Turning Up the American and Turning Down the Mexican: Mexican American Women Navigating the Academy

• In Event: 33.020 - Gender, Ethnicity, and Schooling

Abstract

This paper unearths and analyzes how Mexican American women first generation college students pursuing bachelor's degrees experience, navigate, and negotiate their intersecting identities and current academic environment. Crenshaw's (1989) theory of Intersectionality and Anzaldua's (1987) Borderlands Theory are used as frameworks for analyzing data collected via six semi-structured interviews. The data provides counter narratives that highlight unexamined challenges Mexican American women first generation college students face while encountering academic policies, settings, and societal expectations. A central struggle that emerges for this population is the feeling of having to separate their Mexican American identity from their student identity to be successful in college. This research inserts Mexican American women voices into literature and combats silohing experiences of Latinos in higher education.

Author

• Cecilia Elizabeth Suarez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign