Leslie Patricia Luqueño is a 6th-year doctoral candidate at Stanford's Graduate School of Education, specializing in the Sociology of Education. She holds an M.A. in Sociology from Stanford University and a B.A. with honors in Anthropology and Educational Studies from Haverford College.

Her research interests lie at the intersection of migration, higher education, and family studies, with a focus on the experiences of the children of immigrants within higher education. Particularly, she is interested in how the children of migrants develop unique pockets of familial and experiential knowledge that help them survive and thrive at college institutions. Furthermore, she is deeply committed to advancing qualitative research methods within sociology and expanding the use of autoethnography, community-based participatory research, and Chicana feminist methodology within the discipline.

Leslie's dissertation is titled "College is a Familia Occasion: How Latinx Immigrant Families Navigate the Transition toward Higher Education." In her two-year qualitative, longitudinal study, she follows a group of Latinx parents and students as they go through the college application process and transition into the first year of college, learning deeply about how the transition shapes familial dynamics and relationships as well as how family affects educational change.

Utilizing her novel conceptual framework, immigrant legacies, Leslie delves into how immigration familial histories manifest and the ways in which they inform how families support each other during this critical point of change. Using qualitative interviews, participant-observation, oral histories, and autoethnographic vignettes, Leslie's book-length dissertation centers families as experts of their lived experiences and cultivates a community-engaged research methodology that contributes to the organizations and people Leslie works with alongside in this project.

As a first-generation-to-college Latina student from a working-class, immigrant family herself, Leslie is dedicated to the expansion of justice and equity within higher education and engages in research projects that will have real-life impact on the communities she works with.

Leslie grew up in Bell Gardens, California, a predominantly Latinx, working-class community in the heart of Southeast Los Angeles. The proud eldest daughter of two Mexican, working-class immigrants, Leslie’s family inspired her to pursue higher education and seek opportunities that were unavailable to the generations before her. Leslie was fortunate to have been a part of a college access program called CTY Scholars, where her counselor emphasized the importance of familial involvement and collaboration during the college transition process. This experience motivated Leslie to think about how the family could be further incorporated into educational settings, especially for students like herself who came from collectivist, immigrant families.

Leslie became the first in her family to attend college, pursuing her bachelor’s degree at Haverford College, where she attended on a full-ride scholarship. While at Haverford, Leslie navigated the tension between her new life in suburban Pennsylvania while still being a source of support for her family back in Los Angeles. However, she also experienced life-changing opportunities at Haverford, including co-publishing a book with her adviser, Dr. Alison Cook-Sather, and serving as a research assistant for Dr. Anthony Jack through a summer research opportunity at Harvard University. These transformative experiences encouraged her to continue conducting research on the experiences of Latinx immigrant families, pursuing her Ph.D. in Education at Stanford University.

Now as a Ph.D. Candidate, Leslie is committed to giving back to the communities around her as a researcher, serving as a volunteer and research partner for Bay Area college access programs and mentoring undergraduate and graduate students at Stanford. Her family is still her central source of inspiration and she looks forward to becoming the first doctor in her entire extended family in just a few months! She is excited about becoming a professor post-graduation, in order to ‘pay it forward’ for the opportunities she was privileged to have and continue fostering the pipeline of future first-generation-student scholars within academia.