Abstract
Reproductive politics and Latinxs’ politics demonstrate a preoccupation with representations and discourses across time and space. Intersectional feminists theorize how controlling images function as mechanisms of social control by distorting holistic perceptions of marginalized people. While social movement research documents the importance of culture in collective action, little research applies a controlling images interpretive framework to social movement contexts. An important case for examining Latina/x representations is the ideological terrain created by pro-abortion Latina/x feminist advocates. Utilizing a three-year ethnography with California Latinas for Reproductive Justice (CLRJ), written materials produced by the organization, and in-depth interviews with staff, I argue that CLRJ highlights the limitations of existing research, uses feminist approaches to dialogue, and creates structural analyses of inequalities to challenge la santa (the saint), a controlling image centering cisgender mestiza and white Latinas used to assume that all Latinas make poor advocates for reproductive autonomy.
At the time of her death, Rosaura (“Rosie”) Jiménez was a 27-year-old mestiza Mexican-origin Latina living in McAllen, Texas. She was the daughter of migrant farmworkers, a single mother to a five-year-old daughter, the partner of a longtime boyfriend who was incarcerated, a Medicaid recipient, and a college student. 1 In fall 1977, Rosie discovered that she was pregnant and sought a medically supervised abortion. However, the Hyde Amendment was in place, which prohibits the use of federal Medicaid funds to cover abortion-related expenses, with few exceptions. 2 Due to Rosie’s inability to pay for a medical abortion, she obtained a cheaper abortion via unsafe avenues. Within hours, Rosie experienced cramping, bleeding, and a fever. After a week in the hospital, Rosie died on October 3, 1977, of septic shock.
In the decades following Rosie’s preventable death, she is commonly referenced by reproductive justice (hereafter RJ) and rights (hereafter RR) advocates as the first known person to die from an unsafe abortion in the United States due to the Hyde Amendment. While mainstream, RR organizations 3 often use Jiménez’s story to advocate for the need for accessible abortions for all, intersectional RJ organizations draw on Rosie’s story to simultaneously advocate for accessible abortions and highlight the need for intersectional analyses of reproductive oppressions more broadly. These organizational strategies point to the centrality of representations and discourses in shaping reproductive politics.
Relatedly, the politics of discourse further shape Latinxs’ realities across social institutions. Spanning mass and social media, academic research, political organizations, policy, and quotidian discourse, the United States’s national imaginary reflects a persistent interest in representations of Latinxs (Chavez 2008; Dávila 2012; Molina-Guzmán 2010; Mora 2014). Specifically, the discursive politics of Latinx representations tend to reflect a contentious and bifurcated ideological terrain, where harmful misrepresentations of Latinxs are often met with counter-discourses that humanize Latinxs. The colonial, classist, and heteropatriarchal logics that ground these contestations suggest the need for intersectional analyses to uncover the mechanisms that hinder the self-determination of Latinxs.
Accordingly, Black feminists and other feminists of color have long theorized how controlling images are all around us, are internalized by people of all social locations, and function as mechanisms of social control by distorting holistic perceptions of marginalized people (Crenshaw 1991; Hill Collins [1990] 2000). As Hill Collins ([1990] 2000:67) argues, “Race, class, and gender oppression could not continue without powerful ideological justifications for their existence.” The pervasiveness of these images—and their hybridity—shows how discourse structures what we can and cannot think about certain phenomena (Hall 1989).
While valuable social movement scholarship documents the importance of culture in collective action as manifested via symbols, public discourse, collective identity, and rhetoric (Amenta and Polletta 2019; Fine 2002; Polletta 1998, 2006), little research applies a controlling images interpretive framework to social movement contexts. Thus, an important case for examining political contestations surrounding Latina/x representations is the ideological terrain created by Latina/x feminists in the RJ movement when they advocate for the right to accessible and safe abortion care. The guiding principles of RJ—the right to parent, to not parent, and to parent in safe and healthy environments—reflects the embeddedness of intersectionality in RJ praxis through a focus on choices rather than a singular choice (Ross et al. 2017). In this article, I ask, how do Latina/x feminists in the intersectional movement for RJ engage in pro-abortion advocacy? Utilizing a three-year ethnography with California Latinas for Reproductive Justice (CLRJ)—a statewide nonprofit policy advocacy organization—written materials produced by the organization, and interviews with staff, I argue that Latina/x feminist practices surrounding pro-abortion advocacy necessarily require abolishing misrepresentations of cisgender Latinas themselves, not simply challenging the harmful misinformation and stigma attached to abortion. I find that CLRJ highlights the shortcomings of existing research, uses feminist practices of dialogue, and creates intersectional analyses of systemic inequalities to challenge the pervasiveness of la santa (the saint), a controlling image that centers cisgender mestiza and white Latinas. La santa is wielded to assume that all Latinas are submissive, self-sacrificing, and poor advocates for reproductive autonomy because they are politically bounded by Catholicism regarding feminist issues. In what follows, I review scholarship on controlling images and then discuss extant research on the construction of la santa.
Literature Review
Controlling Images and Intersectional Theorizing
Intersectional feminist scholarship contends that controlling images are ideological mechanisms of social control that distort and fracture holistic understandings of the subjectivities of marginalized people. As sweeping and static misrepresentations, controlling images carry a cumulative effect, internalized as natural “facts” of social life. To maintain an ideological stronghold across time and space, controlling images rely on dichotomous thinking, perceptions of difference in oppositional terms, and address their inherent instability by “subordinating one half of the dichotomy to the other” (Hill Collins [1990] 2000:70). These images offer false understandings of social dynamics by reaffirming binary logics emblematic of colonial thinking, where marginalized people are understood as caricatures in an either/or fashion, systematically erasing how marginalized people are necessarily complex. These images justify unequal social relations, guiding people’s behavior and perceptions of themselves and of others.
The enduring quality of controlling images makes them pernicious and a matter of interest for scholars of inequalities. As Tressie McMillan Cottom (2019:90) explains, Sociologists try to figure out how ideologies like race and gender and class are so sticky [. . .] The easiest answer is that racism and sexism and class warfare are resilient and necessary for global capitalism. The easy answer is not wrong, but it does not always tell us the whys and what-fors of how a middle-class Black woman getting care in the good part of town in the United States of America has the same health outcome as a Black woman anywhere in the colonized world.
The stickiness that McMillan Cottom emphasizes points to the need for robust understandings (i.e., “the whys and what-fors”) of the empirical functionality of controlling images. Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) introduced representational intersectionality to focus on cultural representations of Black women that render invisible the complexities of their social locations and lead to intersectional disempowerment. Crenshaw argues that examining representational intersectionality is essential because “the production of images of women of color and the contestations over those images tend to ignore the intersectional interests of women of color” (p. 1283).
Patricia Hill Collins (1990 [2000]) famously theorized how images of Black women as mammies, matriarchs, welfare queens, jezebels, and ladies operate as powerful symbols of domination by presenting these images as commonsense knowledge. Importantly, the ongoing ideological stronghold of these images is partially attributed to the popular culture crafted by pro-slavery intellectuals that justified the subordination of African enslaved women as permanently racial and gender Others (Simms 2001). These images are necessary to maintain existing power relations that undermine marginalized people’s efforts at self-definition. Hill Collins (1990 [2000]:77) notes that “[a]s the ‘Others’ of society who can never really belong, strangers threaten the moral and social order. But they are simultaneously essential for its survival because those individuals who stand at the margins of society clarify its boundaries.”
Necessarily pervasive, controlling images are saturated throughout social institutions, such as the realms of health and reproductive politics. For example, Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant (2009) contends that the image of the strong Black woman creates a one-dimensional portrayal of Black women that hides their experiences with suffering and vulnerability. What Beauboeuf-Lafontant terms “the performance of invulnerability” results in mental and physical health problems, particularly depression and eating disorders. Representations of Black welfare queens as lazy, childlike, and neglectful mothers are used to develop policies that regulate their reproduction, punishing poor Black mothers for their oppression (Kelly 2010; Roberts 1997).
Controlling images also solidify inequalities in the workplace. Ivy Kennelly (1999) explores how white employers draw on the image of the Black working-class woman as a single mother to justify perceptions of them as poor and unreliable workers. Adia Harvey Wingfield (2009) finds that professional Black men manage their behavior to avoid being portrayed as the angry Black man, while Black women negotiate a modern-day version of the Black mammy image along with the sexualization of Black womanhood from co-workers. Highlighting how controlling images operate via interpersonal interactions, Ali Meghji (2018) finds that white professionals enact logics of white ignorance to justify drawing on an array of controlling images that Black professionals navigate.
The criminalization of Blackness is often buttressed through the normalization of controlling images. Important research documents how these images endanger young Black men in particularly insidious ways. Dawn Dow (2016) finds that Black middle- and upper-class mothers are forced to contend with the image of the thug and its impact on the safety and opportunities for their sons. As the thug is viewed as dangerous and subordinate to white masculinities, Black mothers view their sons as vulnerable and manage their sons’ interactions and appearance. Teachers and politicians also track young Black male students into unequal positions by identifying them as prone to criminality and thus undeserving of mentorship and other resources needed for upward mobility (Ferguson 2000; Norris and Billings 2017). The punishment that controlling images make possible carries particular implications for formerly incarcerated Black women’s mothering practices as they are imagined as pathological mothers who create broken homes (Gurusami 2019). Presumptions of Black women as aggressive, in need of discipline, and as fearless are also wielded to punish Black women’s attempts at self-defense when their physical safety is threatened (Benz 2020).
Some research theorizes how Orientalism (Said 1978) manifests through controlling images. Yen Le Espiritu (1997) traces controlling images of Asian women vacillating between The Dragon Lady—hypersexual and deceitful—and the Lotus Blossom as subservient and docile. Espiritu advocates for analyzing discursive imagery through a lens of gendered racism, and in the case of these images, their intersections ultimately show how cisgender Asian people are imagined as unable to meet normative standards of Western gender presentations. Similarly, Aki Uchida (1998:161) addresses the process of Orientalization, defined as the “objectification of Asian women as the ‘Oriental Woman’—the stereotypical image of the Exotic Other—in the discursive practices in the United States.” The Oriental Woman exists as a binary between the submissive, docile woman and the sexy vixen. The history of immigration centered on Chinese sex work, U.S. interventions in the Far East, and contemporary discourse about Asian women are responsible for the rise and persistence of this image.
U.S. popular culture is rife with controlling images imposed on Latinxs. Representations of Latinx immigrants often rely on the racist and nativist image of the “Latino illegal” who merits various forms of punishment (Chavez 2008; Deckard et al. 2020). In addition, through common representations of Latinas as domestic workers, the media play an active role in shaping racialized-gendered understandings of Latinas (Padilla 2009). Shifting to a focus on Hispanic marketers of commercial advertisements, Arlene Dávila (2012) finds that marketers exploit stereotypical assumptions about Hispanic consumers as inherently distinct from white American consumers for self-preservation in a racist industry. Thus, the notion of an “authentic and homogenous Hispanic culture” is an active and ongoing project. Isabel Molina-Guzmán (2010) develops the concepts of symbolic colonization and symbolic rupture to make sense of the power of resistance to repressive imagery. While symbolic colonization is an ideological process that contributes to the manufacturing of ethnicity or race as a homogenized construct [. . .] in which media practices reproduce [. . .] understandings about Latinidad as gendered, racialized, foreign, exotic, and consumable [. . .] Symbolic rupture points to the process of interpretation that allows audiences [. . .] as cultural readers to disrupt the process of symbolic colonization. (Molina-Guzmán 2010:9)
Controlling images are also used to understand Latinx inequalities beyond popular culture. For example, images of Latino men as predominantly gang members and athletes are used to block their access to higher education and upward mobility, leading to a repertoire of strategies from Latino men to resist these images (Vasquez-Tokos and Norton-Smith 2017). Research on schooling practices also finds that Latinx and Asian students are often disparately tracked, with Latinx students presumed to lack intelligence and require more discipline relative to their Asian peers (Ochoa 2013). While research examines how controlling images matter across social institutions and groups, research that focuses on how these images manifest and are contested in social movements is needed.
Constructing La Santa
One of the most pervasive controlling images of cisgender Latinas is that of la santa, often personified through mass media, research, and public thought as the mestiza, self-sacrificing, pious mother who is an immigrant and a monolingual Spanish speaker. Representing one half of an externally imposed virgin–whore dichotomy endemic to heteronormative mandates within settler colonialism, la santa is an extension of the figure of the Virgin de Guadalupe, the Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary is represented as a non-sexual mestiza revered by Catholic Latinxs across the Américas as exemplary of purity and self-sacrificial motherhood (Fregoso 2003).
Adulation for the Virgin Mary across time and space birthed the cult of marianismo, an ideology that “functions to discipline and regulate Latina femininity by positing ‘women’s spiritual superiority’ and hence their ‘capacity to endure all suffering’” (Fregoso 2003:180, quoting Gil and Vásquez 1996). In essence, marianismo positions the Virgin Mary as a colonial and gendered measuring stick to delineate the parameters for desirable and acceptable Latina behavior. Ideologies of marianismo and machismo essentialize Latin American cultures as comprised of women inclined toward submissiveness in relation to men invested in excessive displays of dominance. Given the global ideological violence wrought by European colonization, the cult of marianismo is linked to Victorian ideals of domesticity (Hill Collins [1990] 2000) and the Angel of the Hearth that constructed the ideal Victorian woman as a “Madonna-like wife and mother from whom all morality sprang; who was to be a spiritual guide, light of the home and self-sacrificing martyr who placed the family’s welfare above her own physical, mental and psychological fulfillment” (Bullaro 2005:157). The forced indoctrination of Catholicism by European colonizers to assimilate Indigenous peoples across the Américas via cultural genocide (Castañeda 1990; Lara 2005) continues today through assumptions that Latinas and Catholicism are inextricably linked.
Early sociological and anthropological research are significant sites for the propagation of la santa. Research on Hispanic families dating back to the early twentieth century is rife with stereotypes of cisgender Latino men as machistas and Latinas as self-sacrificing, who raise their children to follow in their gendered footsteps. These representations are the ideological repertoire of a vast body of research on what is termed Hispanic familismo or familism (Sena-Rivera 1979). Evaluations of the efficacy of the family among Latinxs vary between perceived positive effects on health (Alvirez and Bean 1976; Ramirez and Arce 1981) to conclusions that familismo constructs Latinx families as pathological (Baca Zinn 1982/1983). Consequently, la santa’s accomplishments as a doting wife and mother are used to advance a politics of respectability for Latina motherhood that villainizes women who attempt to feel, think, and act based on their own desires (Gaspar de Alba 2014).
Importantly, la santa perpetuates the erasure of ideas and experiences of Black Latinas given contrasting expectations for mothering between non-Black and Black Latinas. As Martha I. Cruz-Janzen (2010:288) explains, Whereas my Spanish heritage taught me that women are weak and dependent, my African heritage taught me that women are strong and self-reliant. African women flourished in spite of the despair of their lives to emerge as enduring forces of cohesion and cultural transmission.
As Elena Gutiérrez (2008) discusses in her work on forcibly sterilized Mexican-origin immigrant women, non-Black Latinas are imagined as overly invested in motherhood, supporting stereotypes of Latinas as morally traditional and family-centered, in contrast to Black women who are continuously imagined as neglectful, irresponsible mothers.
The ubiquity of controlling images like la santa has significant implications for Latinas’ sexualities. Latina youth often encounter school-based sex education that reinforces heteronormative, gendered racism that presumes Latina sexuality is a social problem (García 2009). This sex (mis)education fails to provide comprehensive sex education to Latinxs across sexualities, assuming that they are all heterosexual and in need of policing to prevent them from engaging in “risky and deviant” sexual behavior. Lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ+) Latina youth are forced to manage heteronormative health discourses and resist these hegemonic discourses by reframing their sexual identities and behaviors as health promotive through preventative behaviors (Schmitz, Robinson, and Tabler 2020).
Latinas experience hypersexualization (Bettie 2003; Denner and Guzman 2006) that is used to normalize and justify sexual violence against them (Clonan-Roy 2019). The construction of Latina sexuality as a problem leads Latina mothers to police their daughters’ sexuality by emphasizing the importance of waiting to have sex until marriage (Reyes 2016). The sexual objectification of non-white women in the Américas is directly linked to the logic of Manifest Destiny that justified the invasion of Indigenous lands and the enslavement of African peoples. Irene Lara (2005) provides historical context for the duality of the virgin–whore construct in Latin America, arguing that it not only reflects the surveillance of women’s sexual agency but also impedes collective healing. Examining how the discourses surrounding la santa manifest in collective action is important for understanding how controlling images undermine Latinx feminist advocacy and how marginalized actors resist hegemonic imagery through intersectional praxis.
Data and Method
CLRJ is a Los Angeles–based Latina/x-led nonprofit organization established in 2005 that, according to their website, is “committed to honoring the experiences of Latinas/xs to uphold our dignity, our bodies, sexuality, and families. We build Latinas’/xs’ power and cultivate leadership through community education, policy advocacy, and community-informed research to achieve reproductive justice.” CLRJ’s advocacy work centers on policy advocacy, community engagement, strategic communications, and community-informed research.
During the period of data collection, most staff were children of working-class or working poor Latinx immigrants, with one migrating to the United States as a child and two who identify as third-generation Latinas. The staff comprised primarily of Mexican-origin Latinas, with one who identifies as Puerto Rican and two who are of Central America origin. In addition, all staff members hold at minimum bachelor’s degrees in ethnic studies, gender studies, labor studies, or public health, with a few also holding master’s degrees in public health. The organization’s membership is comprised of woman-identified Latinas ranging in age from 15 to over 60, non-binary Latinxs, and male-identified, young Latino fathers. CLRJ’s membership reflects a range of positionalities regarding age, gender, sexuality, parental status, immigrant status, countries of origin, and race. Of the over 2,200 members, 90 percent are bilingual (English and Spanish), with the remaining 10 percent comprised of monolingual Spanish speakers. Many of the members aged 20 to 30 attended college or were recent college graduates at the time of data collection. The membership is predominantly working-class and poor, with 7 percent identifying as middle-class.
I use the factual names of both the organization and staff members for three reasons. First, all staff members consented to the use of their names. Second, by providing factual names, I follow in epistemological traditions that resist the erasures of contributions of feminists of color in social movements (Luna 2016). Last, CLRJ is the only Latina/x RJ organization in California; therefore, anonymity is difficult to establish. Non-staff membership varied over the course of my fieldwork; therefore, I did not establish the same degree of rapport with all members as I did with staff, and I use pseudonyms when referring to non-staff research participants.
I conducted approximately 3,000 hours of ethnographic observations between June 2014 and June 2017, an average of 10 to 35 hours per week. I gained access to CLRJ as an unpaid intern and I coordinated their story collection project, assisted and occasionally organized community education trainings, helped recruit new members, lobbied state legislators, participated in political canvassing and phone banking, and at times transcribed focus group interviews to support research efforts. In addition, I attended many community events, staff meetings, and meetings between CLRJ and partner organizations. Following unexpected staff turnover in the spring of 2016, I temporarily served as the coordinator of their leadership development work while CLRJ hired new staff. I executed these efforts (i.e., training Latinas to become RJ policy advocates) based on the guidelines created by CLRJ staff. I wrote jottings of events while in the field and later expanded those jottings into field notes when I returned home.
In addition to participant observations, between October 2015 and February 2016, I conducted 12 in-depth interviews with CLRJ staff. The duration of each interview was between two and five hours focused on six topics: (1) the history of the organization, (2) personal trajectories that led each staff member to CLRJ, (3) decision-making and implementation of organizational strategies, (4) strategies for coalitional work, (5) how academics can support nonprofits, and (6) what “justice” means to them. The interviews took place privately either at the CLRJ office or at staff members’ homes; all interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed with the aid of a paid research assistant. I modified the interview questionnaire as the interviews progressed based on insights shared by respondents.
This article also draws on a qualitative content analysis of written documents authored and circulated by CLRJ. Specifically, I analyze fact sheets, press releases, policy reports, and internal documents on community education trainings frequently used by staff and members of CLRJ. All research written materials analyzed in this article were drafted by CLRJ staff prior to my entrance into the organization; therefore, I had no decision-making involvement. I analyzed field notes, interview transcripts, and written documents abductively (Timmermans and Tavory 2012). I hand coded through line-by-line analysis based on the ideas, themes, and issues that emerged during the initial open coding stage. I initially organized the data descriptively based on CLRJ’s distinct programming areas (i.e., policy advocacy, community-based research, voter engagement, communications, and community education). I subsequently coded more conceptually by connecting the data with existing research, tracing the various ways that CLRJ members and staff construct narratives regarding abortion among Latinxs.
I was positioned as an “outsider within” (Hill Collins 1986) which simultaneously enabled and obstructed my interactions with CLRJ. As a cisgender, heterosexual, second-generation, bilingual, mestiza Latina of Mexican origin, the intersections that shape my social location overlap with many of those in CLRJ, which facilitated trust over time in some contexts. However, my status during data collection as a doctoral student in a sociology program at a major research university—a university that several members and staff of CLRJ attended and experienced discrimination—rightfully generated distrust toward me and my intentions as a researcher. Early in data collection, some staff voiced concerns about the colonialist origins of ethnography and the potential negative effects of my presence and future publications on the organization’s efforts, regardless of intent. Given these understandable suspicions, I focused on assisting CLRJ’s work to demonstrate that my presence was not simply oriented toward career advancement.
Findings
For Latina/x feminists engaged in intersectional RJ work, pro-abortion advocacy requires simultaneously destigmatizing abortions and abolishing the controlling image of la santa that presumes that Latina/x feminists make poor advocates for reproductive autonomy. To engage in these simultaneous disruptions, CLRJ engages in three discursive strategies. I first demonstrate how CLRJ challenges the implicit normalization of la santa by focusing on the shortcomings of existing research. I then detail how CLRJ creates discursive spaces for difficult conversations with other Latinxs regarding abortion given the heterogeneity among Latinxs. Last, I examine how narratives constructed by CLRJ further disrupt la santa by shifting the focus away from flattening representations of Latinxs to a focus on how U.S. institutions are designed to repress marginalized people’s ability to exert reproductive self-determination.
We’re Not All Anti-abortion: Naming Bad Science
Advocating for Latinxs’ right to abortion care requires challenging representations of Latinxs as monolithically religious and politically conservative. One of CLRJ’s strategies includes creating and circulating written materials that supplant misrepresentations of Latinxs’ perceptions of abortion with research-driven factsheets and policy reports. Specifically, CLRJ uses these materials to showcase how perceptions of Latinas as la santa are evidence of poor research designs rather than Latinas’ innate conservatism. For example, CLRJ staff authored three factsheets as part of a series titled, “Latinas/os and the ‘A’ Word” to dispel common myths regarding abortion. The first factsheet in the series, “What Latinas/os really think about abortion,” draws on national polling data to offer complex representations of Latinx attitudes toward abortion: California Latinas for Reproductive Justice (CLRJ) is aware that for our communities, abortion is a complex issue that similar to other sexuality topics is considered taboo and often does not get discussed. The vast majority of public opinion surveys concerning abortion are relegated to a polarizing debate around rights and “choice.” Based on this limited and highly politicized framework, Latinas/os are erroneously perceived as an anti-abortion group, whose beliefs are driven by perceived homogenous values. In addition, this framework falsely assumes that all Latinas/os are aware that abortion is legal in the United States and/or that they identify with traditional “choice” language, which is very specific to the U.S. political context.
Rather than cite religiosity or essentialist notions of “Latinx culture” as inherently conservative, the factsheet names the reliance of U.S. public opinion polls on the binary logics of the “choice” framework as a factor fueling misconceptions of Latinx relations to reproductive politics. The “choice” framework, often taken-for-granted in research designs, rests on an individualistic ideology guided by racial capitalism, where women are thought to have a host of choices available for them to select or consume. Therefore, when poor and working-class women of color opt into motherhood, they are subsequently viewed as inferior for opting into a decision that their economic status cannot sustain (Roberts 1997). Yet for poor people of color, who have historically been dispossessed and stripped of the right to parenthood through chattel slavery, coerced sterilization, boarding schools, immigration policies, and the racialized rhetoric undermining public service programs, in some contexts, parenting may be a stronger form of structural resistance than abortion or contraceptive control (Solinger 2005). Importantly, the factsheet implies that U.S. public opinion surveys and the “choice” framework ignore the distinct dynamics produced by migration. As the factsheet notes, the language of “choice” is unique to a U.S. political context that does not necessarily resonate with immigrants coming from sociopolitical contexts with distinct anti-abortion rhetoric and where punishment for accessing abortion care is severe.
The factsheet shares findings that CLRJ gathered from a public opinion poll of “890 Latino voters” that provides a contrasting snapshot of Latinx abortion attitudes. According to the factsheet, what makes CLRJ’s research design better equipped to represent Latinx attitudes is that the poll “framed questions from a value-based point of reference, with the understanding that the Latina/o community is very diverse and depending on circumstance or experience, as a community we hold complex and nuanced views on terminating a pregnancy.” The poll results are organized around four thematic findings with statistical details following each statement. For example,
• Nearly 7 in 10 respondents agree that while they may not choose an abortion for themselves or their partners, they would [. . .]
• Nearly 8 in 10 respondents agree that women need medically accurate information about abortion, and that it [. . .]
• Respondents identify a person’s financial situation and not wanting a child as factors having [. . .]
The findings point to a nuanced recognition of the complexities surrounding abortion attitudes, a recognition imperative for dismantling la santa image. Poll respondents generally agree that abortion care—including medically accurate information—should be available to all women, even if respondents would not choose abortion for themselves. As the conclusion explains, these findings suggest that Latinxs are, in fact, “
The conclusion of the factsheet points to the need for intersectional analyses and policy reform regarding the Hyde Amendment: In 1976, Congress passed the Hyde Amendment, which severely restricts the use of federal funds for abortion services to only cases of rape, incest and if carrying the pregnancy to term jeopardizes the woman’s life. California is one of a handful of states that uses state funds to cover abortion services for low-income women beyond the Hyde Amendment’s restrictions. However, there are many women in California who rely on federally funded medical programs and are denied abortion services as a result of Hyde, including: military personnel and their dependents, disabled women on Medicare, Native American women, women in federal prisons, Peace Corps volunteers, women who are federal employees and others who are dependent on federally-funded health insurance.
The purpose of the Hyde Amendment is the legislative undermining of abortion access previously protected by Roe v. Wade (1973). By restricting the use of federal funds to cover abortion services, Hyde disproportionately punishes poor people of color. Thus, rather than presume that poor Latinxs do not access medically supervised abortions due to religious mandates, the factsheet’s conclusion highlights how poor Latinxs are excluded from accessing safe abortion care through discriminatory legislation. This suggests that not all people face the same barriers to accessing abortions, pointing to the need for intersectional understandings of the social factors that inform decision-making.
Another strategy for dismantling la santa lies in CLRJ’s focus on data gaps on Latinas’ reproductive and sexual needs. To intervene in these empirical erasures, in 2009, CLRJ published a policy research brief titled, “Making the Case for Latinas’ Reproductive Health & Justice Policy.” The brief is comprised of original data based on 26 in-depth interviews with policy advocates, community leaders, organizers, and service providers focused on reproductive politics along with secondary data analysis of information available online. Among the key findings highlighted, the brief states:
The existing Latina data reflects a range of accessibility challenges, including:
The research vehicles do not adequately provide the information needed to inform the policy making process or community leaders’ needs concerning Latinas’ reproductive and sexual health issues. The existing research designs lack cultural competency. The research is not accessible because advocates and community members lack the resources to pay for academic or professional journals or the connections to subscribe to these sources. Latina-specific data sources are not readily available. The language in which the data is presented is highly academic and inaccessible.
This excerpt highlights the need for researchers to reflect on the implications of doing research on marginalized people while making said research inaccessible to those very people. Notably, these findings were echoed during my interactions with CLRJ staff. For example, as I was a doctoral student during fieldwork, the Director of Research and Programs, Ena Suseth Valladares, occasionally asked me to access research articles. As she shared, It’s really frustrating to need certain research studies, but I can’t access them because I’m not affiliated with a university and we [CLRJ] can’t afford to pay for each article. But the research should be available to anyone who needs it.
Ena’s reflection points to the inequalities between those affiliated with the Academy and those who are not. As a director of research for a policy advocacy organization that relies on research to inform their policy priorities, she routinely lacks access to the very resources needed to support the efforts of the RJ movement.
Moreover, Ena shared an important lesson for academics and research organizations regarding the latter’s priorities when developing new research. During a weekday morning in November 2015, Ena approached me in CLRJ’s office with a list of journal articles that she needed regarding Latina reproductive inequalities. As I downloaded the articles, Ena stated, There are so many important questions about Latinas and reproduction that are still unanswered. So much work that could help us move our policy efforts forward and make a difference. But a lot of times it seems that researchers are asking questions that are interesting to them, but not necessarily helpful for the work that we’re doing.
Ena points to a notable gap between researchers’ motivations and the research designs that are most needed by marginalized people and advocates. The 36-page “Making the Case” brief further substantiates these claims by including many anonymized excerpts from CLRJ’s interviews with key stakeholders. Two interview excerpts from advocates highlight key issues that impede opportunities for researchers to engage in work that supports Latinxs’ rights to bodily self-determination:
The groups that serve Latinas should be asking what the pressing issues are and that should drive the research, as opposed to what the big university centers think should be studied.
[It is] hard to find data specific to Latinas that is current and California based; I mostly look at national numbers. But even then, the data is not in the way that you need it; sometimes [the] numbers of incidences or certain rates will be provided, but [I] am not able to break it down by Latinas, nor by gender or age.
While the first excerpt brings attention to the need for community-based organizations like CLRJ to guide the decision-making regarding researcher’s agendas based on the needs of Latinas and Latinxs generally, the second elaborates on the shortcomings of quantitative data that offer snapshots of broad patterns but cannot provide details about the differences in experiences between Latinas of different social locations. The inequalities that prevail between researchers and community-based organizations hold significant implications for disrupting the taken-for-granted quality of controlling images. As two excerpts, one from a researcher and practitioner and another from a researcher, in the “Making the Case” brief explain, There is an assumption about passivity—especially for Latina youth. It is important to look [at] nationality, and not just ethnicity, and do a serious survey on Latinas and their attitudes on abortion because they are more permissive than people think.
The assumption that all Latinas are socialized from a young age into the submissive and respectable traits that define la santa helps maintain the image in-tact, especially when research designs often ignore Latinx realities or focus on doing research on Latinxs rather than with them.
Academics further contribute to the proliferation of harmful controlling images of Latinxs when they assume that Latinxs, especially Latinas, are incapable of creating powerful narratives of reproductive self-determination. During an afternoon in April 2016, I worked on CLRJ’s story collection project in the CLRJ office while Ena and the Communications Director, Susy Chávez Herrera, engaged in their own work in the same room. Ena and Susy discussed some of the issues they experienced in the past when collaborating with academics. When I added that the power dynamics between academics and activists/advocates are fundamentally unfair and exploitative, Ena shared an encounter she experienced years prior with a Latina professor: I shared some of our research findings with her hoping we could work on something together and she told me that our research is not real research because academics weren’t a part of it and because it didn’t go through the IRB process. And she was Latina . . .
Ena slowly nodded, looked down at the floor, and pursed her lips after she added that the academic was Latina, while Susy stared at her computer screen and shook her head in disapproval. The Latina academic that Ena and Susy discussed advanced a false and elitist viewpoint of knowledge production that assumes that legitimate knowledge is only birthed in the Academy. It presumes that marginalized people need academics to “give them voice” or to make sense of their lives. In reality, marginalized people are always already engaged in on-the-ground theorizing, meaning-making, and world-making beyond the scope of the Academy’s imagination.
Meeting People Where They’re at: Making Spaces for Difficult Dialogues
Abortion is arguably the most polarizing topic in U.S. reproductive politics. Due to this contentious dynamic, CLRJ approaches pro-abortion advocacy by enacting lessons of intersectional feminisms: the recognition that all knowledge is partial and that political consciousness is a lifelong process of (un)learning (Hill Collins [1990] 2000; Lugones 2003). As staff explained, a significant aspect of RJ work requires “meeting people where they’re at” because of Latinx heterogeneity. This involves creating discursive spaces to engage in difficult conversations by teaching Latinxs about the intersectional aspects of reproduction, rather than shaming others for espousing views that contradict RJ. During an interview, Lorena Garcia Zermeño, formerly CLRJ’s Program Coordinator and now the Policy Manager, explained the importance of “meeting people where they’re at” when discussing abortion: L: With abortion you have to be careful around how we say things. Always being very careful with your word choice and always being aware that people come from different places and have different experiences. They might be okay with certain topics, but abortion may be a touchy subject. R: So how do you talk about abortion when they’re not supportive of it? L: Well, instead of saying, “Oh, you know, we need to be okay with abortion,” or being so overt about it, understanding, well, “we need to make sure that everyone has access to make their own decisions.” We take a really clear stand [on abortion], but then at the same time, we don’t wanna turn anybody off to RJ and think they can’t be a part of it [the movement] because they may feel a certain way about something. That’s why we also never say “pro-choice” or whatever—it’s not just about that. It’s learning to say, “you know it’s about having what you need to make decisions about your body. It’s choices—whether to parent or not parent.” CLRJ is really intentional about that because we’re not just addressing some folks, and everyone has different views.
Lorena details the discursive intricacies required to engage a diversity of Latinx social locations regarding politically challenging subjects, such as abortion. She notes that she and others in CLRJ are intentional about avoiding phrasing such as “pro-choice” that carry particular connotations and can be off-putting to some Latinxs. Even though CLRJ staff unequivocally support abortion for all under any circumstances, rather than approach Latinxs from that standpoint, they opt for framing the right to abortion and the right to parent as inherently interconnected subjects because they both reflect the importance of bodily self-determination. CLRJ understands that Latinxs reflect a multiplicity of political orientations based on various social factors, and that those orientations can also transform over time. By “meeting people where they’re at,” CLRJ engages in discursive practices that demonstrate that controlling images are not reflective of ontological realities.
I, too, experienced firsthand the discursive complexities of discussing abortion from an RJ lens. In January 2016, I, along with all staff and several volunteers of CLRJ, phone-banked to support the organization’s voter engagement efforts. One of the areas in greater Los Angeles that CLRJ reaches out to because it is often ignored in mainstream voter outreach is Bell Gardens, a city whose residents are overwhelmingly poor and working-class Latinxs (96 percent according to the U.S. Census Bureau). On a Thursday morning, I sat in the CLRJ office adjacent to former Senior Director of Community Education and Mobilization, Gabriela Valle’s, desk. As I worked through the list of community members’ phone numbers, I called a woman named Lourdes who self-identified as Latina and middle-aged. The phone banking script suggested first providing my name and that I am calling on behalf of CLRJ. Just as I finished mentioning the full name of the organization, Lourdes interrupted and said, “there’s nothing for us to talk about. I don’t believe in abortion, it ain’t right.”
The purpose of the phone banking was to discuss the need to support Latinx youth who become young parents and often lack the economic and institutional resources to raise their children in safe and healthy conditions. I quickly remembered the many lessons Gabriela and other CLRJ staff taught me about finding ways to create a dialogue regardless of others’ political beliefs. As such, I responded, “well, actually, for us reproductive justice doesn’t just mean supporting people’s right to abortion, but also their right to parent and to have the resources you need to raise children.” Lourdes quickly interjected, “well, that I can get behind on. It’s hard raising kids when you don’t have enough money and everything costs a lot.” Lourdes and I discussed the RJ framework for over 30 minutes, covering an array of social problems addressed by the RJ movement. I used some of my personal experiences and those of some of my family members to humanize the topics and show the connections across them. Throughout the conversation, Lourdes continued to voice opposition to abortion access. At the end of the conversation, Lourdes shared that while she was still uncomfortable with the idea of abortion, she appreciated that RJ expands the reproductive politics by focusing on various issues.
When Lourdes and I ended the conversation, I took a deep breath and drank a significant amount of water, feeling emotionally exhausted by the moments of confrontational engagement. I looked over at Gabriela and she smiled and added, That’s how you RJ our folks. I know it was a hard conversation, but you met her where she’s at and opened the door for her to start connecting the dots between the right to parent and the right not to parent.
Gabriela validated the importance of approaching RJ as a lifelong commitment to (un)learning and helping those around her do the same, a commitment that requires the willingness to engage in difficult conversations with others who may hold opposing political views. This focus on the possibilities for change in political consciousness over time directly challenges the static quality of controlling images.
These Systems Are the Problems: Institutional Failures by Design
To challenge the dehumanizing effects of controlling images, Latina/x feminists shift the analytical gaze away from themselves and onto social institutions that, by design, reproduce violence and inequalities. For example, the second factsheet in the “Latinas/os and the ‘A’ Word” series provides empirically driven information regarding how social factors work together to impede Latinas’ ability to access abortions. The factsheet outlines four primary barriers—lack of providers, financial cost, lack of information regarding abortion rights for those using safety net programs, and government restrictions—that make it increasingly difficult for Latinas to choose abortion. As the factsheet explains, Immigrant Latinas are challenged to find providers who are not only proficient in their language but more importantly who deliver culturally sensitive and relevant health services. Survey findings from a CLRJ study [. . .] revealed that female immigrants (18%) stated service providers not understanding their culture is a larger barrier to accessing health services than providers not speaking their language (11%). As such, this finding is particularly crucial for promoting and supporting delivery of culturally-relevant services, including abortion care.
This excerpt highlights some of the dynamics that must be accounted for when addressing immigrant Latinas’ lack of access to health services. The difficulties in finding medical providers who speak languages other than English increases the likelihood of receiving limited information regarding medical issues. In addition, finding providers who take into account sociopolitical factors from other countries, and how those factors affect reproductive dynamics, makes it uniquely challenging to receive comprehensive health care.
Latinxs are disproportionately more likely to experience poverty relative to U.S. whites. This economic inequality creates dangerous consequences for people in need of abortions: Low-income Latinas often lack the funds necessary for an abortion, which can delay their care. Delays in accessing coverage can cause them to receive care at later stages in pregnancy, resulting in more complicated and costly terminations. Nearly 60% of women who experience a delay in obtaining an abortion highlight the time it took to make arrangements and to raise money as a significant factor leading to a delay. Finding a provider available to perform abortions in advanced pregnancies may also incur additional transportation and lodging costs, as fewer providers have this specialized training.
During communication education trainings, CLRJ staff elaborated on the inequalities reflected in this passage by discussing how the intersections of poverty and geographical location work together to impede Latinxs’ access to abortion care. Specifically, staff often mentioned that for Latinas living in the San Joaquin Valley—a large, rural area in Central California where poor and working-class Latinxs comprise 42 percent of the population (U.S. Census Bureau)—accessing an abortion is especially difficult as it can require at least a two-hour drive to the nearest clinic in the Bay Area. As staff explained, a two-hour drive to the nearest abortion clinic not only requires access to a working vehicle, but also the financial flexibility to lose a day’s worth of wages. For poor and working-class Latinxs in rural areas like the Central Valley, then, abortion becomes no choice at all.
The third factsheet in the “Latinas/os and the ‘A’ Word” series brings attention to the predatory practices of crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) that target poor and working-class people of color: Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) or Pregnancy Resource Centers are anti-abortion and religious-based organizations, whose sole purpose is to dissuade women from obtaining an abortion and instead opt for motherhood or placing their child for adoption. CPCs more often than not pose as legitimate medical health clinics and are generally located near a genuine health center or clinic—making it easy for women to go to the crisis pregnancy center by mistake. CPCs also draw women into their doors by using names that are similar to the names of real reproductive health centers in the neighborhood and/or promoting free pregnancy tests, pregnancy options “counseling” and in some instances, even ultrasounds. Once inside, unqualified or under-qualified volunteers often posture as medical professionals and pressure women to keep their pregnancies through use of inaccurate and biased information, intimidation and scare-tactics.
Challenging the assumption that Latinas specifically and Latinxs generally are inherently anti-abortion, CLRJ’s factsheet names structural forces that make it increasingly difficult for Latinas to exercise a multiplicity of reproductive choices. CPCs purposely present a veneer of a health clinic to lure Latinas seeking health services. Promoting free services such as pregnancy tests and ultrasounds serves as a predatory tactic that exploits Latinas’ increased likelihood to experience poverty. The pressure to birth from volunteers at CPCs on Latinas seeking abortions further reinforces discursive politics that villainize abortion rather than discussing it as simply another health service. Adjacent to the above text, the factsheet includes a map of California that illustrates where abortion providers and CPCs are centralized. The map provides a stark representation of systemic inequalities: the counties with the highest percentage of Latinxs also have the highest rates of CPCs, significantly outnumbering the number of abortion providers in those areas. While racist and nativist narratives prevail of Latinx immigrants and their progeny as “invading” the United States to steal jobs and other public resources, the factsheet flips the discursive script by suggesting that CPCs are in actuality engaging in opportunism: “We must continue to expose CPCs for what they really are and not allow them to continue to invade our communities with misinformation and coercive anti-abortion tactics.”
The factsheet concludes by dispelling four “lies spread by CPCs” using research-driven information:
This myth-busting strategy helps rectify the spread of misinformation that may dissuade Latinxs from accessing abortion care for fear of developing other medical problems such as breast cancer, a decision that is often interpreted as evidence of Latinxs’ conservatism.
Controlling images tied to sexual politics carry dangerous implications for Latinx youth, especially those in rural areas where health services are difficult to access. In the summer of 2016, I accompanied Ena to Fresno—a city in California’s San Joaquin Valley—to conduct a focus group with high school–age Latinas regarding the information they receive about sex education. As we sat at a large conference table at the local Planned Parenthood clinic, Ena asked the group of girls about the lessons taught regarding sex in their high school curriculum. One of the girls, Fabiola, shared an anecdote: My sex ed teacher is famous in my school for telling girls the same story every year. They teach us to wait until marriage to have sex and she tells girls to think about a new shoe and how the bottom of it has good grip. After you use the shoes for a long time, they get smooth and lose their grip. She says it’s the same for girls if you’re having a lot of sex.
Certainly, this teacher uses a sexist falsehood and double standard to police Latina youth’s sexuality and promote abstinence, a strategy that leads to higher rates of unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (Stanger-Hall and Hall 2011). This teacher suggests that Latinas who engage in promiscuous sex will be less desirable to male partners over time as their vaginas will show evidence of repeated sexual activity. More importantly, this ethnographic moment also makes salient the relationality embedded in controlling images. Fabiola’s teacher implicitly uses la santa as a model of sexual behavior that young Latinas should aspire to, effectively using la santa to shame another common controlling image of Latinas: the hyper-sexualized, cisgender spicy Latina with a hot temper and insatiable sexual appetite. Using one harmful misrepresentation to punish another misrepresentation strips Latinas of sexual self-determination, placing Latinas in an impossible situation that leaves no space for bodily autonomy.
Shifting the gaze from Latinxs to systemic inequalities also requires highlighting how mainstream, RR organizations invest in the presumptions of controlling images to the extent that their organizational practices foment intersectional disempowerment. As such, for intersectional organizations like CLRJ, their community education work also involves teaching RR advocates—many of whom identify as cisgender white women—the urgency of applying an intersectional lens to pro-abortion advocacy. Some of this relational labor requires implicitly and explicitly challenging controlling images that surround Latinxs, particularly cisgender, immigrant Latinas. As Gabriela Valle explained about some of her interactions with reproductive health and rights advocates, So, you come into the room, and the people [. . .] are already talking about women and health and immigration. And you’re like, “great, cuz there’s so much there that is part of what we’re interested in and that’s important to us!” And then in that room, there’s an assumption that because immigration is involved, that immigrant women from the around the world—“Oh they couldn’t possibly be pro-choice, pro-abortion. And they couldn’t possibly wanna talk about sexuality. And we should probably just leave those issues over there for somebody somewhere else.” And you’re the one that comes into the room and those issues are already in this room because her journey just to get to the U.S. . . . if we just asked what sexual assault might have happened. It’s already in the room. If you ask what choices she’s already had to make or hasn’t been able to make because of lack of power, money, and position. It’s the fact that she doesn’t even have healthcare . . . [doesn’t] have money to get to the clinic. Now you’ve already complicated the whole discussion that was happening before you came into the room by bringing this RJ lens.
Gabriela provides a vivid illustration of the discursive creativity that RJ advocates perform as they use intersectional analyses to challenge the ideological violence wrought by controlling images. White supremacy and nativism haunt the physical and symbolic room that Gabriela describes as some RR advocates conjure images of la santa, constructed here as an immigrant woman who opposes reproductive autonomy and is sexually repressed. When Gabriela details that mainstream advocates often conclude that “we should probably just leave those issues over there for somebody somewhere else,” she poignantly demonstrates how controlling images reduce marginalized people to simplistic caricatures. These erasures carry significant material implications as mainstream advocates choose which aspects of marginalized identities to advocate for and which they can conveniently “leave [. . .] for somebody somewhere else.” However, Gabriela powerfully explains that regardless of whether mainstream discourses recognize the fullness of marginalized subjectivities—such as how the intersections of sexual assault, migration, and poverty bear on reproductive oppressions—that fullness is “already in the room.”
Discussion and Conclusion
Controlling images comprise the ideological stuff of oppression, discursively stripping marginalized people of their humanity and complexity (Beauboeuf-Lafontant 2009; Crenshaw 1991; Deckard et al. 2020; Hill Collins [1990] 2000). In the context of social movements, movement actors engage in practices that highlight the extent to which “identity emerges as a kind of unsettled space, or unresolved question in that space, between a number of intersecting discourses” (Hall 1989:9–10). Given the complexities in doing intersectionality in a political terrain dominated by non-intersectional logics, this article was originally motivated by the question, How do Latina/x feminists in the movement for RJ engage in pro-abortion advocacy? The findings revealed that doing Latina/x-centric pro-abortion advocacy requires challenging the controlling image of la santa, externally imposed on white and mestiza Latinas. La santa is imagined as cisgender, heterosexual, submissive, family-oriented, self-sacrificing, anti-feminist, and bound by conservative Catholic ideals of sexuality and womanhood (Fregoso 2003; Gil and Vásquez 1996).
In this article, I document three tactics that CLRJ engages in to challenge the normalization of la santa while supporting the right to abortion care. First, CLRJ demonstrates how existing research metrics often reinforce misrepresentations embedded in la santa and thus staff conduct their own research to highlight within-group heterogeneity. Second, CLRJ enacts the importance of community dialogue for (unlearning) central to feminisms of color to “meet people where they’re at” as a starting point to engage in difficult, long-term conversations with Latinxs regarding abortion. Third, to decenter la santa, CLRJ creates their own analyses to shift the gaze away from themselves and onto the social order that perpetuates the structural Othering of Latinxs. Importantly, by applying a controlling images interpretive framework to social movement data, my findings reveal how Latina/x feminist social movement actors engage in additional discursive labor relative to white feminists because they cannot afford to simply challenge the stigma surrounding topics like abortion care, but instead, they are forced to disrupt images that challenge their very existence. These practices show that engaging in intersectional reproductive politics requires contesting the binary logics emblematic of colonialism that render Latinxs static rather than complex social actors.
The findings in this article demonstrate that the explanatory power of controlling images has wide applicability for future research to explore. While some existing research demonstrates the utility of the concept for popular culture representations, it is important to apply this conceptual framework beyond popular culture to understand how these images contribute to what McMillan Cottom (2019) calls “the political economy of incompetence” (p. 91). For example, future research could expand on the relational dynamics between marginalized people that emerge through controlling images. Much of existing research demonstrates how cisgender, class-privileged white people have created, reified, and benefited most from the construction of controlling images that justify the dehumanization of non-white people. My findings reveal that resistance practices at times reinforce the assumption that abortion is only a matter of interest for cisgender women, thus erasing the importance and particularities of access to abortions for trans and non-binary people. In addition, while la santa is certainly wielded as ideological violence against white and mestiza Latinas, the fact that a respectable image is imposed on them also reinforces anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism. Specifically, while la santa is presumed to be overly invested in motherhood and being a supportive wife—demonstrating a proximity to white women’s “cult of true womanhood” (Hill Collins [1990] 2000:72)—Black mothers across ethnicities are continuously imagined as negligent, irresponsible, and unmarried (Roberts 1997).
On June 24, 2022 the United States Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade in a 5-4 decision, further criminalizing bodily self-determination. CLRJ’s discursive work demonstrates that the lifelong fight for abortion access requires intersectional praxis that centers the ideas and experiences of people of color. Abortion advocacy must contend with the logics that flatten marginalized people to justify their dispossession and oppression. Rosie Jiménez’s story is a powerful reminder of the shortcomings of mainstream notions of access that do not acknowledge how settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and racial capitalism are designed to work in tandem to grant access and visibility to some at the expense of others. Abortion advocacy must grapple with the hegemonic weight of controlling images because “once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see that people can change, and there is hope” (bell hooks).
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to California Latinas for Reproductive Justice for gifting me the opportunity to learn about the movement for reproductive justice from their standpoints. I thank Levin Elias Welch, Susila Gurusami, and Diya Bose for their continuous support.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
Support for this research comes from the Mellon Foundation’s Inter-University Program for Latino Research, the American Sociological Association’s Minority Fellowship Program, the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, and the UC Collaboratory for Ethnographic Design.
