This study draws on sociocultural perspectives of identity to understand the ways in which Mexican-origin undergraduate students are recruited into the "figured world" of engineering. The analysis of in-depth, ethnographically situated interviews with 14 participants revealed three sets of recurrent discourses in students' accounts of their pathways to engineering: discourses about the family and the "choice" to study engineering, discourses about childhood activities tied to engineering aspirations, and discourses about teacher support to become an engineer.