“Education is everything. It determines your future”: Latino youth and college access in Montana

Although education and college is prized by the majority of Latino families that we know, and indeed they cite their children’s education as a major motivation for their own immigration, the gap between these aspirations and making them a reality can seem daunting. Citizenship status, costs, fear and intimidation, and a strong local job market are formidable deterrents in our state, as they are in many other states. In this essay we discuss the development of a program to help bridge the gap between Latino youths’ dreams of college and their position in a new rural immigrant destination where many obstacles exist to making these dreams into realities. Southwest Montana’s Latino population has grown 58 per cent since 2000.1 And although the state has a more than 200-year old history of Latinos, it is in many ways an invisible history (Kevane 2008). Few know the history of Latinos in the state. Nor do they know the present context of Latinos in the state.