A First-Generation Tale of Strife and Success

Alejandra Campoverdi grew up with her immigrant mother, aunts, and grandparents, in a crowded Santa Monica apartment with fashion-magazine cutouts on bedroom walls. Her outfits gestured toward the status to which she aspired. She wore a plaid uniform skirt to what is now Saint Monica Preparatory, the Catholic school she attended thanks to financial aid and her grandma taking on work as a teacher’s aide. In high school, she connected with her Latina identity and her teen-age, gang-member boyfriend, Spider, by dressing like a chola—a female counterpart to a cholo, a term often used to describe a Mexican American gang member—with brown lipstick, baggy pants, and hair teased high.

Campoverdi was the first in her family to graduate from college, at the University of Southern California. There, she joined the Delta Delta Delta sorority; her new uniform, she writes, was “Reef sandals and Roxy shorts.” When she enrolled at the Harvard Kennedy School, she took “mental notes of the ‘Harvard look,’ ” opting for outfits such as a “red-and-white plaid blazer, jeans, and boots.” Campoverdi went on to work on the Presidential campaign of Illinois Senator Barack Obama and got a job in the Obama White House, where she “wore a blazer buttoned to my collarbone and a knee-length skirt.” She worked for Obama from his first day in office until 2012, spending part of that time as special assistant to the deputy chief of staff for policy, and the rest as deputy director of Hispanic media, a position that allowed her to help craft the Administration’s appeal to Latinos.

Campoverdi’s story is one of success won through ambition, hard work, and talent, which enabled her rise “from welfare to the White House,” as she puts it in a new memoir, “First Gen.” But the book’s most poignant lessons are drawn from the emotional and physical scars she accumulated along the way, and that attend any amount of social climbing. “First Gen” is Campoverdi’s story, but she also wants her book to resonate with others who are the first or only person in their “family, community, or social demographic group to cross a threshold.” The “First and Onlys,” she calls them.

Campoverdi learned about ambition from her mother, Cecilia. “If you don’t ask, you don’t get,” her mother would tell her. When Cecilia was a young girl in Mexico, she listened to Janis Joplin, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles by carrying her radio to the border and holding it above her head to pick up signals from the United States, deepening her desire to move there someday. She eventually landed a factory job in Los Angeles, where the hairnet and rubber gloves she wore didn’t live up to her “vision of Hollywood,” but nevertheless allowed her to purchase trendy corduroy bell-bottoms with her first paycheck. Envious of her reports on life north of the border, her sisters joined her. Their parents soon followed. A few years later, Cecilia had a baby girl.

Campoverdi’s childhood was full of imagination, fun, and love. This was the “upside to living with so many adults as an only child,” she writes. With her grandma and mom, she fancied herself Cinderella and absorbed “cross-class fairy tales or romances” such as the 1970 film “Love Story,” about the relationship between a wealthy male student at Harvard, played by Ryan O’Neal, and a working-class female student at Radcliffe, played by Ali MacGraw. Campoverdi’s mom liked the movie so much that she began calling her Ali.

But Campoverdi also writes that there was “an air of constant chaos” at home. She was born when her mom was twenty-five and still “chasing her version of the American Dream”: dancing, roller skating, fashion, celebrity, and men. Her grandmother Abi, short for abuelita, was her rock, but her grandfather Abito, short for abuelito, frequently came home drunk from his job as a mechanic. And money was tight. One Christmas morning, Campoverdi opened the door to find a “cardboard box filled with food and wrapped toys sitting on our doorstep.” It was a gift from the Santa Monica Fire Department. She recalled feeling “dueling emotions—happiness for the much-needed help and embarrassment that we had become charity cases.”

As a child, Campoverdi recalls, she took it upon herself to solve her family’s problems. “I saw hemorrhaging around me—from money to food to energy to options—so I made myself the tourniquet,” she writes. Like many children of immigrants, she “became the family helper, translator, doctor questioner, form filler, concept explainer, living dictionary, and therapist.” Campoverdi also began to wrestle with what Latina identity meant to her. Spanish was her first language and the one she spoke at home. When she started school, her teacher thought she had a learning disability and put her in a lower-level reading group. When Abi made everyone at home speak to her granddaughter in English, Campoverdi began to excel. At the beginning of high school, she saw some Latinas sitting on the steps of the library and thought, “These are my people.” But when she tried to sit with them, the “leader of the pack” said to her crew, “Raise your hand if you want her to sit with us.” None did. She only became an insider when she started dating Spider.

The contradictions of Campoverdi’s Latina identity continued to haunt her at U.S.C. “I wanted Spider, and I wanted USC,” she writes. “I was proud of my Latina identity, and I was diving headfirst into doing supposed ‘white people things.’ ” During her first year, Campoverdi lived at home and drove to school in the run-down Mercury Capri her mom bought her with her earned-income tax-credit refund. When she moved into her sorority house as a sophomore, her “living conditions leveled up big-time,” she writes. Every morning, she would “walk down our winding mahogany staircase in my fluffy robe to the breakfast room, where stacks of newspapers and steamy fresh blueberry muffins were waiting like a dream.” A Black cook made her omelettes, and Mexican housekeepers cleaned up after her. Campoverdi found it “jarring to be a woman of color in a predominantly white environment, who was being waited on by women of color.” She had “never felt more rich or more poor in my life,” she writes.

After graduation, Campoverdi waitressed as she flirted with a modelling career. She danced in music videos for Justin Timberlake and Smash Mouth, appeared in “The Aviator” with Leonardo DiCaprio, and was in a beer commercial with Ben Stiller. In 2004, she appeared in Maxim wearing lingerie, which she now sees as her greatest professional misstep. Later, when Campoverdi worked for Obama, Gawker featured the photos and called her the “White House’s Maxim Babe” in a story about her rumored romantic relationship with the speechwriter Jon Favreau. Her mood sank as she read the story and clicked through the comments. “If the photos weren’t enough to do me in,” she writes, “the snarky implication throughout the story—that I didn’t deserve what I’d accomplished—would. I felt as if every sexist stereotype had been projected onto me at once.”

After Campoverdi left the White House, she moved to Miami to help launch Fusion, then a joint venture between Univision and Disney’s ABC News. It was there that she first earned “six figures,” a goal she had set for herself when she was waitressing after college. In Miami, she lived on the twenty-fourth story of a high-rise building. Her apartment had floor-to-ceiling windows through which she saw the ocean. She writes that she “swam in turquoise water every weekend and drove a silver BMW.” She was finally “successful enough to breathe easier and start saving some money, yet not successful enough to bring my entire family along with me.” Her mom, who was proud of everything her daughter had accomplished, told Campoverdi, “I live vicariously through you.”

Campoverdi continued to rise, and she continued to struggle. Breast cancer had afflicted at least three generations of women in her family. Her great-grandmother Maria Elena died from the disease when Campoverdi was a baby. Her maternal grandmother, Abi, died from it when Campoverdi was a junior in high school. Her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer after Campoverdi graduated from U.S.C. When her mother tested positive for the BRCA2 gene mutation, in 2014, Campoverdi got tested as well. Her positive result meant that she had an eighty-five-per-cent chance of developing the disease. Four years later, back in California, she opted for a double mastectomy.