‘Nibbling on the margins of patriarchy’: Latina immigrants in northern Utah

Abstract

Although many scholars point to the importance of gender in structuring the immigrant experience, many immigrant women themselves do not attribute much importance to the role that gender plays in their lives. To explore this issue further, we investigate how thirty-two foreign-born Latinas define their experiences in Utah, a new immigrant destination that has received little empirical attention. The women in our sample indicated five major challenges they faced in their everyday lives: social isolation, language difficulty, racial-ethnic prejudice, poverty and lack of documentation. Most of the women described these challenges in terms of social class, race-ethnicity and immigrant status, rather than gender. We argue that migration research needs to be more attuned to axes of oppression other than gender and more attentive to how immigrant women, themselves, interpret their everyday lives.

Keywords:

• Immigration
• assimilation
• Latinas
• Latino immigrants
• new immigrant destinations
• gender

Notes

1. The reference to ‘nibbling on the margins of patriarchy’ is borrowed from Pessar (1999, p. 589), who analyses why some immigrant women do not identify with the struggle for gender equality.