This paper investigates the self-narratives of academically high-achieving, first generation college educated, and highly resilient Roma women. We place their meaning making and social navigation processes at the centre of our inquiry, understanding it as an important element of the resilience process of upward mobility. Our aim in this paper is to understand the strategies that are utilised to accomplish a resilient minority mobility trajectory by mitigating the tension and the emotional costs that are unavoidable when one travels long social distance between the community of origin and the newly attained class.

Throughout the biographical notes of two young Roma women, a Spanish and a Hungarian, we aim to illustrate the complexity of the personal experience of resilient upward social mobility of a selection of first-generation Roma university graduates, who come from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. We term a mobility trajectory ‘resilient’ when upwardly mobile people narrate their social ascension as having occurred with minimal emotional pain: when the “hidden costs” (Cole and Omari 2003) of social mobility is minimal. Our aim in this paper is to understand the strategies that are utilised to accomplish a resilient minority mobility trajectory by mitigating the tension and the emotional costs that are unavoidable when one travels long social distance between the community of origin and the newly attained class (Naudet 2012).

In the 1980s, the main focus of resilience research was growingly placed on the interaction of individual traits of coping with their physical and social environment (Rutter 1987 in Ungar 2011). From an ecological perspective, instead of ‘resilient individuals,’ investigations tend to highlight physical and social conditions that help individuals cope with horizontal and vertical stressors successfully. In this way, resilience can be understood as ‘the ecologically complex’ (multi-dimensional) processes that people engage in, that makes positive growth possible. Ungar’s (2012) analytical model highlights the role of the following 4 factors: personal strengths and challenges; ecology; available and accessible opportunities; and meaning creation.  In an educational context, academic resilience gained general consolidation recently, when OECD’s PISA test introduced this dimension in 2011 (Patakfalvi-Czirják, Papp Z., and Neumann 2018). Drawing on Ungar (2012), ‘meaning creation’, or ‘meaning making’ (Michele Lamont 2000), or ‘framing’ has a central role in our analytical framework. With Ungar’s words ‘the meaning we attribute to aspects of our social and physical ecology shape the opportunities that we create’ (2012, 22). In this sense, resources are not ‘objectively’ useful and supportive for a person, but one’s social and cultural environment may create an interpretation of them, or frame them as supportive or not, as (morally, technically, etc.,) acceptable or not, as accessible or not, and if so, to what extent.

In the meaning making process Naudet (2018) and others (Carter 2005; Vallejo 2012; Neckerman, Carter, and Lee 1999; Friedman 2016; Baxter and Britton 2001) draw attention to the conflicts and moral dilemmas socially upwardly mobile people struggle with, by oscillating between their attachment to the background of origin and their efforts to legitimise their attained social position. Upward mobility for socially disadvantaged individuals implies a ‘mastery over schemes of action and perception that are differently situated in the social space, and hence in contradiction with each other’ (Naudet 2018, 11). With this respect we centre our attention on the strategy of navigation, the capacity to identify and access resources and negotiation, the interaction with their background of origin in order to redefine, reframe and legitimise alternative meanings of resources and the conditions of accessing it (Harris, Chu, and Ziervogel 2018).

The paper draws on two research projects; the first conducted in Spain (2015-17) among 35 Roma university graduates, and the second in Hungary, (2018-20), between 150 Roma and non-Roma university graduates. We have selected one ‘resilient minority mobility trajectory’ as an ideal type from each database for the purposes of this comparison. In this category, upwardly mobile Roma graduates achieve their aspired self-development with the minimal ‘emotional cost’ possible. The Spanish dataset contains 35 purposively selected interviews with male and female first-generation Roma professionals, while the Hungarian set includes 45 (out of the 150 -Roma and non-Roma respondents). Data collection was made through semi-structured, narrative, in-depth life course interviews. We considered our interviewees Roma based on their self-ascription. We reached them through personal networks and utilising the snowball technique. Verbal informed consent was obtained at the beginning of the interviews, in a recorded form. In our analysis we use the case study approach. We purposefully chose female Roma informants as our preliminary analyses showed that they have to negotiate even more issues and reframe more traditional meanings during their mobility trajectories than men do. Throughout the paper, our aim is to explore how people tell the story of their mobility experience, so we applied a narrative analysis. Creating a self-narrative of success can never claim to be objective. In this sense, what we aim is to find out how interviewees narrate their negotiations, navigations, meaning making and reframing of traditional meanings in their discourses and how they use a self-narrative of mobility as a means to resolve tensions lived through the mobility experience (Naudet 2018).

Our empirical findings support the idea that resilience is a multi-dimensional process (rather than an asset) that potentiates positive development in adverse situations (Ungar 2012). In the observed Roma women’s trajectories close family members tended to offer greater support for mobility, through the transmission of an ‘ideology’ that fits mainstream society’s normative expectations: for instance, a strong individualistic and meritocratic stance is present in both narratives. We argue that our protagonists are under a complex and dynamically changing set of ideological influences by at least family, ethnic community and mainstream society. These opposite ideological influences are complemented by the messages from their peers, different members of the mainstream society they regularly encounter, and also of their protective, supportive agents or mobility supporting organisations they belonged to at one period during their mobility journey. Multiple ideology mismatches in different ecological settings, or within the same, eventually crystallise in ‘self-narratives of mobility’, attempting to ‘render a trajectory marked by contradiction coherent’ (Naudet 2018, 12). Through that, meaning making of resources and opportunity structures of one’s mobility constitute an important element of their resilience process. Our paper can be read as an argument supporting the idea, illustrated by the examples of our two Roma woman protagonists, that resilience is a process that one’s social and physical ecology facilitates. Given the example of the two Roma women, we argue that not only personal strength, and good navigation and negotiation skills but available and accessible resources are the essential factors necessary to accomplish a resilient mobility trajectory. However, in recent day Hungary and Spain where mobility seems to have stalled, and the recourses necessary for educational mobility are restricted for those coming from socially disadvantaged families; personal strength, navigation skills and resilience to adversities are not making up for the loss of structural opportunities of a resilient upward mobility for many unprivileged Roma.

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