"Beat the Culture": Detailing Latinx Women's Negotiations of Gendered Cultural Narratives as Mathematics-Intensive STEM Majors

• In Event: 45.092 - MTCC Roundtable Session 17
  In Roundtable Session: 45.092-4 - The Potential of Intersectionality for Advancing Research Paradigms in STEM: A Cross-Cutting Conversation

Abstract

Extant research has documented the influence of gendered cultural narratives in shaping Latinx women’s pursuits of higher education (Knight, Dixon, Norton, & Bentley, 2006; Ovink, 2013). Ovink (2013), for example, detailed how Latinx women framed college education aspirations distinctly from Latinx men, particularly in relation to contributing to families’ financial stability and demonstrating independence from men. Such framing reflects how racial-ethnic and gender ideologies uniquely intersect in shaping what Ovink (2013) calls gendered familism among Latinx women and perceptions of their higher education pursuits.
Mathematics education research has documented how racialized, gendered, and other exclusionary discourses shape the social construction of a hierarchy of mathematics ability (Ernest, 2001; Martin, 2009). Latinx women, at the juncture of racialized and gendered discourses of mathematics ability, are taxed with the intersectional burden of navigating institutional and relational contexts in STEM education shaped by the confluence of these discourses (Author, 2016; Zavala, 2014). With Latinx women largely underrepresented in mathematics-intensive STEM majors (e.g., computer science, engineering; Espinosa, 2011; Rincón & Lane, 2018), there is a need to examine how Latinx women negotiate gendered cultural narratives as well as racialized-gendered discourses of ability to construct positive identities for persistence in mathematics-intensive fields.
To address this area of intersectional inquiry, this paper presents findings from an analysis that looks across the mathematics experiences of four Latinx women pursuing mathematics-intensive STEM majors. Participants’ pseudonyms, ethnicities, and majors are Lauren (El Salvadorean-American, computer science), Lisa (unidentified, physics), Kelly (Mexican-American, mechanical engineering), and Tracey (Cuban American, mathematics/theater). These Latinx women were in their first college year in a large, public, and predominantly white university in the U.S. Northeast. Counter-storytelling methodology from critical race theory was adopted to construct analytical narratives of each Latinx woman’s high school and undergraduate mathematics experiences (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). The counter-stories were based on data from mathematics autobiographies, a survey, semi-structured individual interviews, and a focus group. Intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) guided the cross-case analysis to highlight trends and variation in the Latinx women’s negotiations of discourses at intersections of culture, race, and gender as aspiring majors in mathematics-intensive fields.
Three analytical themes reveal variation in the intersectionality of the four Latinx women’s experiences and identity constructions. First, the Latinx women described how they encountered gendered cultural expectations (e.g., becoming housewives, dropping out of high school to bear children) and racialized-gendered judgment of STEM major choices that stood in opposition to their STEM higher education pursuits. Second, a variety of psychological motivations (e.g., becoming a teacher who encourages Latinx women to “beat the culture”) and forms of familial support (e.g., financial sacrifices, parental encouragement to “break that tradition”) were leveraged in the Latinx women’s ways of overcoming these racialized-gendered influences. The final theme documents variation in the Latinx women’s appeals to ideologies of whiteness (e.g., colorblindness) and gender-blindness in making meaning of their experiences and the future of STEM. Overall, this intersectional cross-case analysis extends prior work on Latinx women in higher education to capture how racialized-gendered influences in STEM further characterize their academic trajectories.

Authors

• Luis Antonio Leyva, Vanderbilt University

• Zander Alley, Vanderbilt University

• Alexandria Cervantes, California State University - Monterey Bay