the ground, real trees (oaks and maples, the kind that didn’t grow in my neighborhood), and smart, sophisticated women taking their education seriously. I hated where I came from and wanted to get as far away from it as possible. I think I knew how different the culture would be at Mount Holyoke—going from the trailer park to the ivy-covered walls, from bumming rides off friends with cars so I could hang out at the local mall where I couldn’t afford to buy anything to burying my nose in an old book in the musty-smelling library, also renowned for its beauty. However, I didn’t realize the cost of leaving my class culture behind and trying to immerse myself in this new one—elite academia. I’d been desperate for it my entire life, and now here I was.
I was at Mount Holyoke because I wanted to move up the class ladder and out of poverty. I desperately clung to the idea that a good education was my ticket out. While at MHC I never questioned how I got there, what made me different from the other kids in the trailer park, why I got out and they didn’t. They ended up pregnant in high school, dropping out, addicted, working low-wage jobs and aspiring to buy their own trailers so they could move out of their parents’. As far as I was concerned, that would have been a fate worse than death. I needed to pass—or fit in—for four years in order to convince myself and everyone else that I belonged here.
Though it would sometimes have felt easier to let classist comments made by professors and other students go and just keep trying to fit in, I definitely spoke up when my buttons got pushed. I remember a discussion on mhc.chat where people were debating the CRACK Program, which paid drug-addicted women $200 in exchange for sterilization or long-term birth control. Students proclaimed that these women shouldn’t be having children because they wouldn’t be able to care for them. In an ideal world, all children’s basic needs would be met, but being the daughter of addicts I felt they were invalidating my childhood, that well-intentioned students were spouting the classist, racist, antifeminist rhetoric that claims drug addicts can’t be parents and poor women shouldn’t have babies. I posted this as my response, and it felt good to be seen and heard for a moment.
The truth is that there are other women at Mount Holyoke who are the daughters of addicts and grew up poor or working class—sometimes we had our basic needs met, sometimes we didn’t. There is no “should have” in terms of our experiences, our childhoods are just as valid as the middle-or upper-class experiences. We may find ourselves the subject of reading materials in sociology, history, or economics classes, yet we are so painfully invisible at Mount Holyoke.
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Note: This essay was excerpted from a larger piece written while the author was working for Class Action.
