A Multimethod Approach to Mapping College Opportunity in a Small Town in California’s Central Coast

Mayra Puente
Education
UC Santa Barbara

This interdisciplinary and multimethod research project investigates the college opportunities available to first-generation rural Latinx high school seniors from working-class backgrounds living in a small town along California’s Central Coast agricultural region. It centers issues of rurality and geography to make sense of rural Latinx students’ complex decision-making as they decide where to pursue higher education. This project engages in various methods like photovoice and walking pláticas (conversations), which documents aspects of the community that have the potential to promote or constrain higher education access. These methods will be shaped by the previous pláticas (conversations) I held with rural Latinx youth during the 2024-2025 academic year. The photos, audio, and video recordings captured this summer will humanize and nuance the secondary quantitative data collected from sources such as the US Census. The end result is more complex GIS maps that more holistically capture the community and its assets and areas for improvement to ensure equitable access to higher education for its rural Latinx youth.