Growing up in Santa Barbara, Chelsea Guillermo-Wann started "developing concepts of white and brown" while she was still in grade school, concepts that gave her a different understanding of her white mother and brown father—his heritage both Mexican and Filipino. The town was "very stratified in terms of race and socioeconomic status," she says, and she saw that her father was treated differently than her mother—mistreated, that is—although both had college degrees. This "led me to question issues of social stratification and racism," she says.

Throughout her K-12 public education and later attending Westmont College, Chelsea came to see the privileges of being the second generation in her family to attend college. After graduating, she took a job with the state-funded California Student Opportunity and Access Program (Cal-SOAP) to support underrepresented students and their families in the college-going process. Her colleagues, both there and from more recent work in community colleges and student retention, encouraged her to get a master's degree, and she was later accepted for master's studies in UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Quickly she saw that "I had so many questions that just could not be answered in a one-year program," and one of her first-quarter professors, Sylvia Hurtado, supported her continuation for a doctoral degree.

Now beginning her third year as a Ph.D. student, Chelsea is drawing up a dissertation proposal likely to focus on something she knows a lot about: being multiracial in the academic world. Although a growing number of students represent more than one race or ethnicity, very little research has been done about their experience, beyond issues of identity formation. There’s even some question about whether they can be considered a group, she says.

People often point to the multiracial population as evidence that the United States is entering a post-racial period in its history. To test this idea, Chelsea did a qualitative pilot study of 14 students at a four-year university, framing race as a social construction. "For these students, race did play a big role in their lives," she says, although some were more aware of this than others. A few students, for example, said race was not an issue but went on "to talk about the benefits they got because they could pass as white" or gave examples of everyday experiences of discrimination based on being multiracial or a student of color in general. Many however, were keenly aware of how race influenced their daily lives despite the talk of a post-racial society.

Chelsea hopes her research will lead to greater understanding of her peers, particularly related to college retention issues. "We don’t know a whole lot about multiracial students," she says, "and they are extremely diverse."

Published in Fall 2010, Graduate Quarterly