This reflexive vignette reveals the emotional risks of ethnographic work by a Chicano researcher, educator, and advocate doing work in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands, caught at the intersection of vulnerable Latina/o youth and their possible futures. Data in this creative piece are derived from field notes of one classroom observation from an ethnographic case study on the communal construction and practice of a college-going culture experienced by marginalized, middle school, Mexican-American and Central American emergent bilinguals.