Women's Work and Chicano Families: Cannery Workers of the Santa Clara Valley

by Patricia Zavella

Overview

At the time Women’s Work and Chicano Families: Cannery Workers of the Santa Clara Valley was published, little research had been done on the relationship between the wage labor and household labor of Mexican American women. Drawing on revisionist social theories relating to Chicano family structure as well as on feminist theory, Patricia Zavella paints a compelling picture of the Chicano women who worked in northern California’s fruit and vegetable canneries. Her book combines social history, shop floor ethnography, and in-depth interviews to explore the links between Chicano family life and gender inequality in the labor market.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801417306
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	07/23/1987
Series:	The Anthropology of Contemporary Issues , #8
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	214
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.88(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

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.

Contemporary Sociology - Norma Williams

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"

Zavella documents the labor history and current work situation of these Mexican American women with care and thoroughness.

-- "Choice"

From the Publisher