Women's Work and Chicano Families

Patricia Zavella is Professor and Chair of Latin American & Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of I'm Neither Here nor There: Mexicans' Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty and coeditor of Women and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: A Reader.

Zavella documents the labor history and current work situation of these Mexican American women with care and thoroughness.(Choice) This book, based upon informal interviews and participant observation, provides in-depth knowledge of one segment of the contemporary Chicana community. Zavella challenges a number of prevailing stereotypes about Mexican American women that continue to be perpetuated by certain scholars. For example, the women are not passive, as some sociologists would have us believe. Women's Work and Chicano Families needs to be ready by scholars interested in gender roles, the family, race and ethnic relations, and the labor force. If it reaches this broader audience, social scientists may come to rethink some of their current generalizations about minority women.- Norma Williams (Contemporary Sociology)