I watched My Oxford Year with the kind of cautious hope I save for rom-coms that might reflect someone from my cultural orbit. Latinas are rarely featured in mainstream rom-coms, let alone placed within elite British institutions. There she was: Anna De La Vega, played by Sofia Carson, a driven, glamorous, bilingual, American-born Latina walking through the spired halls of Oxford University. And for a moment, I let myself feel it. The awe. The thrill. The fantasy of it all.
But as the credits rolled, that thrill gave way to a quieter ache. Despite its feel-good romance, My Oxford Year plants a Latina character in one of the world’s most elite academic institutions, and that choice is quietly radical. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about what this fantasy leaves out. What does it cost (physically, socially, and emotionally) to chase a dream that was never built for us?
And I say “us” intentionally; while not Latina myself, I’m shaped by the same “otherness” that shadows so many who come from immigrant, bilingual, and culturally hybrid backgrounds. We’re not insiders, but we’re not fully outsiders either. A tension that’s difficult to name but impossible to ignore.
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Let’s start with the obvious: seeing a Latina at Oxford is rare, on-screen and off. While Latinas are the fastest-growing demographic in U.S. higher education, they remain vastly underrepresented in elite academic and international spaces. As per the latest Open Doors data reported by NAFSA, Hispanic/Latino(a) students make up approximately 20.3% of U.S. postsecondary enrollment, yet account for only 12.2% of students studying abroad.
So when a film dares to imagine that journey, it’s significant. Representation matters. My Oxford Year tries to deliver that aspirational high with sweeping drone shots, candlelit libraries, and monologues about legacy, love, and ambition. But underneath the fairy lights and charm, I kept circling the same question: who gets to dream this big? And at what cost?
Author and academic Hanif Abdurraqib once said, “The places we aspire to be are often not designed to make us feel like we belong.” That line hit me as I watched Anna breeze through Oxford’s hallowed halls. Because while the film shows us her ambition, it skips over what that ambition demands from someone like her.
Anna is brilliant and unapologetic. She’s a Rhodes Scholar, name-drops Yeats, and is on track for a stellar career. But we briefly hear about loans, visas, burnout, or the quiet guilt of being the first. And if you’re a first-generation college student or even just the child of immigrants, you know that weight. It never leaves your backpack.
There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment where Anna’s talking with Jamie Davenport (played by Corey Mylchreest) about financial precarity. And for a second, it feels like the film might pull back the curtain. It might explore what it means to carry both ambition and financial insecurity. But the scene fades quickly into romance, and that deeper tension, the kind that so many of us live with, gets left behind. That’s the story I was waiting for.
In Once I Was You, journalist Maria Hinojosa writes, “We carry the dreams of everyone who couldn’t make it with us.” That line echoed through every library scene. Because for so many, the dream of Oxford isn’t just about self; it’s about community. Legacy. The many hands that push us forward. However, the film reveals only the tip of the iceberg: the polished image of success, without the labor or the fractures underneath.
It’s important to note that “arrival” doesn’t erase struggle. If anything, it intensifies it. A 2022 report from USC’s Race and Equity Center found that Latinx students in elite universities often experience what it calls simultaneous hypervisibility and invisibility, admired on paper, marginalized in practice. You’re at the table, but you’re not eating the same meal.
This echoes Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of cultural hybridity, which suggests that people from marginalized communities often exist in a “third space,” neither fully part of the dominant culture nor entirely separate from it, yet inevitably shaped by both. Anna is welcomed at Oxford, but she isn’t fully known. Her belonging is conditional, shaped more by how well she fits than by who she is.
The film folds her Latinidad into something more aesthetic than lived. She speaks Spanish briefly, and her last name nods to her heritage. But we don’t meet her family. There’s no glimpse of cultural friction, imposter syndrome, guilt, double consciousness, or the self-editing that often shadows students in elite spaces.
As America Ferrera once put it during a Time panel, “We’re not just fighting to be seen… we’re fighting to be seen fully, in all our contradictions and complexities.” That’s what I wanted for Anna, not just to exist in the frame, but to feel fully realized within it.
And yes, romcoms center on love. But even love doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The way we fall, trust, and hold back is shaped by where (and who) we come from. I kept waiting for My Oxford Year to explore how Anna’s background shaped her interactions, not just with her love interest, but with the elite world she’s suddenly a part of. As writer Hassan Mahamdallie once put it, marginalized people in elite spaces are often expected to “trim down aspects of who they are to fit in, smoothing the edges that make them different.” Anna fits in a little too easily, and we lose some complexity in the process.
And let’s not overlook the interracial romance. The fact that Anna falls for a white British professor is part of this larger story about power, proximity, and aspiration. It’s not a problem, but it’s also not neutral. The film doesn’t interrogate what that dynamic means, especially when one partner is navigating multiple layers of cultural translation.
That said, My Oxford Year still gives us something powerful: a Latina protagonist who is ambitious without apology. And for the young women watching, especially those dreaming of study abroad programs, graduate fellowships, or just permission to dream bigger, it means something to see it, even if it’s incomplete.
As poet Elizabeth Acevedo says, “I write us in because we deserve to be in the center of the page.” This film places a Latina at the center of the frame, but it just doesn’t fully trust her with the depth of the story. It’s not that Anna doesn’t belong; it’s that the story doesn’t let her fully exist.
So maybe that’s our job now: to keep writing the rest. To imagine stories where Latinx not only arrive at Oxford but thrive, critique, stumble, and grow as symbols of aspiration.
Until then, I’ll hold both the fantasy and the friction. Because the dream isn’t wrong; it’s just incomplete. And telling the full story is how we bring it closer to the truth.
