If you’ve been rocking with Viva la Mami for a while, you probably know me as Jessica – the bicultural Latina mom talking about raising bilingual kids, navigating madrehood and feeling ni de aquí ni de allá, and all the beautiful, messy layers of our identidad. But there’s a whole side of me that I’ve never really sat down and shared with you, and that’s my professional story.
So that’s exactly what I did on this week’s solo episode. And honestly? It felt like coming full circle.
The Girl Who Didn’t Know She Could Dream Bigger
I grew up in Chicago as the firstborn, not just in my immediate family, but the first cousin, the first daughter, the first everything to go to college. If you’re first-gen, you already know what that feels like. That quiet but enormous pressure to be the example, to not mess it up, to carry everyone’s hopes on your back while also trying to figure out what you actually want.
I went to a Chicago public neighborhood school, not because I chose it strategically, but because my parents didn’t know about selective enrollment, and honestly, neither did I. My school counselor was great, but he had nearly 1,000 seniors to look after. One-on-one guidance? That wasn’t really an option. So I did what a lot of first-gen kids do: I figured it out on my own, with very limited information.
I applied only to schools that didn’t require essays. I aimed for ACT minimums because I didn’t know tutoring or test prep was even a thing. I literally learned what “living on a campus” meant from watching movies. That’s how narrow my window into college life was — and I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.
Finding My Path in Higher Ed
I ended up at a small private liberal arts school just 10 minutes from my house. I commuted. It made financial sense, and my mom was right, it didn’t make sense to pay to live on campus when home was around the corner. But during orientation, when I got a tiny taste of residential college life, something clicked. I wanted that. The full experience. The community. The immersion.
So after my first year, I transferred. I found a small private school in rural Western Illinois just four hours from Chicago, and I went for it. And you know what? It was exactly what I needed.
I joined the orchestra (I played violin throughout high school and wasn’t ready to let that go). I pledged a sorority. I got involved in leadership. I became an admissions tour guide. And through that last one, a whole new world opened up.
My major was Spanish Education and I wanted to be a bilingual teacher. But after three practicums and one very intense elementary math class, I had to be honest with myself: the classroom wasn’t my place. I wanted to stay in education, but from a different angle. A mentor, the woman who had helped me transfer into my alma mater, saw something in me and said, “Have you thought about admissions? I think you’d be great at it.”
And I remember thinking: Wait. That’s a job?
A Decade in Higher Education
From that moment, I was all in. I graduated, landed a job at a small private liberal arts college in the Chicago suburbs, and fell in love with admissions work. I traveled the state, visited high schools, worked directly with students. It was the kind of role that made me feel like my story actually meant something like I could be the person that younger me never had.
Over the years, I went on to work at Loyola University Chicago (my alma mater, where I also earned my master’s in Higher Education), then as a regional admissions counselor for Millikin University, then for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I got involved with IACAC, the Illinois Association for College Admission Counseling, and started building my presence in the field.
Then life shifted, as it always does. My husband and I started thinking about starting a family, and the constant travel that came with recruiting started to feel unsustainable. So I made the move that people in the field call “going to the other side of the desk.” I transitioned from working in university admissions to working as a college counselor in a high school setting.
Motherhood, Mental Health, and Making Hard Choices
I joined a private high school in Chicago where 100% of the students were Latino – mostly Mexican, mostly first-generation. It was exactly the population I had always wanted to serve. But at the same time, my husband and I had moved to the suburbs, which meant an hour commute each way, a newborn at home, and a mental health spiral I wasn’t prepared for.
I started having intrusive thoughts during my commute. I was terrified I wasn’t going to make it home. I couldn’t show up fully for my students, and I couldn’t show up fully for my son. So I made one of the hardest decisions of my professional life – I left.
I don’t share that lightly. But I also think it’s important to name it, because so many of us moms are out here trying to hold every single piece together, and sometimes the bravest thing you can do is put something down.
After stepping back, I found a part-time role at a nonprofit focused exclusively on helping first-generation, low-income students from Chicago get to college. I stayed there for three years, and it reminded me of exactly why I got into this work in the first place.
The Gap That Changed Everything
Last fall, after we had moved to México and I took on a part-time application reviewer role with the University of Illinois, something became impossible to ignore. Reviewing application after application, I kept seeing the same pattern: students whose parents were first-gen college graduates, people just like me, were showing up underprepared. Their essays didn’t meet the bar. Their school lists weren’t strategic. They were navigating a system that had changed dramatically since their parents went through it.
And that’s when it hit me: first-generation parents are just as underserved as their children.
We made it to college – some of us barely, many of us without the support we deserved. But making it through doesn’t mean we know how to guide our kids through a college admissions landscape that looks completely different today. We default to the school counselor who’s managing 400+ students. We ask la prima who got into a good school five years ago. We rely on a sibling who graduated before the Common App changed everything. And none of that is wrong, community knowledge is beautiful, but it may not be enough.
There are over 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States. The process is more competitive than ever. And our kids deserve someone in their corner who knows the current landscape inside and out.
Introducing Avila College Consulting
So here’s my big announcement: I’m launching Avila College Consulting.
This is something that’s been living in my mind and heart for the past six months, ever since we settled into México and I finally had enough clarity to ask myself, how can I take everything I know and use it to actually change things for families like mine?
Right now, I’m building a beta group for families with rising juniors or seniors for the 2026–2027 school year. I’m offering deeply discounted rates for this inaugural group because I want to work closely with a small number of families, support their students, and grow alongside them.
I’m also in the early stages of building a beta group here in León and the Bajío area for students interested in pursuing university studies in the United States or Canada. International college admissions is a space I know well, and there’s a real need for it here.
If this is speaking to you, whether you’re a first-gen parent who wants more than what the system is offering your child, or you’re a family in México dreaming of a U.S. or Canadian university experience, I’d love to connect.
📩 Reach out at podcast@vivalamami.com 📲 DM me on Instagram at @vivalamami
I’ll send you the link to schedule a free 20-minute consultation so we can talk about your student, your goals, and whether we’re a good fit for each other.
Why I’m Sharing This Here
I know this episode felt a little different from my usual Viva la Mami content. But everything I do comes back to being a mom and wanting more for our kids than we had for ourselves. That drive, that first-gen hunger to give our children what we had to fight for, is exactly what connects my professional life to this community.
You’ve trusted me with your madrehood journey. Now I’m inviting you into this next chapter too.
Show Notes
In this solo episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on a side of me I don’t often share – my professional story. I walk you through my journey as a first-generation college student, how I stumbled into the world of higher education, and the decade-long career in college admissions and counseling that followed. And yes, I have a BIG announcement at the end that I’m so excited to finally share with you.
What you’ll hear:
- My experience navigating the college process as a first-gen Latina with no roadmap and limited guidance
- How I transferred colleges, found my people, and discovered a whole career path I didn’t know existed
- Why first-gen parents are just as underserved as their children when it comes to college admissions
- The gap I noticed while reviewing college applications, and why what worked 10 years ago won’t work for our kids today
Resources Mentioned:
About Jessica Cuevas
Jessica is the founder and creator of Viva la Mami, LLC a community centered around Latina motherhood. Jessica created this platform after not finding empowering stories about experiences of Latina moms. She realized that there was a lack of representation in this space and felt there was a need for mamis to share their stories and to learn more about the nuances about motherhood through a cultural lens.
Viva la Mami’s mission is to empower the modern Latina mom to redefine the meaning of madrehood through education, story-telling, and cultural relevance all while bringing comunidad together.
