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20. Igualadas
- Utah State University Press
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287 Chapter 20 Igualadas Francisca de la Riva-Holly Igualada is a condescending term often used by upper-class women who hire domestic workers in Mexico. An igualada is a subaltern who wishes to possess the same riches and privileges as her upper-class employer, especially one who hopes to give her children a level of schooling, clothes, and standard of life that she does not possess. An igualada will never receive the respect she longs for from la patrona (her boss). She has entered an unequal relationship. The “I” for “igualada” inscribed on her forehead for all the acquaintances of the patrona to see is indelible. She can never work hard enough or be grateful enough for what the higher class has done for her. The patrona who hired her is the smart one, and all the credit for her work, her benefits, and her future success will go to this employer and the people she socializes with. This is the metaphor that I utilize to describe the social class structure that I entered when I began working in a department where most of the faculty were either privileged white men or privileged Latin Americans. I pursued a PhD in modern languages from an Ivy League university, hoping to escape the social-class monster that follows the children of working-class immigrants even after they are successful professionals. What I identify as the social-class monster is a conflation of customs and structures that have prevailed since colonial times and Latin Americans reproduce when they arrive in the United States, thus engendering a legacy duplicated also by immigrant communities. Immigrant children spiral and reproduce the values with which their parents are judged because of their origin, e.g., rural or urban, upper class or lower class, from a certain region of a Latin American country. In my particular case, my parents’ social class dictates my placement in Latin American social circles. I will always be the daughter of the woman who might have cleaned their relatives’ homes in Latin America; my credentials or skills have been erased by their devaluation of my persona—a phenomenon that has existed for generations, for centuries, and a legacy of their colonized minds. I also soon realized after I was hired that often women of color in academia are seen as the domestics and scapegoats of their institutions, this of course aligning with value judgments reinforced by classism and the vision that other Latin PRE S UME D INCO MPE TE NT 288 Americans have of Latino/as. This is particularly the case with people who come from very class-conscious backgrounds or countries, often other Latin Americans or diasporic immigrants from Africa and Asia. Some Latin Americans will never stop seeing a US working-class Latina as the daughter of their maid, someone who has somehow not climbed the same ladder to demand equal privilege with them, and someone who represents the daughter of the rebellious masses in their native country, even though they no longer live there. This was the common belief among the anti-affirmative-action crowd and the privileged Latin Americans—as well as colleagues from other departments—who did not see my value as a Latina, as opposed to any other Latin American, African, or Asian immigrants who might be hired. Yolanda Flores Niemann synthesizes and contextualizes an understanding of the Chicana experience in Chicana Leadership (2002). She writes that “(1) Chicanas are women who function in a patriarchal society, (2) Chicanas are overrepresented in the lower socio-economic and poverty categories in a capitalistic system, (3) Chicanas are racial minorities who lack representative and economic power within the United States, and (4) some Chicanas are lesbians in a predominantly heterosexual society” (viii). This summary is extremely helpful in establishing a foundation where I can begin my analysis of my particular situation. The patriarchal systems of both Latin American and US cultures were very oppressive in my department, where the only people with power were men, and these men could only see my background as unidimensional and, on some level, pathetically inferior. The Hire There were many red flags after my interviews at the Modern Language Association conference for a position at what I will call Forward University. I should have listened to the feminist pedestal theories when the Latin American interviewer told me that I was the “best thing” that had ever happened to them. He added that after interviewing two hundred people, he thought I was...