As Latin American women, we are heirs of a culture of silence....
What hurts is the discovery of the measure of our silence. How deep it runs.
How many of us are indeed caught, unreconciled between two languages,
two political poles, and suffer the insecurities of that straddling.”

Alma Gomez, Cherrie Moraga, Mariana Romo-Carmona

I am visible -- see this Indian face -- yet I am invisible.
I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot.
But I exist, we exist.
They'd like to think I have melted in the pot.
But I haven't. We haven't.
I am playing with my Self, I am playing with the world's soul,
I am the dialogue between my Self and el espiritu del mundo.
I change myself, I change the world.

Gloria Anzaldua

“In spite of the changes in women’s roles in society, in spite of the changes in their own mothers’ lives, many of today’s girls fall into traditional patterns of low self-image, self-doubt, and self-censorship of their creative and intellectual potential.” (Orenstein, xvi) A national survey on gender and self-esteem in adolescents conducted by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), which polled 3,000 boys and girls between the ages of nine and fifteen on their attitudes toward self, school, family, and friends, (xv) showed that, although both boys and girls “experience confusion and a faltering sense of self at adolescence, girls’ self-regard drops further than boys’ and never catches up.” (xvi) For a young girl, the passage into adolescence “is marked by a loss of confidence in herself and her abilities,” as well as a “scathingly critical attitude toward her body and a blossoming sense of personal inadequacy.” (xvi)

 “We live in a culture that is ambivalent toward female achievement, proficiency, independence, and right to a full and equal life,” (xix) notes Peggy Orenstein in her book, Schoolgirls, and young girls have successfully internalized these cultural messages. To put faces behind the statistics of the AAUW survey, Orenstein interviewed girls from a cross-section of ethnic, class and family structures in two schools in Northern California. Despite an educational system supposedly designed to encourage the intellectual and social growth of all young people, students in the AAUW survey reported gender bias in the classroom. Boys receive the majority of their teachers’ attention and are rewarded for being outspoken and aggressive (xvi-xvii), while girls are rewarded for being silent and compliant, forcing them into the role of “outsiders in the learning process, passive observers rather than competent participants.” (226) So it is not surprising that, when asked what they like most about themselves, adolescent girls “cite an aspect of their physical appearance” and think they are “not smart enough” or “not good enough” to achieve their dreams. (xvi) Boys, on the other hand, name their talents as the thing they like most about themselves, and say they are “pretty good at a lot of things” (xvi).

Although all girls report having lower self-esteem than boys, “the severity and the nature of that reduced self-worth vary among ethnic groups.” (xvii) African-American girls have strong female role models in their community from which they can draw the strength and pride needed to bolster their self-esteem. Caucasian girls have the advantages of increased academic opportunities, as well as high-visibility role models. But Latina girls, with neither the “personal self-esteem of black girls” nor “the academic opportunities enjoyed by many white girls,”(199) suffer the most profound lack of self-esteem.

The majority of Latino youth live in the most economically distressed areas of the United States. They attend “overcrowded, instructionally inferior, inadequately staffed, and underresourced schools which do not meet their educational needs.... They experience debilitating stereotyping, prejudice, and social bias.” (ERIC, 1) But for Latina girls, it goes even deeper, because within their own culture, the socially accepted norm is macho males and docile females. “Family disappears as a source of positive self-worth..., and academic confidence, belief in one’s talents, and a sense of personal importance all plummet.” (Orenstein, xviii) They have “learned there’s nothing good about being Latina,” (219) so they have “a more negative body image, are at greater risk of attempting suicide, and report higher levels of emotional stress ... than any other group of children, male or female, of any race or ethnicity.” (199) Because they are usually poor, quiet, brown-skinned girls, whose first language is Spanish, Latina girls tend to be overlooked in the classroom and fall through the cracks in school. Mirroring the Latina’s role in society, the consequences in the educational system are “silence and marginalization.” (199) They have the highest dropout rate of any group of students and are particularly vulnerable to becoming gang members and/or teenage mothers. (199-200)

In SchoolGirls, Peggy Orenstein describes several Caucasian girls at Westin Middle School, a predominantly white school located in an upper-middle class suburb in Northern California, and several African American girls at Audubon Middle School, an urban school in Northern California with a predominantly poor, minority population. The only Latina girl described at any length is Marta Herrera, an eighth grader at Audubon. In a school setting where “the pressures of poverty, discrimination and the inadequacy of education often overshadowed the gender differences reported in the AAUW study,” (xxv) Marta, like other adolescent Latina girls, has entered a complex process of downward-spiraling self-esteem, that is negatively reinforced at both home and school.

Marta, a stocky eighth grader with permed brown hair and impassive eyes, lives with her extended family in a ground-floor flat in a rough, predominantly Latino neighborhood. Her parents work in industrial laundries and speak only Spanish. Her mother is supportive, but her father is less understanding, calling her worthless and a whore, and unrealistically restricting her movement in the neighborhood. Craving the freedom and respect that she sees boys get, Marta wishes she were a boy, but instead utilizes self-destructive “female” strategies “to maintain self-esteem and seek alternative sources of self-worth.” (201) She sneaks out at night to flirt with a group of delinquent young men in her neighborhood and is drawn to 20-year-old, rifle-toting Berto. The attraction ends, though, when he takes her for a ride in his car and threatens to rape her. Although she had previously rejected the idea, Marta begins to contemplate joining a gang, for protection, for camaraderie, and to bolster her self-worth, even though it may mean sexual abuse and violence as part of the initiation process. She even admits to thoughts of suicide “because of all the pressures” to submerge her ego. (204).

Marta once loved school, with a brief passion for computers and the stories that were read in her seventh grade English class. She received A’s, B’s and C’s, and once dreamed of becoming a lawyer. Yet she has continually fallen behind and now receives D’s and F’s. She has never received the extra help in her basic English and math skills that her teachers consistently recommended in her student file; she has never been sent to the school social worker or channeled into special programs; and her parents have never been called in for a special conference. She’s at great risk, but because she sits silently in her classes, neither disrupting nor arguing, her “placidity renders her invisible.” (198) Her increasing anger, disillusionment, and despair go unnoticed. When asked how she thought her school year had turned out, Marta’s previously excited tone when describing her gang prospects turns to indifference. She states, “There’s nothing I can do about it now, even if I tried. I don’t like school. And anyway, hardly anyone in the gang finishes school, so it doesn’t really matter.” (213) Ultimately, she doesn’t graduate, and will probably join the other Spanish-speaking girls that the school and society have failed, who are “just pushed to the side,” and “end up leaving school, joining gangs, getting pregnant.” (201)

Unlike Latina girls like Marta, African American girls tend to fare better in terms of “retaining their overall self-esteem during adolescence, ...maintaining a stronger sense of both personal and familial importance,” (xvii) even though they are “more pessimistic about both their teachers and their schoolwork than other girls.” (xvii) LaRhonda Johnson is a good example. She is a confident, street-smart African-American girl, whose combined qualities of warmth and grittiness get her the respect she so values and make her “a leader among the girls at Audubon.” (155) Yet, although she can rally support for extra-curricular events and blossoms when she works with second graders as part of her community service class, she is unable to translate her strengths into passing grades in the core subjects. Although she is bright, articulate and very responsible within her family, LaRhonda stops attending school when she is notified that she is in danger of failing eighth grade. She returns briefly, after a teacher convinces her that she still has a chance to pass her classes and graduate, but it doesn’t last. Like Marta Herrera, LaRhonda doesn’t graduate.

On the other hand, Dashelle Abbott, a full-figured African American girl with grace and poise, is able to turn her strong will and healthy self-esteem into academic success.  Orenstein describes her as a sanitized version of the drug dealer that LaRhonda respects: “a student who is loud, tough—who can act ‘black’—but can use her grit to work toward academic excellence.” (232) She once was considered by her teachers to lack potential and be “one of the most nettlesome girls at Audubon.” (227) But motivated by one of her younger brothers, who told her that if she kept on acting like she was, she wasn’t “gonna be nothin’,” (229) Dashelle decided to change. Wanting to be a positive role model for her younger siblings, she succeeds academically, even though it means foregoing a social life. She raised her grades to over a 3.0 and kept them there, making the honor roll for three quarters. Her improvement was rewarded. Dashelle was selected to participate in Audubon’s peer tutoring program; she gained special late admission to a high school for college-bound students; and she received several awards at graduation.

 Still in Northern California, but on the other side of the world from Marta, LaRhonda and Dashelle, sits Westin Middle School, a California Distinguished School because of students’ high scores on standardized tests and exemplary faculty performance. Amy Wilkinson is the first girl introduced and, through her, it is clear that even academic opportunities aren’t enough to counter the damage to adolescent girls of a “hidden curriculum” (5) that reinforces gender roles. Orenstein describes Amy as bold, brassy, and strong-willed, earning solid grades in all of her subjects. She, along with two of her friends, Evie DiLeo and Becca Holbrook, are self-defined feminists, yet all three take on low-profile, non-participatory roles in math, science and English classes, ceding the dominant, outspoken role to the boys. The only class in which they actively participate is in American history, where the teacher actively wrestles with gender dynamics and encourages students to strive to do their best.

Even with academic opportunities on their side, and without the challenges of survival that occupy the attention of Marta and the other girls at Audubon, the Westin girls’ self-esteem is derailed by two negative dynamics. One is their need to strike a balance in their developing sexuality between the prudish “schoolgirl” and the fallen “slut”; (51) the other is a self-destructive obsession with body image. Amy’s friend Evie, a fast-talking, straightforward girl enrolled in Weston’s gifted program, has struggled with both of these issues. She wants to wear sexier clothes, but not so sexy as to be perceived as a slut. She already feels like a slut inside, because she considered having sex with a boy her own age. Having internalized the judgments that society places on young girls about their sexuality, she feels dirty and wishes she could just “wipe the glass clean, like if I had Windex for my soul.” (55)

 Yet it is in the other, even more self-destructive, dynamic that Evie is on even rockier ground. She is so obsessed with how her body looks that she struggled with bulimia for almost a year, vomiting three to five times a week, until she finally realized that it was hurting more than helping her. Unlike her friend Becca, who has become alarmingly anorexic and suicidal, Evie was strong enough to fight the disease. In a white culture which constantly equates beauty and success with thinness, young girls like Amy, Evie, and Becca, whose confidence hinges on the way they look, are extremely vulnerable to potentially life-threatening eating disorders. It has become an almost “expected female rite of passage,” (98) in which “they learn to guard against their lust for food just as they learn to contain other ‘inappropriate’ desires, including the desire to speak, to act out, to be heard.” (96)

 The flip side of the obsession with thinness has equally negative consequences. It can be as life-crippling a stigma to be perceived by peers as “fat,” as to be called a “slut.” Another student at Westin, Lisa Duffy, is a case in point. She actually is an overweight girl who, although articulate and intelligent, has resigned herself to failure as the inevitable consequence of being fat, equating “thinness with success and intelligence.” (100) She has found the acceptance she so desperately needs with the “‘headbangers’: students who smoke, take drugs, and listen to heavy-metal music.” (104) Now that she has officially become “a loser,” (105) she starts cutting class and, even more self-destructively, herself. As her grades and self-esteem drop, she begins to practice self-mutilation. Orenstein notes that girls slice and burn themselves for much the same reasons that they deny themselves food: “to alleviate anxiety and depression, to express powerlessness, and to restore a sense of control.” (107)

Two communities, two schools. Yet Dashelle Abbott is the only girl at either school who is able to maintain a strong, healthy self-esteem and excel academically. She is the only one who says, “I love my life. I’m so proud of myself.” (240) Tragically, Marta, LaRhonda, Amy, Evie, Becca and Lisa are each, in their own way, crippled by the prevailing social dynamics they encounter at home and/or at school.

What can be done, then, within the educational system, to counter this downward spiral in self-esteem in adolescent girls, in general, and Latina girls, in particular? Apart from a total revamping of society and education, is there any evidence of partial solutions that would help girls regain and retain a strong and healthy self-esteem as they go through adolescence?

The Hispanic Dropout Project (HDP), sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, has written a paper, Transforming Education for Hispanic Youth: Exemplary Practices, Programs and Schools, that presents ways to improve the education of all students, while specifically addressing the needs of Hispanic students. Orenstein also provides some examples in SchoolGirls that could fit into the larger scheme of improvements. Four of the HDP recommendations are:

1) Each Hispanic student should have an adult in the school committed to nurturing a personal sense of self-worth and supporting the student’s efforts to succeed in school. The YWCA-initiated in-school support group for Latina girls at Audubon is a good example of this, as applied specifically to Latina girls. The purpose of the support group, as taught by Jessica Diaz, who was from the same neighborhood as the students, was “to pierce through the girls’ silence, to uncover the ways they have been taught to suppress the self.” (216) She hoped to guide the Latina girls to an understanding of “the beauty of their culture and their entitlement to their own desire.” (216) Armed with that, she felt they would be better able to develop “a clear sense of pride and self-worth,” so that they wouldn’t be “tempted into gangs or duped into sexual victimization.” (216) This type of focus group could be expanded to a year-long class format and opened to a broader student population.

Another example is one that I saw successfully applied at San Francisco Day School, a racially diverse, private K-8 school in the City. The entire upper school student body (grades 6-8) is divided into multi-racial advising groups of 10 students each to a teacher. They meet three times a week at the end of the day, in order to promote a more intimate and supportive atmosphere for individual students. Grade-level advisors meet weekly to discuss the students and meet several times a year, or more if necessary, with the parents of the students in their advisee group, to present a global portrait of each student’s personal and academic development. In a situation like this, Marta Herrera, or any student like her, would not easily fall through the cracks.

2) Schools... should be safe and inviting places to learn. They should personalize programs and services that succeed with Hispanic students, give them the opportunity to assume positions of leadership and responsibility (to counteract the lure of gangs), target them for prosocial roles, and protect them from intimidation. Orenstein gives us the example of Danny Muriera’s Community Service class at Audubon, which sought to offer an important “balance between cognitive development and psychological support. (166) The class combined American history with “equal parts crisis intervention programming, group therapy, and community service projects,” (165-166). It gave students the opportunity to take responsibility and leadership at school in areas where they naturally excelled. Another example is mentioned in one of the Notes to SchoolGirls. Two studies published by the Women’s Sports Foundation have shown that participation in sports has a positive effect on girls’ self-esteem; in particular, it showed that sports participation is “especially beneficial in building Latina girls’ feelings of efficacy.” (289)

 3) All students should have access to a high-quality, relevant, and interesting curriculum that treats their language and culture as resources, conveys high expectations, presents available options for their lives, and demands student investment in learning. An example provided in Transforming Education for Hispanic Youth is a program at Lennox Middle School, in Lennox, CA, which intersperses English as a Second Language (ESL) students, who themselves have different language competencies, with other students, to promote their ability to communicate in different situations. The curriculum also features literature by Latino/a American writers, and emphasizes justice, peace, and tolerance.

4) Teachers should teach content so that it interests and challenges Hispanic students. They should communicate high expectations, respect, and interest; understand the roles of language, race, culture, and gender in schooling. SchoolGirls begins and ends with the most impressive example of a student-engaging curriculum that directly addresses real equality in the classroom: Judy Logan’s class at Everett Middle School, San Francisco (CA). In dynamic, ethnically mixed classes, Ms. Logan tries “not only to practice equity but to teach it, to change both boys’ and girls’ perspectives on the female self.” Curriculum content, teaching approaches, and student assignments all unite around Emily Style’s idea of an inclusive curriculum that functions as “both a window and a mirror for students,” so that they can not only “look into others’ worlds, but also see the experiences of their own race, gender, and class reflected in what they learn.” (Orenstein, 248) Logan creates an inclusive, cooperative-based classroom that turns the conventional student-teacher relationship on its head by allowing students to become the experts and produce their own curriculum. (259) A class like this has real potential for bringing adolescent girls like Marta Herrera out of their silence and marginalization, because it creates a non-threatening environment for taking risks.

Orenstein notes in her last chapter that, although there is “no single magic formula that will help girls retain their self-esteem,” (245) concerned educators around the country are “working to develop gender-fair curricula in all subjects and reexamining traditional assumptions about how children best learn.” (245) Each one of us, in our own teaching practices, can implement pieces of this larger curriculum that is race, culture, gender and class sensitive. Each one of us can take responsibility for creating challenging and inclusive educational opportunities that promote healthy self-esteem and self-empowerment for all adolescents. Together, we can help to positively change lives and impact curriculum, “one stitch at a time,” (274) so that everyone is heard and included.

Works Cited

Cuentos: Stories by Latinas. Edited by Alma Gomez, Cherrie Moraga, Mariana Romo-Carmona. New
York : Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983.

Gorski, Dr. Paul. “Multicultural Pavilion: Quotations and Proverbs” Multicultural Pavilion: Resources
and Dialogues for Educators, Students, & Activists. Curry School of Education, University
of Virginia. 25 June 2000.

Orenstein, Peggy. SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap, in association
with the American Association of University Women. New York: Anchor Books, 1994.

“School Practices to Promote the Achievement of Hispanic Students.” ERIC Clearinghouse on Urban
Education Digest. Number 153, March 2000. ERIC Clearinghouse on Urban Education.
18 June 2000. http://eric-web.tc.columbia.edu/digests/dig153.html.