LINEAGES AND OTHER TRADITIONS

[00:00:00] Certain traditions you know the cohort meetings the retreats the dinners the certain things that we do together that. If those didn’t exist the community could easily fall apart because students are busy. Then there’s a central space which is the First Wave family. And uhm it becomes tight-knit because those students come in and become intimate with each other in the summer before they even engage with the rest of campus community.

[00:00:32] First Wave lineages were started in the first cohort. Or after the first cohort. It was originally fifteen people in the first cohort I believe and fifteen in the second cohort. So what they wanted was a mentorship program which essentially what the lineages are. You have someone from first cohort who has a mentee from second cohort.

[00:00:56] A lot of First Wave students refer to their cohort members as like their brothers and sisters or their siblings. And First Wave students referred to their mentors as their parents.

[00:01:23] That student is my grandmother. That student is you know my my my great grandmother.

[00:01:29] You know your great great great great great great great great great great and so and so it’s really involved.

[00:01:36] Originally it was like this is how you survive this city. Again a lot of the people that First Wave recruited are low income students first time really being in this type of environment. So the mentorship program was like I made it through my freshman year and here’s how you can too. And then eventually evolves into this huge community. By the time I came in eighth cohort, there were many people who I just didn’t know. And there were a lot of people who I wanted to know. And and my lineage. I end up meeting everyone in my lineage and really felt like wow, I have a community here. One of the first people that I really got close with was a woman named Barbara Gonzalez from the fifth cohort. She’s from New York and she’d like would take me in. And just like order pizza we just watch movies. And she was like you’re in my lineage so I can do this you know. But that was a community that I needed.

[00:02:40] My lineage in particular doesn’t pass anything down but the program in itself passes down something started with Danez Smith in the first court. I don’t know if I can share what it is. It’s a it’s a pair of underwear. You aren’t supposed to wear them. Don’t wear them. No one wears them. But they. They actually were never worn. At least not to my knowledge and by the original wearer of them they were just really cool looking underwear. And then like every odd number cohorts someone in that cool word gets handed like gets passed down the underwear if you are like are worthy. There’s no like it like the requirements the eligibility for the underwear arelike completely arbitrary and depends on who has them at the time and some people feel like they should be passed down to like who they believe is like the most promising artist of the next cohort or who they have the strongest connection with or who they think will be like the strongest leader in the cohort. So it all depends. I got the drawers as a member of the fifth cohort and then I gave them to E.J. of the seventh cohort. And then, oh I want to say Francisco Velasquez in the ninth court has them and he will now pass them on to someone in the 11th cohort and you pass them down at the retreat. At the First Wave retreat in February. So. Yeah.