Tara Blanco tells Class of 2026 what it really means to rise
With her husband, eight children and nine grandchildren cheering her on, Tara L. Blanco will walk across the commencement stage on June 14 not just as a graduate, but as the voice of her entire class.
As one of the student commencement speakers for the UC Irvine School of Social Ecology's Class of 2026, Blanco will stand before thousands of families, faculty members and fellow graduates and deliver a speech she wrote between football practices, wrestling matches, late-night work shifts, and decades of showing up for her family.
This first-generation college student, double major, honors researcher, student organization founder, singer, wife, mother and grandmother, once was a teenager in Northern California who "hated school" and barely scraped by with a 2.0 GPA.
Growing up in a military family meant that change was constant. From her earliest years in Long Beach, California, to formative experiences at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, Blanco learned early to adapt to new environments, cultures, and communities — carrying that skill like a second language.
But when her family relocated to Wheatland, a small agricultural community in the Sacramento Valley, the culture shock hit differently. The continuous movement that had once broadened her world now felt destabilizing, and she rebelled — skipping school, smoking, and falling in with the wrong crowd. She graduated "by the skin of my teeth," she recounts.
At 17, her life took a sharp turn.
She became pregnant by a young serviceman, which led to a miscarriage due to stress. A year later, she carried her oldest son to term. The relationship with her son’s father ended in divorce after he returned from an overseas deployment a changed man.
What followed were decades of building a life — raising three biological children and five step-children, working as a client services specialist where she learned to communicate with empathy and translate complexity into clarity, and eventually finding her way back to higher education. She arrives at UCI's commencement stage with the hard-won knowledge of someone who lived through the alternatives.
For all the turbulence, one constant remained: music.
From a deeply musical family, Blanco was singing by ear by age 5 and went on to audition for both "American Idol" and "The Voice." Television stardom never came, but she never stopped singing — or encouraging the next generation to find their own voices. Today, all her children carry on the family tradition, singing and playing instruments.
Finding herself
When Blanco transferred to UC Irvine as a non-traditional student, she pursued a double major in criminology, law & society and psychological science through the Campuswide Honors Collegium — all while working full time and raising her family. She wrote papers in her car between her children's football and wrestling matches, battling imposter syndrome in honors courses.
Through it all, her most grounding anchor wasn't a classroom.
“The people who carried me the farthest weren’t in classrooms,” she reflects. “They were at home.”
Her husband, her children, and the family she had built across decades became both her foundation and her motivation — a truth that crystallized one late evening at the kitchen table.
Surrounded by textbooks and thesis drafts, her children wandered in and asked if she ever got tired of school. She told them yes but that it was worth it.
“I realized my persistence was not only about my own goals,” she recalled, “but about modeling resilience for them.”
That drive extended beyond her studies.
Blanco built a student organization under Lambda Alpha Epsilon, a national criminal justice association, from the ground up, organizing campus events and securing sponsorships to send students to the organization's 2026 National Conference in St. Paul, Minnesota. She built it not for recognition, but out of conviction.
“Leadership is not about being in front,” she says. “It’s about building something that allows others to rise.”
Her honors thesis focused on an often-unacknowledged population: male victims of domestic violence. The work is scholarly and deeply personal, informed by her commitment to trauma recovery and justice reform.
The silence and scarcity of resources surrounding male survivors drove her research and sharpened a belief she now carries like a compass: “Justice is not just a concept we study. It’s a responsibility we carry.”
On commencement day, Blanco, who has been accepted into UCI’s Master of Legal and Forensic Psychology program and plans to eventually teach criminology and work in policy development or victim advocacy, will speak directly to her fellow graduates: “Courage rarely feels like bravery. Most of the time, courage feels like showing up when you're tired. Trying again when you're discouraged. Holding onto your own value, especially on the days when life tries to convince you that you didn't have any value left.”
And she will close with a message that is unmistakably and powerfully her own:
“Somewhere out there is a version of you who almost gave up. Today, you proved them wrong. And if that doesn't make you proud, let me say it for you: I am proud of you. We made it. We rose. And we are not done rising.”
— Mimi Ko Cruz