Instruction librarians embedded in the first-year experience of first-generation college students are uniquely positioned to shepherd novice researchers across a threshold that demarcates their past experience as consumers of knowledge to their new role as creators of knowledge. Beginning from my own testimonio — a discursive practice reliant on the narration of personal experience — my research applies a critical ethnic studies lens to explore the in-between space occupied by first-generation Latinx students as they navigate the threshold of an academic identity that can feel hostile and alien to those underrepresented in higher education. By applying theories that have come out of Ethnic Studies rather than Education or LIS, I am proposing a new way for academic librarians to see and support the often painful experience of transformation from student/outsider to scholar.