In high school, ninth-generation Texan Olivia Sirchio decided that she wanted to volunteer with migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. "I felt like these values of Southern hospitality that had been sort of drilled into my head were really not in alignment with the things that I was hearing on the news," she said.

"I had been raised going to church twice a week, spending all day on Sunday at church, and having these ideals, specifically Christ's commandment to love thy neighbor. That was one of the most important things that I was ever taught in church."

To Sirchio, seeing families separated at the southern border just didn't make sense. "They are literally our neighbors. Why are they not being afforded the same sort of kindness?"

Having learned Spanish in school, she began offering her services as a translator for asylum seekers in Dallas. She didn't realize it would be a reckoning. "I had some pretty extreme negative responses to my beliefs and my interests," she said. "I had issues with teachers referring to me as 'criminal' in my classes and telling other students not to associate with me if they wanted to get college recommendation letters. My teachers said that they wanted to inform my future employers about my 'anti-American activities.'"

When it came time to leave behind her tiny, conservative high school and embark on her undergraduate studies, she felt pulled west toward California not only for its natural beauty but more importantly for its tolerance, especially in academic settings. "The culture of open-mindedness and also this sort of desire for the truth is something that I'm really, really drawn to, because I know what it feels like to feel betrayed by your community and what you've been taught—to discover the truth and to try to bring that information to that community, and to be punished and excluded for that," she said. "That impacted me really quite profoundly."

In particular, the Department of Global and International Studies piqued her interest. "The global studies department is incredibly unique," she said. "Not only do they allow you to lean on different disciplines and engage in different fields, but they actually encourage it quite heavily." From the start, she knew that she wanted to take a clinical or scientific approach to understanding the problems she was interested in.

After taking some human rights courses that detailed the ways in which countries like the United States sidestep their obligations to the populations they're supposed to serve, she became disillusioned with that approach. Instead, she pivoted to trying to better understand the material conditions that relate to rights—for example, how urban development and sustainability can help alleviate poverty. (In addition to her international studies major, she's also earning minors in global sustainability as well as humanities and law.)

"I'm really interested in how to materially secure human rights for people across the Americas, including Latin America," Sirchio says. She has appreciated the ability to focus on a specific region in her studies as well as to conduct a lot of field research, which she's passionate about.

Putting her Spanish-language skills to work, Sirchio is currently conducting senior honors research on the Mexican public housing program INFONAVIT, which was established in 1972 to increase supply as well as to facilitate housing affordability and financing. "They had a two-pronged approach, but as a result of pressures to deregulate in the '90s, they ceded the construction element to the private sector," she explained. Two decades after the program was started, construction of new housing ceased, and the program began to focus solely on financing existing housing; new construction was henceforth only available via public-private contracts and partnerships. In 2024, however, under newly elected president Claudia Sheinbaum, INFONAVIT was reformed and will resume building new low-cost homes in Mexico. 

Mentored by Sylvia Croese, global and international studies assistant professor, Sirchio is working on a comparative analysis of INFONAVIT's first two phases to try to understand what its future may look like. "There's a growing trend in urban development literature to critique neoliberalism, but there has not been much comparative work evaluating specifically this program and its efficacy before and after its revision," says Sirchio.

Croese isn't the only faculty member who has supported Sirchio in her work here. "Almost every single professor that I've encountered has been immensely supportive and kind, and that's a really wonderful thing about my department, and I think also the culture of social sciences at UCI," said Sirchio. "It's not just professors who create and produce amazing research—they're also really fantastic and involved educators."

Croese, along with Yousuf Al-Bulushi, associate professor, and Eve Darian-Smith, Distinguished Professor and department chair, have all been "deeply, deeply inspiring to me and to my future," said Sirchio, who initially thought that law would be the most sensible career path for her. "But through having professors like Dr. Croese and like Dr. Al-Bulushi and like Dr. Darian-Smith, I realized—first off—that [teaching] was a possibility. I was sort of raised in a place where graduate school in general is almost considered frivolous or like, a thing that rich people do when they're bored. So, being a professor didn't even really seem like an option. And through their guidance and what they've offered me, I sort of had this epiphany."

After graduating in June, Sirchio intends to continue her education and become a professor herself. "If I could give a future student half of the things that they've given me, I would feel satisfied and fulfilled."

Although she's applied to a variety of Ph.D. programs in California, Sirchio wants to stay at UCI, or at least come back to teach at some point in the future. "I really hope that my research, and also my intimate knowledge of how these really divisive conversations trickle down into the classroom, will allow me to navigate those conversations and that research better as we go into the future and hopefully try to end an incredibly divisive and polarizing era," she said. "I hope, in some way, that my research and my teachings will help back in Texas."

—Alison Van Houten for UCI Social Sciences