Mayra Hernández García is a 2024 graduate of Edison High School in Fresno, California and one of the school’s valedictorians.

She became a top student at the school while dealing with many challenges during her high school career, including her family’s housing insecurity during the pandemic and her father being diagnosed with lymphoma cancer her junior year.

Both of her parents were born in México and are Indigenous people from the state of Oaxaca who speak their native indigenous language Triqui.

Hernández García had to help her parents with many responsibilities at home, including language barriers and caring for her three younger siblings while her mother worked, since her father was unable to.  

One of the things that helped her juggle her schoolwork and maintain her grades was participating in Fresno State’s Upward Bound, a program serving low-income and/or first-generation college bound high school students.

The program serves students at six high schools in the Fresno Unified School District, recruiting freshman and sophomore students and preparing them for higher education throughout their high school years.

“It was during quarantine time, and I felt like I needed something to guide me more, especially since online wasn’t helping me enough,” said Hernández García in an interview with the Fresno Bee. At the Saturday academies she attended she received tutoring, career counseling, assistance with college applications, and financial aid advice.

Through her participation in Upward Bound, she was selected to attend the virtual National Student Leadership Conference, which helped her choose to major in political science in college.

Hernández García applied to 20 colleges, including John Hopkins University in Baltimore. Although the college has a 7 percent acceptance rate, she was offered early admission and a  four-year scholarship she will use to major in political science with a minor in applied mathematics. After graduating from John Hopkins, she plans to attend law school and pursue a career as a lawyer.

This will be Hernández García’s first time living outside of Fresno and while her parents are scared, she is leaving home and moving to the East Coast, at the same time, “they know the type of person that they raise, they know who I am,” she said. “And so, they’re fine with me leaving.”