The Emerald Newsletter | Kappa Delta Chi Sorority The Emerald Fall 2019 | Page 32

Dreamer's journey: For Rosalinda Espinosa, being an
undocumented immigrant made her work harder
By Carla Hinton @TheOklahoman
NORMAN — When she wasn't studying, Rosalinda
Espinosa spent hours at the public library
researching college majors and taking practice tests
for the ACT and SAT. But most of all, she scoured
every resource she could for information about
college scholarships. The enterprising student got
excited just thinking about the possibilities for her
life. Then a high school counselor gently dashed
those hopes with cold, hard facts. Espinosa wasn't
eligible for many scholarships and government-
backed aid because she was an undocumented
immigrant. "I was devastated," she said. "That had
always been my yellow brick road — if you work
hard in school, opportunities will come to you."
University of Oklahoma junior Rosalinda Espinosa is shown at the Memorial
Student Union on the OU campus in Norman. [Chris Landsberger/The Oklahoman]
Today, Espinosa is the newly crowned Miss Hispanic
University of Oklahoma. Through her studious ways
and hard work at jobs both on campus and off,
Espinosa, 20, is finishing up her junior year as an
industrial engineering major. She is about to embark
on her second prestigious summer internship before
starting her senior year of college in the fall. The
honor roll student said she wants to encourage
Hispanic girls to pursue STEM careers as part of her
pageant platform. It's her Dreamer's dream to help
others succeed.
I've come this far.'
In her cultural presentation for the pageant,
Espinosa wrote and performed a monologue about a
night she had an acute bout of homesickness. The
young woman said she seemed to be plagued by
"imposter syndrome," a psychological term referring
to a pattern of behavior where people doubt their
accomplishments and have a persistent, often
internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud. She
reached out to her mom for consolation and found
her mother on her doorstep shortly afterward. 
 "My mom drove down to Norman to bring me 'arroz
con leche' (a traditional dessert)," she said, smiling. The
moving story centered around the themes at the heart
of her personal journey: the importance of family and
education. She said her parents left Mexico to bring her
to America so that she would have access to a good
education and a better life. She said they worked odd
jobs over the years to support her and her two younger
siblings and now her father is a mechanic and her
mother is a child care worker. Espinosa said she was
determined to find ways to pay for her college
education herself. In 2012, the Obama Administration
created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
program, widely known as DACA, and Espinosa enrolled
in it. The program allows qualifying undocumented
immigrants who came to the United States as children
to apply for renewable, two-year permits that would
protect them from deportation and allow them to work.
The program doesn't provide these young people
known as "Dreamers" with a path to citizenship, but it
gave college-minded students like Espinosa an
opportunity.
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