11-11-2016, 09:31 AM
“It’s Different Lives”: A Guatemalan AmericanAdolescent’s Construction of Ethnic and Gender Identities across Educational Contexts
1468197367-ItsDifferentLivesGuatemalanAmericanEthnicandGenderIdentity.pdf (Size: 97.3 KB / Downloads: 4)
Drawing from a multiyear ethnography and a longitudinal case study, this article examines how
one Guatemalan American teenager negotiates the multiple socializations to ethnic and gender
identities in her home, her Pentecostal church, and her high school. She must face processes of
Americanization and Mexicanization. Americanization’s thrust is to replace the languages and
cultures of Latino/a students with English and mainstream middle-class European American ways
while Mexicanization pushes Central Americans to Mexican and Chicano dialects of Spanish and
ways of being. With respect to gender, Amalia confronts a process of sexualization, particularly in
school. Tensions between the socializations create spaces where Amalia enacts her agency and
constructs her identities. The article is informed by research on multiple socializations, scholarship
on identity and agency, and studies of Latino/a language and identities. [Latina, socialization,
language, identity, agency]
Research on socialization for students of color and working-class students has documented
cultural differences that exist between home and school contexts focusing in particular on
the negative consequences for schooling and academic achievement (Bourdieu 1977; Heath
1983). However, these studies have not adequately addressed how students respond to and
negotiate their multiple socializations. Addressing this issue for Latinos/as, a burgeoning
body of research has grappled with the complexities of socialization and its connection to
identity and learning (González 2001; Valdés 1996; Zentella 1997). However, the majority of
these studies focus on Chicanos or Mexicans and Puerto Ricans; hence, the situation of
Central Americans remains underresearched and undertheorized.
Drawing from a multiyear ethnography and a longitudinal case study, this article
examines how one Guatemalan American teenager, Amalia Gramajo (pseudonym), negotiates
the multiple socializations to ethnic and gender identities in three primary educational
contexts: her home, her Pentecostal church, and her high school. Each institution has
its own cultural values, norms, beliefs, and languages that are sometimes in conflict with
one another in significant ways. Amalia must face both Americanization (González 1997)
and Mexicanization (Guerra Vásquez 2003). Americanization’s thrust is to replace the
languages and cultures of Latino/a students with English and mainstream middle-class
European American ways while Mexicanization pushes Central Americans to Mexican
and Chicano dialects of Spanish and ways of being. With respect to gender, Amalia
confronts a process of sexualization, particularly in school. Tensions between the socializations
create spaces where Amalia enacts her agency and constructs her identities. To do
so, she leverages various tools and resources, including language, performance, and dress.
Research on multiple socializations, scholarship on identity and agency, and studies of
Latino/a language and identities provide a conceptual framework to examine these issues.
Theoretical Framework
Multiple Socializations
Issues of socialization to gendered and ethnic identities are multifaceted and complex.
Socialization is a process of becoming an active, competent participant in one’s community
(Ochs 1993). Novices are socialized to culture by more expert others through their participation
in social interactions. Schooling is a key site of socialization.
Scholars interested in cultural difference have shown how education is a process of
cultural transmission whose purpose and consequence is the reproduction of the dominant
culture (Spindler et al. 1990). For example, Bourdieu (1977) and Willis (1981) shed
light on the cultural and linguistic differences between middle-class and working-class
whites, highlighting privileged youth’s advantages over working-class youth. Middleclass
students arrive at school with the proper cultural capital including the taste, speech,
literacy, and behaviors learned as part of their home socialization. These valued ways of
speaking and behaving translate into higher teacher expectations for achievement. Willis
demonstrated how teachers systematically devalued the linguistic and cultural differences
of working-class youth.
Continuing this cross-cultural inquiry, Heath’s (1983) study of three communities that
differ by class and race—a middle-class white community, a working-class white community,
and an African American working-class community—highlighted the differing
socialization between home and school particularly with respect to language and literacy
practices. Her work pointed out that the language and literacy practices of working-class
homes and communities had important functions and uses in those homes and communities.
Similarly, Michaels (1981) documented the differences between African American
children’s narrative structures and the school-valued white mainstream storytelling. By
upholding the value of white middle-class practices while devaluing minority and
working-class ways, middle to upper class and white become synonymous with the
“right” practices.
Although this body of work in cultural reproduction has contributed much to our
understandings of differential socialization and its consequences, critiques of this theory
have focused on its overly deterministic view of working-class and minority students as
well as its lack of attention to students’ agency (Foley et al. 2000). Often this body of work
has unwittingly reinforced deficit views of working-class and minority populations
because some researchers and educators conclude that minority cultural practices need to
be fixed to match those of the schools. Researchers of color in particular have sought to
point out how power is central to dominant perspectives on the cultures of culturally and
linguistically diverse students, highlighting “the multiple struggles of cultural identity
groups against race, ethnic, class and gender dominance” (Foley et al. 2000:46). They seek
to document nondominant students’ agency. A significant site where dominance occurs is
in identity construction because powerful institutions can inscribe and reinscribe essentialized
identities. In addition, institutions value or ratify certain identities while negating
others, and this assigning of certain identities has consequences for learning and achievement.
Nevertheless, it is also true that immigrant youth like Amalia can and do enact their
agency in the spaces created by multiple socializations to construct their own identities.
Identities and Agency
I draw on theories that view identity as fluid, dynamic, and emerging in social practice,
countering traditional research that has focused on identity formation as an individual and
internal phenomenon where a person strives toward a unified sense of self (Spencer and
Markstrom-Adams 1990). Such views of identity have been particularly ineffective for
people of color, because they assumed static notions of culture and homogeneity among
racial and ethnic group members. Incorporating a sociocultural view, scholars began to
focus more on “social identity,” which posits that identity is derived from group membership
(Hansen and Liu 1997) and from the relationship between the individual and the
larger social world, as mediated through institutions (Norton 1997:420). Although these
406 Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 40, 2009
sociocultural conceptualizations moved away from a purely internal and individual view
of identity, they did not completely do away with essentialized notions of identity. In
addition, these frameworks focused on identity more as a product than as a process.
The work of Holland with colleagues counters the view of identity as product by
asserting that identities “are lived in and through activity and so must be conceptualized as
they develop in social practice” (1998:5). According to these scholars, “identities are
hard-won standpoints that... make at least a modicum of self-direction possible” (Holland
et al. 1998:4). Their perspective highlights the connection between identity and human
agency.As people form or “improvise” their identities they are able to create “new activities,
new worlds, and new ways of being” (Holland et al. 1998:5). In addition, social actors can
change the conceptual and material aspects of “cultural figured worlds,” which are constructed
by the joint production of activities, discourses, performances, and artifacts.
Highlighting the importance of how others evaluate and take up identities, Gee
observes that “the kind of person one is recognized as ‘being’ at a given time and place can
change from moment to moment in the interaction, can change from context to context,
and of course, can be ambiguous or unstable” (2000:99). According to Gee (2000), two of
the most important types of identities for youth in schools are institution identities and
discourse identities. Institution identities are positions that are created and legitimated by
an institution while people can construct discourse identities through discourse without
the support of the official institutions. Spindler and Spindler put it thus: “Social actors
carry on a culturally constructed dialogue. This dialogue is expressed in behavior, words,
symbols, and in the application of cultural knowledge to make instrumental activities and
social situations ‘work’ for one” (1987:5).
These constructs demonstrate the interplay between institutional limitations and people’s
agency. Institutions can influence or shape the resources that people use to construct
identities as well as the opportunities they are afforded to perform identities. However,
despite sometimes limited resources, people improvise identities “in the flow of activity
within specific social situations—from the cultural resources at hand” (Holland et al.
1998:4). The emphasis, then, is on a person’s acts, actions, performances, or practices of
identity. My analysis of Amalia’s constructions of identities is informed by Holland et al.,
Gee, and literature specifically on Latinos/as’ languages and identities.
Latinos/as, Language, and Identities
Immigrant Latinos/as live in the intersections of societal constructions of race, ethnicity,
class, gender. With the understanding that defining ethnicity is quite challenging, I
define an ethnic group as being bound together by a shared cultural structure and a sense
of a particular ethnic identity as well as dress, religion, customs, food, and music (Omi and
Winant 1994). Thus, I consider Latino/a an ethnicity while Mexican or Guatemalan is a
nationality. It is important to point out that Latino/a students are agents who construct
their identities within these larger macrostructural categories and labels. Thus, although
discussion of these categories of race, ethnicity, gender, and class may seem to essentialize
the identities of Latino/as, they are meaningful to the lived experiences of Latinos/as
in the United States in that these categories often affect their educational choices and
opportunities.
Anzaldúa (1987) argued that ethnicity, gender, and language are inextricably intertwined
for Latinas and Chicanas. Taking up these intersections, a body of work on
Latino/a identities focuses on the importance of discursive acts in the construction of
ethnic identities. This scholarship has examined the identities of Puerto Ricans (Zentella
1997), Chicanos (Fought 2003), Mexican Catholics (Baquedano-López 1997), Mexicans on
the U.S.–Mexican border (González 2001), and Dominican Americans (Bailey 2002).
Ek “It’s Different Lives” 407
Through the use of their linguistic repertoires, Latinos/as construct ethnic identities. In
particular, these studies highlight not only the importance of Spanish in the construction
of ethnic identities but also the use of various varieties of both Spanish and English to
signal group membership, thus reinforcing language as a key tool for the maintenance,
expression, and perception of Latino/a ethnic identities. Language is also often a part of
certain behaviors or performances that mark the body in specific ways (Mendoza-Denton
1999). Mendoza-Denton (1999), for example, shows how Mexican girls in gangs physically
performed and inscribed a kind of femininity that confounded community notions
of how girls should behave, dress, and speak. Mendoza-Denton surmised, “makeup,
clothing, musical taste, and consumption are all related to linguistic and literacy practices”
(2008:3). Although primarily focused on language, ethnicity, and gender, these
studies have continued to illuminate the multiple socializations that make up Latinos/as’
everyday lives.
As Latino/a immigrant youth in the United States move in and across different contexts
in their daily lives, they are continually engaging in actions and behaviors that are taken up
as markers of their ethnicity and gender. Latinas like Amalia are socialized to expectations
for proper ways of performing gender that are reflective of their socialization to ethnic
identities at home. In addition, as Bucholtz (1995) argues, “any performance of ethnicity is
always simultaneously a performance of gender” (see Fought 2006:6). Butler (1990) too
argues for a view of gender that incorporates the notion of performativity. Following
Butler, then, gendered identities are produced through the repeated acts of individual
agents as they engage in cultural activity. However, Latino/a students may find themselves
in contexts like school that do not reflect nor validate their constructions of ethnicity
or gender and create tensions for them.
Methodology
The data for this article come from two interrelated research projects for which I was the
Principal Investigator: a longitudinal case study of Amalia carried out over a period of ten
years and a four-year ethnography of the Pentecostal church that Amalia and her family
attended. I first met Amalia when I was a research assistant on a project examining the
construction of “childhoods” in California.1 After the “childhoods” study, I began the case
study of Amalia that examined her socialization to learner identities in multiple contexts. I
chose to follow her because I was interested in exploring the language and identity of
Latino/a immigrant students who did not belong to the majority Mexican or Chicano
Catholic group. The longitudinal case study data included field notes from visits to her
house and schools, which I audio or videotaped whenever possible as well as structured
and semistructured interviews with her, her family, and select teachers. The majority of the
home visits took place from 1999 to 2001 and in 2003–04. However, during the years that I
could not make home visits, we stayed in touch through email, phone, and cyber social
networking sites.
My ethnography of the church La Iglesia (the church; a pseudonym) was comprised of
two phases of data collection. Phase I began in October 2000 focusing on the Sunday youth
class and ended in 2002. During that time, I attended over 30 youth classes. My jottings and
writing up of field notes followed the conventions of qualitative research. I also recorded
my personal reactions, feelings, and preliminary analysis of my observations. I used video
and audio recording whenever possible to capture linguistic interactions with more accuracy.
Phase II of the data gathering took place from October 2002 to April 2004 during which
time I conducted monthly visits to the church. At the same time, I conducted focal case
studies of Amalia and two other youth in their year-round high schools from October
2003–June 2004; however, I was not able to observe the students during their school breaks.
408 Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 40, 2009
The case study of Amalia and the ethnography at the church generated over 60 hours of
audio and videotaped interactions in home and church. Here, I focus primarily on data
collected during the time Amalia was in high school. Because analysis pointed to the
salience of gender and ethnicity, the following questions guided my analysis: (1) What
ethnic and gender identities is Amalia being socialized to in home, church, and school
contexts? (2) What are the similarities and differences across socializing settings? (3) How
does Amalia negotiate differing expectations?
My qualitative analysis included data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing
and verification (Miles and Huberman 1994). I read through all of my field notes, interview
transcripts, and video- and audiotape summaries several times coding to identify
salient themes, patterns, and relationships that I used to select key pieces of video recordings
that I transcribed and analyzed using discourse analytic methods. I also did the
following: repeatedly reevaluated my coding scheme and preliminary analysis to not make
premature judgments; verified my analytical conclusions by comparing the multiple
sources of data to check that they supported the same findings; and searched for alternative
explanations. Multiple codings challenged my initial interpretations of themes and
helped refine later interpretations.
Conducting Ethnography Guided by Respeto (Respect)
I had a similar background to my participants in that I am a working-class Latina
immigrant from a non-Catholic religion. These identities facilitated my entry and gave me
insight into the respeto (respect) ethnographers need. Respeto refers to sharing cultural
norms concerning appropriate speech, behavior, and gender roles (Zentella 1997). In my
fieldwork, I was friendly and humble. I drew on my Baptist upbringing to inform my
actions, dress, and speech at church. But, I am not nor have I ever been a member of the
Pentecostal church. Other factors that marked me as an outsider included being Mexican
in a largely Central American church.
Participants and Field Site Description
Amalia Gramajo and her family lived in a California city where Central Americans
constitute 14 percent of the 1,719,073 Latinos/as, and together Salvadorans and Guatemalans
represent 80 percent of the Central American population (U.S. Bureau of the
Census 2000). I was drawn to this community given that I was interested in documenting
the diversity of Latino/a linguistic and educational experiences in home and community
contexts. The three primary settings in Amalia’s life were her home, church, and
school.
Mr. Gramajo, a mail clerk, and Mrs. Gramajo, a homemaker, immigrated to the United
States from Guatemala over 20 years ago. During high school, Amalia lived with her
parents and younger brother Aldo in a small apartment full of artifacts and signs of their
homeland including a blue and white Guatemalan flag painted on a wooden key holder
and a cloth calendar with the statement, SEÑOR JESUS PERDÓNAME SI HOY ME
OLVIDO DE TI PERO TÚ NUNCA TE OLVIDES DE MÍ [LORD JESUS FORGIVE ME IF
TODAY I FORGET YOU BUT YOU NEVER FORGET ME] woven into it.
The Gramajos have been members of the Pentecostal church,2 La Iglesia for many
years. The Pastor once stated, “Amalia nació en la iglesia” [Amalia was born in the
church]. La Iglesia is part of a worldwide religious movement that promotes evangelism
and Christian service and has over six million members. When Amalia traveled to Guatemala,
she attended Pentecostal churches there with her family. La Iglesia in Southern
California had about 80 working-class members, approximately 70 percent of whom were
Ek “It’s Different Lives” 409
Central American and 30 percent Mexican. In contrast to theEnglish dominant public
school, the Sunday school classes for the youth were taught primarily in Spanish.
Amalia entered school as a kindergartner in the bilingual education program. In fifth
grade, she officially transitioned from the bilingual education program to English only
instruction. Amalia applied for and was selected to attend a magnet high school outside of
her neighborhood that required traveling on the bus for an hour. The high school’s student
population was 72 percent Latino, the majority of whom were Mexican, thus Central
Americans were a small minority.
Constructing Ethnic Identities
Although the largest group of Guatemalan immigrants in the United States is Mayan,
the Gramajos do not claim a Mayan identity. According to Menjivar’s (2002) description of
racial classification in Guatemala, they would be considered Ladinos. However, they do
not refer to themselves as Ladinos, rather, they refer to themselves as Guatemaltecos
(Guatemalan), Chapínes, mestizos, or as being from la capital (the capital, Guatemala City;
Ek 2009). Because of their mixed European and Indigenous backgrounds, Amalia and her
brother were able to blend in with the larger non-Indigenous Mexican population.
Americanization at School
According to Gee, institutions insure that “certain sorts of discourse, dialogue, and
interactions happen often enough and in similar ways” to sustain the I-identities the
institution underwrites (2000:103). Public schools have their own ethnic definitions and
labels that do not always validate the identities that children and youth construct for
themselves. For example, as a child Amalia called herself a “Guatemalan girl” even though
she was born in the United States. But, in high school, she started identifying as Hispanic.
Thus, children and youth have to struggle against the powerful ethnic institutional identities
that the schools impose on them. However, given the powerful influence of school,
it is easy to understand how Amalia would default to using the school sanctioned “Hispanic”
that is foregrounded over a national category such as Mexican or Guatemalan.
Ely and Gleason stated, “As an institution, school is the epitome of socialization”
(1995:265). As previously mentioned, schooling’s socialization has had an assimilationist
thrust toward middle-class European American values and the English language. Thus,
Americanization requires immigrant students to abandon their culture and language
(González 1997). The increasingly xenophobic social and political context in the United
States further complicates the education of immigrants. Several policies in California,
including Proposition 163 (1986) that made English the official language and Proposition
227 (1998) that dismantled bilingual education, increase English’s prestige while marginalizing
and stigmatizing immigrant languages, Spanish in particular. Moreover Proposition
227 limits bilingual students’ full linguistic repertoire, especially their primary
language (Gutiérrez et al. 2000).
Amalia’s Negotiations of Americanization
In Amalia’s high school, English was a dominant force in socializing students to the
dominant culture for as Heath asserts, “language learning is cultural learning” (1983:145).
Institutions attempt to socialize students to a fixed identity like that of an “American” who
speaks English. Like other bilingual English–Spanish speakers, Amalia spoke mostly
English at school even with peers who were bilingual and even in her Spanish for Spanish
speakers class. However, Amalia valued the Spanish language stating:
410 Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 40, 2009
Some people don’t think that Spanish is necessary, not only the Bible, but all books that are in
Spanish... they’re like. . . . “Why do we even need it?” . . . But, I mean, you’re in high school, you
have Spanish classes. If you read the Bible, it has, you know, where the acentos (accents) are, you
know, what words not to use, what words go on a sentence.
Amalia was aware of linguistic ideologies that viewed Spanish as having little value.
Historically in the United States, Spanish has been associated with negative qualities. Yet,
Amalia resisted the devaluation of her language by recognizing that reading in Spanish,
the Bible in particular, translates into skills that can be used in school.
A comment made by Amalia in response to the increasing use of English in the church
revealed that she realized that Spanish represented more than a practical way to do well in
school. Tommy, the Sunday school teacher for the youth, began to speak more English as
a way of retaining the youth in church (Ek 2005). The other youth in the Sunday school
class responded very favorably to the increased use of English but Amalia objected:
I hate it when people talk in English [in the church] . . . Yo le digo, “Tommy, por favor en español
la clase.” . . . [A] mí me encanta el español y no porque es parte, you know, de mi cultura. . . . Y yo
le digo que estamos hablando toda la semana inglés. [I say to him, “Tommy, please, the class in
Spanish.” . . . I love Spanish and not because it’s part, you know, of my culture . . . And I tell him
that we speak English the whole week.]
Amalia’s actions here, that of reading the Bible in Spanish and asking the Sunday school
teacher to stop speaking English, are resources she uses to construct her linguistic and
ethnic identities that are also connected to her religious identity. In the retelling of these
actions, her performance takes on a dramatic tone given her choice of emotive vocabulary:
she “hates” English but “loves” Spanish. Amalia’s saying that Spanish is part of her
“culture” and indicative of ethnic identity recalls the historic and social reality of Spanish
as an ethnic marker. Through her actions, Amalia attempts to stem the tide of Americanization
but the language ideology reflected here is at odds with her linguistic practice at
school where she often defaults to English. She is trying to resist Americanization by
disrupting the ubiquity of English that is encroaching into the Spanish-speaking church,
but processes of Americanization are very powerful. Moreover, language hegemony is just
one of its features; another is a middle-class norm of success.
Although education serves as a powerful gateway toward economic mobility, it may
distance Latinos/as from their families’ value systems given that “school systematically
valorizes upper-class cultural capital and depreciates the cultural capital of the lower
classes” (Bourdieu 1977; see MacLeod 1995:14). Amalia experienced the tension between
church and school in regard to the value of humildad (humility) learned in her church,
which she defined as “Not being stuck up, you know, being kind to others.” She contrasted
this value with school’s expectations: “Church, you have to be humilde (humble).
In school, you have to be competitive. In church, you have to be calm. In school, you
have to be aggressive. It’s different lives.” She explained,
They [school] want us to be rich people... they want us to have more education, less, how do you
say this, um, menos humildad [less humility], you know?... Menos humildad [less humility] . . . Too
much education could also be bad, you know?...I mean, hey, you’re talking to your grandma and
you have a lot of education now. Your grandma doesn’t know a lot of stuff. Like in my case, my
grandma doesn’t even know how to write good, you know? . . . You intimidate your own family,
you know?
The only time during this quote that Amalia codeswitched was with the word humilde
(humble) and menos humildad (less humility). The word humilde can mean both being
modest and coming from a working-class background. Through Spanish, Amalia links
Ek “It’s Different Lives” 411
working-class and Latino identities for as Fought (2006) points out, social class is a
critical element that shapes the creation of ethnic identities. Amalia is very conscious of
the distancing from family that can result from working-class students’ socialization into
dominant values of wealth, competition, and individualism (Stanton-Salazar 2001). The
disconnect between humility and competition is difficult for her to negotiate given that
it can negatively affect her family relationships but Amalia feels that she must still
engage in schools’ competitive and aggressive practices if she wants to continue to be
academically successful. Along with these processes of Americanization, Central American
students also encounter Mexicanization in their daily lives.
Mexicanization at Church and School
Fought observed, “Research on race and ethnicity acknowledge the important roles of
both self-identification and the perceptions and attitudes of others in the construction of
ethnic identity” (2006:6). In the United States, Central Americans are usually constructed
as Mexicans in places like California where Mexicans and Mexican Americans are the
majority Latino/a population (Guerra-Vásquez 2003; Lavadenz 2005). A Los Angeles
Times article describes this phenomenon: “The metropolis drives many [Central Americans]
to Mexicanize, to degrees big and small.. Change comes gradually, particularly
through speech” (Bermúdez 2008). Thus, the primary way in which Central Americans
can signal a Mexican identity is through engaging in an intentional linguistic passing or
“language crossing” where they use a language variety of a social or ethnic group they
do not normally belong to (Rampton 1995). Some Central Americans intentionally Mexicanize
their speech through such features as intonation and lexicon but many also do it
unwittingly as a result of socialization.
For Amalia, Mexicanization occurred primarily in her church and school. La Iglesia’s
socialization to a Universal Christian Pentecostal identity (Ek 2005) echoed Walsh’s
(2003) examination of Mexican and Mexican American Pentecostals who felt that they
needed to relinquish any identities that deterred them from a religious one. The church
members’ discursive practice of using usted (you, singular formal) and tú (you, singular
informal), rather than the Central American vos (informal) and its verb forms (Lipski
1994) were taken up as signs of a Mexican identity. Amalia told me that she did not use
vos at La Iglesia even with her Central American cousins, but did so in her church in
Guatemala. Because issues of power and authority influence the extent to which people
can leverage their agency (Holland et al. 1998), it is sometimes easier for students to
default to the dominant code or dialect. Other Central American youth in the church
have said that they are laughed at when they use vos, further pushing them away from
using it (Ek in press). This powerful Mexicanization occurred at school also.
At Amalia’s school, the majority Mexican student population and her habit of using tú
veiled her Guatemalan identities. As previously stated, Amalia valued Spanish and thus
took Spanish for Spanish speakers classes at her high school. But the Spanish teacher was
from Mexico, and her classroom was saturated with Mexican cultural references and
artifacts including: music by Mexican pop star Luis Miguel; posters and pictures of Cesar
Chavez and Mexican artist Frida Kahlo; and talk of “piquete,” a Mexican drink made with
coffee and tequila. It is important to note that the church preached against some of these
cultural references, in particular secular music and alcohol.
Amalia’s Negotiations of Mexicanization
Amalia worked hard to resist both Americanization and Mexicanization. She was aware
of the predominance of Mexicans and Mexican Spanish and how these influenced her
language practices at school. She stated:
412 Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 40, 2009
Cuando estás en un lugar si... todos son Mexicanos y tú eres la única de otro país, se te pega lo
Mexicano. [When you are in a place if . . . all are Mexican and you are the only one from another
country, the Mexican style rubs off on you.]
The bidialectical skills she picked up helped her be flexible and accommodating to her
Mexican friends by speaking like them, but she claimed to be faithful to the Central
American lexicon, stating, “Como esto, la straw, ‘popote,’ pero yo no le digo popote, yo le
digo ‘pajilla.’ ” [Like this, the straw, “popote” (Mexican), but I don’t call it “popote,”
(Mexican) I call it “pajilla” (Central American)]. Also, at home Amalia uses the voseo with
her family. For example, while helping to caretake for a baby cousin she said to him: “¿Qué
tenés? ¿Querés ( )?” (What do you have? Do you want [ ]?) Amalia used the voseo verb
forms tenés (you have) and querés (you want). In Mexican Spanish, Amalia would have said
to the baby: ¿Qué tienes? (What do you have?) and ¿Quieres? (Do you want [ ]?). The baby
was being exposed to a Guatemalan way of speaking, the way Amalia was also spoken to
as a child. In turn, Amalia was teaching her young cousin a way of enacting a Guatemalan
identity.
Like other second generation immigrants, Amalia also had other support for building
and maintaining linguistic and cultural knowledge of her parents’ home country. Important
to her identity processes were yearly return trips to Guatemala from the time she was
six months old although the trips became much more infrequent in middle and high
school because of her demanding schoolwork. Still, phone calls, letters, photographs,
videos, and email helped her communicate with relatives in Guatemala, who in turn
visited the Gramajos in the United States. Amalia wants to be recognized as being Guatemalan,
thus she enacts her agency by attempting to put forth a Guatemalan identity—a
difficult feat given that it was seldom validated outside of her home. Another area of
tension for Amalia was the process of socialization to gender identities as the next section
demonstrates.
Constructing Gender Identities
Like ethnicity, the construction of gender identities is quite complex and multifaceted. To
capture how gender played out in Amalia’s life, I focus on each context’s expectations,
particularly those that intersect with Amalia’s growing up into young womanhood. At
home, Amalia’s engagement in domestic activities reflected a traditional role for Latinas.
Like her mother, Amalia was expected to cook, clean, and caretake for her brother
Aldo—chores that she willingly performed. A videotape log of a typical evening in the
Gramajo home captured the following:
Amalia cooks the rice for the family’s dinner . . . She sets the table and finishes cooking with her
mother. Then she warms up the tortillas on the stove while everyone is talking in Spanish . . . Now
everyone is at the table except for Amalia who is making smoothies. Her mother gets up and gets
the glasses for the drink. Amalia finishes making the drink and comes to the table holding the
blender. She serves herself a bowl of soup... After the meal is finished, Amalia clears the table
while her mom puts the chairs back. Aldo takes his plate to the sink, but doesn’t wash it. Amalia
washes the dishes and her mother helps her finish cleaning.
Although Amalia and her mother were washing and cleaning, Mr. Gramajo and Aldo sat
and watched television. Once, when her mother went to Guatemala for a month, Amalia
stepped up and took on the cleaning, laundry, and cooking for the family. She was very
proud of her skills and of her ability to take a lead role in the running of her household,
boasting about her cooking: “I know how to make anything.” Perhaps because of Amelia’s
displays of discipline, maturity, and responsibility at home and at school, Mr. and Mrs.
Ek “It’s Different Lives” 413
Gramajo trusted their daughter to make good decisions and gave her a lot of freedom. La
Iglesia, however, had very strict expectations for youths’ behaviors that intertwined with
processes of socialization to sexuality.
Sexualization
La Iglesia socialized its youth to el camino (the path or God’s path) and away from el mundo
(the world) or the larger society and its practices (Ek 2005). El mundo’s practices included
dancing; listening to nonchurch music; wearing tattoos, jewelry, makeup, short skirts, and
spiked hair. At La Iglesia girls were supposed to wear long skirts and no makeup. They had
to be demure and modest in their interactions with boys and men. Bible stories used to
socialize the youth often portrayed female protagonists as dangerous seductresses. For
example, when teaching the narrative of David and Bathsheba from the book of 2 Samuel,
church elders portrayed Bathsheba as the main wrongdoer who seduced David. However,
the Bible depicts David as the primary seducer given that he first coveted her and sent his
messengers to lure her to him.
Elders were most concerned about sexuality, particularly the girls’. During one lecture
condemning abortion, the Pastor positioned Amalia as an example of a young girl who
could get pregnant if she did not beware of boys’ overtures and of her own desires for
male attention. In another lecture, he urged the youth not to engage in premarital sex
because they could lose their moral values and their Christian identity. Both the elders and
the youth thought that the school condoned premarital sex (Ek 2005). Thus, although the
elders told the youth that the pursuit of higher education was their moral responsibility,
they were concerned about mainstream gender roles and constructions of sexuality at
school that conflicted with Pentecostalism.
In her study of Puerto Rican girls in an urban middle school, Rolón-Dow (2004)
documented how schools are sites that put forth sexualized images of girls, particularly
through extracurricular activities such as school assemblies. My observations at Amalia’s
high school echoed Rolón-Dow’s study. For example, a pep rally, attended enthusiastically
by all students included a fashion show where the students modeled the clothes. My field
note read:
A girl in tight jeans introduces the fashion show. She calls out the names of boy/girl couples. Boys
wear shirts/ties with slacks. Slender but shapely girls emerge in tight slinky dresses, short skirts,
and heels. One girl wears tight pants and a midriff shirt. They walk across the court, the song
“Always & Forever” playing in the background. [January 23, 2004]
Holland and colleagues argue that “the world of romance and attractiveness plays a
prominent role in the production and reproduction of gender privilege” (1998:57). The
school assembly fits right in with the world of romance that Holland critiques. The pairing
of the boys and girls and the wedding music created that romantic world that girls like
Amalia were supposed to take part in. Furthermore, this world of sexy fashions that the
school promoted lay in direct contrast to what La Iglesia socialized its youth to. School’s
performances of gender identities included tight, revealing clothes, and being in heterosexual
couples.
In addition, Amalia participated in certain activities that further exposed her to and
reified society’s sexualized images of girls. For example, on a visit to her Advanced
Placement biology class, I saw that she and her classmates, mostly Latina and Asian girls
surreptitiously read a Young Miss magazine. The magazine’s cover listed the titles of the
featured articles, which included: “New Contest: 12 Super Delicious Guys; Sexy, Party
Clothes You Can Really Afford; No More Undereye Circles Ever; Plus, a Day in the Life of
414 Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 40, 2009
4 Teenage Moms.” The magazine’s content included the very things that the Pastor and
other church elders feared the girls would fall prey to: guys, sex, parties, cosmetics, and
pregnancy.
But, although the church was greatly concerned with school, some of the practices at the
church itself around the performance of gender and sexuality went against its own
teachings (Ek 2005). For example, the church hosted Amalia’s elaborate quinceañera (15th
birthday party), and these quinceañeras tend to be very worldly, almost like beauty
pageants, involving elaborate makeup, clothes, and jewelry.
Amalia’s Negotiations of Sexualization
For many Latinos/as, the quinceañera is a very important ritual and performance of
gender and ethnic identities for girls. Mexicans, Cubans, and Central Americans celebrate
quinceañeras in very similar fashion. Although traditionally they were Catholic ceremonies
that included a special mass, the practice has been adopted by other religions including
Pentecostalism. It is not just a birthday celebration but also a coming of age party, a
very important rite of passage from girlhood into womanhood that has traditionally
marked a young woman’s readiness for sexuality, marriage, and children (Cantú 2002).
Amalia’s celebration was held at the church and was well attended by her family including
relatives who came from Guatemala for the occasion. It included a sermon, music by the
church band, and dinner in the church parking lot.
The all day quinceañera preparation included hair styling and a manicure at a beauty
salon—luxuries Amalia and her mother rarely had. Amalia’s blue, floor length gown was
brought from Guatemala by her cousin Gabi whose quinceañera in Guatemala Amalia had
attended a couple of years before. Although Amalia’s aunt dressed her, the aunt insisted
that Amalia show some cleavage, which Amalia protested, but her aunt pulled her dress
down. A full face of makeup was applied by a female cousin with expertise in cosmetics.
Although Amalia usually did not wear any makeup, layers and layers were applied
including foundation, concealer, blush, mascara, eyeliner, eye shadow, lip liner, lipstick,
and powder. As Mendoza-Denton (2008) observed, makeup paints gender on girls’
bodies. In this way, the quinceañera was very much a performance complete with costume
and makeup. However, Amalia was not comfortable with the whole spectacle nor with
some of its connotations as demonstrated by the interaction below between her and her
20-something-year-old cousins, Jorge and Roberto, that was witnessed by her brother.
Unusually quiet and seeming uncomfortable, Amalia sat waiting for her ride. The
transcript begins with her cousins teasing her about being a young lady.3
1 Jorge: ¿Amalia (.) cómo te sientes de ya ser una: señorita madura? ((videotaping her))
[Amalia, how do you feel now that you are a mature young lady?]
2 Amalia: Todavía soy una niña. [I am still a girl–child.]
3 Roberto: Ah no: no:. [Oh, no, no.]
4 Quiere ser una niñ:a ((laughing)) [She wants to be a girl–child.]
5 Amalia: ((covers face with right hand))
6 Roberto: No le gusta estar grande ya. ((Laughs)) [She doesn’t want to be grown up yet.]
7 Jorge: ¿Es cierto? [Is that true?]
8 Amalia: Sí. ((matter of factly; nodding head)) [Yes.]
9 Roberto: No quiere ser madura:. [She doesn’t want to be mature.]
10 Quiere ser una niña. WAA! ((Pretends to cry like a baby and laughs))
[She wants to be a girl–child. WAA!]
11 Amalia: Sí soy. [Yes I am.]
Amalia’s cousins interpreted her participation in the quinceañera along with its makeup
and clothes as signals that Amalia was not a child anymore. The teasing in this exchange
Ek “It’s Different Lives” 415
indicates an affective relationship between the cousins (Schieffelin 1986) and contains a
sexual double meaning (Farr and Barajas 2005) that highlighted the different footing that
Amalia as a “young lady” could now have with her male cousins. Jorge’s use of the word
señorita (ln. 1) signaled the emergence of Amalia’s sexuality and fertility. In some Latino
communities, becoming a “señorita” is synonymous with the onset of menarche. The term
señorita is also used to distinguish an unmarried female (i.e., virgin) from a married
woman. Covering her face and hiding the makeup that signaled her budding sexuality,
Amalia resisted her cousins’ evaluations of her. She protested and replied that she was still
a child. Even when Roberto continued relentlessly in lines 6, 9, and 10, Amalia, sitting
there in her gown, cleavage, and full makeup, did not take the bait, but insisted that she
was still a girl.
Rejecting the grown up señorita identity, Amalia discursively constructed an alternate
world where she could participate in the quinceañera ritual but could still be a child. As an
outside observer, I had the impression that the quinceañera was something that her
parents and relatives wanted more than she did. Later, Amalia shared with me that her
brother Aldo would get a car for his 15th birthday. When I asked her if she would have
wanted a car instead of a party, she said yes, thus indicating that she did not want the
traditional female ritual. Although cultural expectations dictated that she have a
quinceañera, she did not fully perform the particular gender identity that the ritual
marked. During my observations and interviews with Amalia, I never saw her want to be
a sexualized woman. She usually wore jeans or slacks and loose-fitting knit tops. Her hair
was often in a ponytail. She did not date during high school even though her father
considered himself muy liberal (very liberal) when it came to his daughter dating. Even
when she attended her prom, she was accompanied by a male friend, not a “date.”
Amalia also encountered the school expectations for teenagers that included certain
extracurricular practices such as dancing. Although she did not participate in the fashion
shows, she did attend dances that her parents paid for. When I asked her why she attended
the dances when the church preached against that practice, she said: “That gets me madbecause
dance? What bad is that? David danzaba [David danced], o.k.? Hello? And makeup,
I don’t know what does make-up have to do with this?”
In her defense of dancing, Amalia turned to the Bible story of King David from the book
of Psalms where David, speaking to God, declares, “You turned my wailing into dancing”
(Psalms 30:11), and he calls for people to “praise His name with dancing” (Psalms 149:3).
Amalia’s use of the Bible to defend dancing demonstrates that she viewed it as the
authority about what constitutes good and bad behavior—an authority higher than the
Pastor or the Sunday school teachers. In this way, she demonstrated her agency in negotiating
the differing expectations between school and church. She also claimed that when
church elders preached against dancing, they meant that if you were supposed to be at
church and you went dancing, then that was bad, but if you were at a dance and it was not
worship time, you were okay.
In addition, Amalia does not see the relevance of makeup to the larger Christian
moral trajectory on which Pentecostal youth find themselves. In this way, Amalia is able
to rationalize her behavior and wants beautifully so that she could still be a good and
moral person. Amalia’s actions here point to the “improvisations” of agents that constantly
change the conceptual and material aspects of figured worlds (Holland et al.
1998) and help them to negotiate the disjunctures of their multiple socializations.
Conclusion
This research demonstrated how a Guatemalan American teenager negotiated the
multiple socializations of her home, school, and church. Using tools of agency, Amalia
416 Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 40, 2009
resisted powerful forces of Americanization and Mexicanization by constructing her
own ethnic, national, and gendered identities. Primary among her agentic tools were the
Spanish language and the Guatemalan variety of Spanish. However, such linguistic
resources are always embedded in the historical and structural forces that permeate
Latino/a students’ lives (Bailey 2002). Unfortunately, our nation is moving toward
further weakening the agency of Latino/a students as xenophobic policies and politics
devalue the very tools they need to enact agency in their everyday lives. For example,
California, Arizona, and Massachusetts have passed antibilingual education policies that
attempt to regulate language. But, bilingual students like Amalia embody the fluidity of
language and resist these restrictive language policies.
Latina adolescents in particular are caught in a power struggle as they seek to enact
their agency in worlds where the more powerful attempt to regulate their bodies, voices,
languages, and identities. They are constantly seeking to construct themselves in ways that
may not be approved of by the institutions of which they are members. Amalia, for
example, seeks to hold onto her childhood amid powerful forces of sexualization in her
school and home that make it difficult for teenagers to be children. At the same time, she
resists church’s socialization to fundamentalist views of gender and sexuality. As Holland
and colleagues observe, “Human agency may be frail, especially among those with little
power, but it happens daily and mundanely, and it deserves our attention” (1998:5).
Our scholarly attention must also turn to more recently arrived Latino/a groups like
Central Americans. Even though this research centered on only one adolescent, the study
shows how already complex processes of socialization for Central Americans are further
complicated by the position of being a subgroup within a minority group. Linguistically,
their Spanish is doubly subordinated. First, Spanish has a low status in this country, and
second, Mexican Spanish predominates in largely Latino/a cities. Thus, Central Americans
must be both bilingual and bidialectal to claim a space for themselves. By leveraging these
tools, Amalia is able to construct positive identities and success in the face of contradictory
expectations.
The findings from this study also have implications for research and theory. First,
studying the educational experiences of Latino/a immigrant youth must focus on the
intersections of ethnicity, gender, and class and how these influence their identity work.
Identity is not a product but a process that plays out in social practices and activities.
Second, methods and analytical techniques must focus on youth’s own meaning-making
processes. Third, a focus on disjunctive or multiple socializations must include a lens that
sheds light on the interplay between larger structural and institutional forces and the
youth’s own agency.
Educators and administrators need to be aware of Latino/a youth’s positionality in the
nation’s larger social, political, and linguistic context. They need to recognize that youth
may receive contradictory information during their formative years. Teachers must give
students opportunities for discourse and dialogue and realize that students are facing an
uphill battle in retaining their native languages that are inextricably connected to their
identities. Also, increased knowledge and familiarity with the heterogeneity of Latino/a
cultures and languages can help us better meet the needs of these talented and resilient
students, particularly newer populations like Central Americans.
Although this article mostly focused on the complications of multiple socializations and
the challenges that arose for Amalia, it is important to note that there were positive
socializations in the three contexts. In church, for example, there was support for Spanish
and English literacy development and practices. There were also higher educational goals
for both girls and boys. However, there were also strains in the socializations. For
example, girls were more restricted and female Biblical characters were often portrayed
as being morally offensive. In addition, family obligations took away from school and
Ek “It’s Different Lives” 417
homework. In school, the English dominance pushed out Spanish and mainstream culture
challenged working-class values associated with home and church. Latino/a immigrant
youth’s words, bodies, and actions resist these strains and moral evaluations of
their multiple contexts to create legitimate places for themselves. Researchers, educators,
and policy makers must recognize and validate Latino/a bilingual youths’ identity
work.
Notes
Acknowledgments. I deeply appreciate Ana Celia Zentella, Kris Gutiérrez, Marjorie Faulstich
Orellana, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. I am
thankful to Nancy Hornberger and Doug Foley and their editorial teams for their assistance
and guidance. I am grateful to the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program
for supporting this research. Above all, I am indebted to the Pentecostal youth and their
families for their participation in my study.
1. The California Childhoods project was funded by the MacArthur Foundation Research
Network on Successful Pathways through Middle Childhood in a grant to Catherine Cooper (University
of California, Santa Cruz) and Barrie Thorne (University of California, Berkeley).
2. The Protestant church was connected to the repressive military regimes in Guatemala
(Steigenga 1994). But, a longer discussion about its history and connection to genocide and strife is
beyond the scope of this article.
3. Transcription conventions from Ochs and Capps (2001):
::: Colons indicate stretching of the preceding sound, proportional to the number of colons.
Word Upper case indicates loudness.
(( )) Double parentheses enclose descriptions of conduct
( ) Empty parentheses indicate that something is being said, but the transcriber could not hear it.