Summary Of The New Latino Studies Reader A Twenty-First-Century Perspective

In The New Latino Studies Reader: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective by Ramon A. Gutierrez and Tomas Almaguer, chapters “Gender Strategies, Settlement, and Transnational Lives” and “She’s Old School Like That” talk about the gender issues first and second generation Latinas faced. In the first generation, Robert Smith articulates how gender structures impact the lives of men in women. Whereas in the second generation, Lorena Garcia communicates how mother and daughter relationships worked during that time period and how sexual behavior played a big role in their relationships. In the first-generation of men and women, both were put into gender-based structures as explained in Robert Smith’s “Gender Strategies, Settlement, and Transnational

The children are angry at their father because he does not spend time with them, so they constantly tell Talia to leave him. “Talia is enacting more than one image of femininity. On the one hand, she feels bound by the requirement of ranchera or Ticuani migrant femininity that a woman stay with her husband even when unhappy” (450). Talia herself has noticed that Mexican women tend to suffer a lot when it comes to marriage because of ranchera femininity. She talks about what her Puerto Rican friend who says, “You can be screwed in life chingada, but there you are, see?’ Because you have to think about your kids…You have to put up with this until the end” (450). Because of what Talia has heard from her friend, she has displayed anger forgetting all about her ranchera femininity. She gets mad at her husband, she talks to him about him spending more time with the kids and taking them to Mexico, and she has thought of leaving him. She is questioning the conditions of her marriage with Don Gerardo, which happens to most immigrant women that assimilate to the American culture. Smith says, “Migration, assimilation, and transnational life challenge dominant forms of relations between men and women and ways of thinking about gender”

Garcia talks about the mother and daughter relationships Latina women have. These mothers are concerned with their daughter’s sexual behavior and want to keep them from losing their virginity. Latina mothers consider their daughters losing their virginity a failure and a shame. Betina, a Mexican woman Garcia interviewed said, “‘Que verguenza how embarrassing, you are probably wondering how I let this happen’” (473). As for the women who lose their virginity, they are viewed as a lost cause or as Minerva’s sister would said about her losing her virginity “‘was no longer worth it’” (473). Mothers were trying to find ways in which they can control and prevent their daughter’s sexual behavior. Garcia said, “I found that mothers adopted four specific strategies to continue to offer their daughters sexual guidance after discovering their sexual behaviors” (473). One of the strategies that mothers were using was talking more about safe sex and respect. Mothers would include their own experiences with sex in their conversations. They would also reveal their daughter’s sexual behavior to their husband and women in the family. Mothers would also refer to white young women’s