This guest post was written by Marco Cobian ’25. A slightly different version is appearing as BC Law Magazine’s Winter 2025 In Closing column.

Growing up in Ramona, California–a rural and dispossessed, secluded and dust-strewn town tucked into the upper-hinterlands of San Diego County–I was acquainted with the rhythms and cycles natural to a certain way of life. Among these were the buzz and crackles of the morning commute, of pickup trucks leaving early for their daily pilgrimages only to return in the evening to start over again the next morning. This is the cycle that defines Ramona–the departure and the inevitable return, week after week, year after year, generation after generation.

This too, is the cycle that defined my family. I was born and raised in Ramona, just like my father before me. Moreover, I was born and raised in Ramona, the son of a first-generation American, the grandson of two undocumented Mexican-immigrants who settled in Ramona in their late-teens; I was born and raised the proverbial and vaunted embodiment of their hopes and dreams. As all three generations of my family ventured outside of Ramona and glanced at horizons just beyond the town’s borders, the gravitational pull of this cycle wrenched them back in, and just like that, the cycle repeated. And with each iteration, a certain impression of reality solidified in the psyche of my family–fortified by structural barriers and generational trauma, this cycle created limits on what one could imagine oneself being and doing. 

As I navigated throughout life, I excelled in both athletics and academics, and I began to represent what lay just beyond the cycle. I embodied a rupture in the cycle, an opportunity to break through and to break free. But what animates me now, what compels me to investigate how these familiar cycles are created and maintained, is asking the question, what good is breaking free if you don’t bring anyone with you?

This is the question that has steered me through the past eight-plus years of my life. In these years–six spent in Chicago as a student and educator, and now two in Boston as a law student–I’ve been granted a certain distance from the beats and paces of my youth. I’ve entered the orbit of new cycles, with new families and new histories, and I’ve had my worldview both challenged and clarified by these experiences. 

It was my experience as an educator, in particular, which transformed my outlook on what is demanded of those who work to dismantle systems of inequality on a daily basis. Being a special-ed teacher on Chicago’s Near-West Side–teaching to a student population which was predominantly Latinx and low-income–I saw my experiences from growing up in Ramona coalesce with my desire to advocate for my students. Amidst the backdrop of COVID-19, I confronted an education system which is designed to disadvantage students like those I taught. And as my time as an educator wore on, I felt the need to expand my advocacy outside of the classroom and into the realm of legal studies. Entering law school, I was motivated to investigate the apparatuses that continue to limit so many to the cycles for which they’ve always been confined. 

Through law school I yearned for opportunities to pursue legal research related to the inadequacies of our nation’s education system. Being a part of Law Review, for example, is an opportunity for me to develop my legal research and writing skills, while pursuing topics that are extremely resonant to me on both a personal and academic level.

Over the past eight years, I’ve reconciled with the fact that I will never shake the cycle which forged me; it remains tied to everything I do. But now, when I reflect on my upbringing—on the cycles that defined my life and the lives of so many others—I am grounded with a sense of purpose. What animates me now is not a desire to break free from these cycles and never return, but rather, to transform these cycles, and to explore new cycles through the structure of the law.

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Marco Cobian is the executive articles editor of Boston College Law Review.