Denise A. Segura

CHICANA AND MEXICAN IMMIGRANT WOMEN AT WORK:: The Impact of Class, Race, and Gender on Occupational Mobility

This article explores the process and meaning of occupational mobility among a selected sample of 40 immigrant and nonimmigrant women of Mexican descent in the San Francisco Bay Area who entered the secondary labor market of semiskilled clerical, service, and operative jobs in 1978-1979 and 1980-1981. This labor market was segmented along race and gender lines with few promotional ladders available as the work force became more nonwhite and female. When Chicanas and Mexicanas obtained jobs with fewer Chicano coworkers and greater avenues for advancement, they reported escalating conflictual social relations at work. Occupational mobility contained both objective and subjective dimensions for the respondents. Often a woman felt mobile in a job that lacked the means for advancement because she compared herself to a local Chicano or Mexicano working-class reference group and a self-concept rooted in her class, race, and gender.

Navigating between Two Worlds: The Labyrinth of Chicana Intellectual Production in the Academy.

Undergirded by a theoretical framework, which focuses on the important role of social context, this article focuses primarily on the cultural, institutional, and individual factors explaining how Chicanas fare in academia. To what extent are the experiences of Chicanas exemplary in suggesting similar issues for African-American, Asian, and American Indian women? What strategies have Chicanas employed to help them negotiate the new and ever-changing aspects of academic life? Based on research with 30 Chicana faculty, this article provides compelling answers to these important but unanswered questions.

Introduction: Gendered Borderlands

With Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa burst onto the feminist conceptual scene offering new ways of exploring relationships of power and domination, resistance and agency, among women and men hitherto cast as marginalized “others.” Anzaldúa acknowledges the pain and anguish of otherness and seeks to reclaim its latent power by exploring how disempowered subjects labeled as “other” express their identities and resistance. She coins the term mestiza consciousness to reflect border subjects’ expressions of agency that incorporate spiritual transformations and psychic processes of exclusion and identification—of feeling “in between” cultures, languages, or places. Anzaldúa also delves into the origins and conditions that construct and reinforce otherness. Her theoretical formulation of “borderlands” expounds on the dynamics within material and discursive spaces that transcend geopolitical border areas, where women, men, and youth, straight and queer, adapt, resist, and develop new strategies to negotiate social inequalities. Anzaldúa’s creative reflections about fluid borders and borderlands have influenced many fields. Until recently these concepts, borders and borderlands, have not been problematized or operationalized in sociological research (Martinez 2002). All too often “borderlands” is used as a catchall that signifies, among other things, uncharted territory or subjects whose identities are outside the mainstream. This uncritical use of borderlands as a proxy for analyses of complex relationships between structure and agency that are not situated regionally or historically is problematic. Understanding the intersections of historically specific regional dynamics, institutional configurations, and cultural expressions would generate exciting theoretical and empirical work on gender and borderlands. There are

Enhancing the Resilience of Young Single Mothers of Color: A Review of Programs and Services.

Within the last decade, births to unmarried women in the United States have risen dramatically, presenting challenges for young women to complete high school and attend college. This article presents a review of programs and services designed to support single mothers in completing high school and accessing postsecondary education. We highlight both problematic and effective aspects of these programs with particular attention to whether they support the educational access of Latinas and African American single mothers.

Mexican American Faculty in Research Universities: Can the Next Generation Beat the Odds?

Mexican Americans represent the largest Latina/o subpopulation and have the lowest levels of educational attainment in the United States. Mexican Americans are underrepresented in all professional fields, including academia, and thus warrant attention. The purposes of this study are to describe the experiences of early and mid-career Mexican American faculty, emphasizing key sources of inspiration, support, and mentoring, perceived discrimination, and their coping responses; assess the ways in which these factors influence their careers; and examine differences by gender and maternal education. Mixed methods were used to obtain information from 133 Mexican American faculty who participated in a larger national study of underrepresented minority (URM) faculty at research universities. Five major findings emerged: (1) early life course support sustained and encouraged educational aspirations, (2) mentorship from significant others provided valuable advice in developing social capital throughout higher education and early faculty experiences, (3) female respondents were more likely to report inadequate mentoring and higher levels of distress due to recurrent experiences of racially gendered discrimination, (4) strategies of resistance reveal high levels of emotional labor as respondents deconstruct the hidden curriculum to perform effectively in environments that are imbued with implicit bias, and (5) maternal education contributed to improved mentoring experiences and active resistance strategies. The findings suggest that expanding social capital–driven strategies and increasing understanding of persistent anti-Mexican social policy that leads to misidentification and implicit bias are key in retention and professional success for Mexican American faculty.