Over the summer, I was selected to attend a research program at UCSB. During my time there, I studied underlying agendas in seemingly neutral legislation and learned more about the law, society, and policy than I ever had before. Yet the long hours at the library pouring over political theories and applying them to case studies wasn’t what yielded the most important lesson for me. That came from my research partner, Sofia.

Sofia was brilliant. Before attending this program, she had already conducted research in the field of education policy. When I felt minuscule in the face of a daunting mountain of secondary sources, Sofia was able to rapidly and effectively compile a small selection of the sources most relevant to our study. When my writing wound itself into rambles and tangents, Sofia was able to extrapolate the essence of what I was trying to say and help me find my own way of putting my thoughts on paper. When our third partner ditched our meetings the week of our Capstone presentation for Burger King with her friends, Sofia was able to keep a level head, and we both memorized the third partner’s portion of the presentation by heart. She was a brilliant young woman with drive, ambition, and intellect of the likes I had never seen before.

My home county has the seventh-highest median household income in the state, and my private Catholic high school looks like a picturesque college campus. Although a minority and the child of immigrants, I have lived life with my fair share of privilege. By contrast, Sofia was a first-generation college applicant, selected by her local need-based scholarship program out of a large pool of students encompassing her entire region. She was then selected out of the larger global pool of applicants—many of whom had millionaire parents who could afford all sorts of opportunities for their children—for the 10% acceptance rate program. She balanced her scholarly duties, not just as a student but as a true pursuer of knowledge, with her family duties as the eldest sister, along with a number of jobs. She came from the kind of circumstances that neither I nor many could possibly imagine. She came from those kinds of circumstances and developed the type of intellect that few could dream of.

The idea of “Forefathers of America” is a vague and ambiguous one. America as a nation—America today—is an amalgam of various international cultures, the ancestral forefathers of whom had many more differences than they had similarities. And so, although the term “Forefathers” does not strictly constitute the Founding Fathers, equating the two must suffice for the purposes of this essay. 

In no way could the Founding Fathers have envisioned an America where a minority child of immigrants would work with a young, self-made, brilliant Mexican American woman to study the legislation of this nation. Even the few abolitionists of the group were far from advocates for full racial equality. Forget studying legislation; the Founding Fathers didn’t even believe that those in the masses who owned no land should vote at all. America was founded upon the principles of equality, democracy, and justice, but the Founding Fathers’ definitions of those three components were far from the definitions we understand today.

That being said, the Founding Fathers knew that any idea of the America of two centuries later could not be accurately envisioned. The Founding Fathers knew that different minority groups would eventually rise to new stations. The Founding Fathers knew that the qualities we hold at the center of our nation would change and become more defined. James Madison kept this in mind when he wrote the Bill of Rights; the Ninth Amendment prevents the government from restricting rights not explicitly enumerated in the original Constitution. Alexander Hamilton kept this in mind when he cited implied powers to establish the National Bank. The Founding Fathers carefully crafted a system that was both meant to last and not meant to last in its same form. They knew that we as a nation would mold a national identity in the centuries to come. They knew that we would reshape what it means to be American. They built a system that could grow and change with the times, a system that would eventually lead to an America where a minority child of immigrants would work with a young, self-made, brilliant Mexican American woman to study the legislation of this nation. In many ways, America today was our forefathers’ true vision.