Thomas, now based in Pharr, Texas, graduated from Princeton with a B.A. in English. He writes fiction and nonfiction primarily about the US-Mexico borderlands. He’s the founder and board chair of a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, College Scholarship Leadership Access Program (CSLAP), where he works directly with students to increase college enrollment rates in Hidalgo County. CSLAP ensures that no matter what backgrounds students come from, they can tell their stories effectively and increase their chances of getting into college. Through his advocacy to the State Board of Education, he helps ensure that ethnic studies and the stories of the people of Rio Grande Valley are told in their K-12 curriculum.

Thomas recently entered county government as a lead coordinator for Hidalgo County’s Prosperity Task Force, a new initiative designed to uplift residents out of poverty through developing human capital and economic opportunity. This year, he published his debut book of short stories on the Texas-Mexico borderlands, The River Runs, and his co-authored historical memoir on the South Texas Chicano Movement, El Curso de la Raza: The Education of Aurelio Manuel Montemayor.

This interview is part of the Career x Identity series, which provides students a look into alumni career trajectories with a focus on intersections of career and identity. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How do you describe your identity, and what does it mean to you?

I describe myself as a fronterizo, a borderlands man. Growing up here in the Rio Grande Valley as a white-skinned Mexican American, I was always treated like I was from the border. It really wasn’t until going to Princeton, a much more diverse place — both in terms of demographics but also where people geographically came from — and interacting with other Latinos that I was seen as non-Latino in some spaces. And in white-majority spaces, I did not feel comfortable with my cultural heritage feeling hidden.

How has your identity/identities affected your career path and exploration?

I was a first-generation low-income college student. Those are identities I didn’t understand until I got to college and understood there’s a lot of students like me. These two identities informed my college access work to make sure that students from the Rio Grande Valley could have the resources and mentorship that I did not have. 

At CSLAP, we train near-peer mentors ages 20 to 25  to come back to the region and to mentor young people in the college admissions process. We make sure students apply to and graduate from college no matter what background they’re from. All that work stems from identity, which is asking ourselves, “How do we make sure students can come into their own identities and own them no matter what field they want to go into in the future?”

What do you find most fulfilling about your work? 

At Princeton, I knew I wanted to make a difference in my hometown. I just didn’t know how. So, I created my own platform to give back.

Now through our nonprofit, we’re able to give young people a platform to stand on even before graduating from college. At CSLAP, their youth is a superpower. Getting trained in near-peer mentorship enables them to uplift students in ways their counselors and teachers often cannot. It also draws them back to their hometowns and their school districts to give more resources and support that they didn’t have to the upcoming generations. 

In what ways do you see your identities impact your work? 

As a fronterizo, I see the need to own narratives from the U.S.-Mexico border or else other people will own them for us. I tell my college students, we can bring the unique perspectives we have from being from the Rio Grande Valley everywhere we go. We carry the borderlands with us. And if we're conscious of that fronterizo identity, then we can inform whatever field of work we do with that binational, bicultural, and bilingual consciousness that is going to become so necessary in the 21st century. 

We need to teach more of our stories in our school curriculum. As a high school student, I had no clue what it was like to be a Mexican American because I never learned about Mexican Americans, even in my social studies courses. 

It wasn’t until Princeton that I realized how unique it was to own my own history and my own stories from the Rio Grande Valley. When I came back home, I started raising awareness about specific civil rights events that happened in my hometown that are simply being lost to history because those individuals are passing away. A few months after graduating from Princeton, I spearheaded a project to erect a Texas Historical Commission plaque for the Pharr Riot of 1971, a turning point for civil rights in my hometown. Now, the plaque is used as a teaching tool in local schools.

If we teach our young people these topics in high school, wherever they go to college, they’re going to be aware of where they come from. So if they choose to come back to the border, they know how to bring the border into the 21st century with them. 

What were some challenges (if any) you faced in the workplace that were directly tied to your identity?

There is a unique pull that the U.S.-Mexico borderlands have on you. To me, it’s not necessarily a challenge, but more so an ongoing struggle to make sure that fellow fronterizos are being well represented in society and they’re coming back to make a difference in our communities. 

What advice do you have for students as they reflect on their identities — how might it play a role in their career development journey?

Assess the flexibility of the skill sets in your respective fields. The English major is a great example. I knew I wanted to write stories, but now I'm writing stories in completely different ways than I never expected, from local histories to my nonprofit’s impact. But I'm able to do all of this because of the flexibility of the liberal arts, especially English at Princeton.

One of my favorite English courses at Princeton was “Beowulf” with Professor Sarah Anderson. I do not use “Beowulf” in my day-to-day career. However, I do use the critical thinking, reading, and writing skills we sharpened every week in that course. Reading and analyzing an ancient poem through different critical lenses every week expanded my mental capacities.

Writing the essays, all the reading and the speaking exercises — I have learned to apply all those fundamental skill sets in a multitude of ways. I recommend students imagining the future 10 years from now and asking, “How are these skills going to be applied differently? What must I do in the meantime to develop these skills to make sure I can be competitive in different markets? How can I continue developing my passion as it evolves throughout the years?”

How would you advise students to think broadly about careers and how their academics may connect to a wide range of options?

I would first identify what draws you to your field of interest in the first place. Take that passion and see how that passion can be applicable across different skill sets. 

To me, the English major opened up so many different realms of what storytelling could mean, and that has enabled me to grow as a person. I would have never envisioned myself as a business owner, a politician, an academic, and a writer. But now I do, because storytelling has enabled me to open all those career fields.

What I find most unique about Princeton is the informal motto and how it truly transforms the student experience. When we take our writing seminar or our freshman seminar, we’re constantly asking ourselves at the end of every class, “How can I take what I just learned and apply it in the real world to make a real difference?” If we can frame our Princeton experience around the university’s informal motto, I think whatever field students go into, they will be happy because they know they’re making a difference in the world.