Fernanda Ochoa
Sociology 04
Professor Thea Alvarado
29 April 2016
Article 13 Discussion
This article discusses both working class and middle class white and Mexican American
girls in a California high school. This article focuses on Julie Bettie’s ethnographic study in
which she focuses on concepts that are often ignored because they are exceptions to social
norms. Bettie also importantly points out that her sample is small because it is focused on a
specific group and not a generalization. Her primary goal is to explain how race, gender, and
class intersect in the lives of these women because she believes this relates to educational
mobility.
Bettie is using field research as her research method for this study. She first explains that
she will review her literature separately so she will be splitting race/ethnicity, race, and gender
into different sections. She interestingly explains that many studies that have been conducted in
the past that show inequality in classrooms only discuss class and not race/ethnicity and gender.
She explains that this is done so because issues of race/ethnicity and gender cannot be explained
nor understood through a class analysis. Race/ethnicity centered research is also the same in this
case, Bettie believes that it fails to recognize different classes and gender. She points out that in
different race/ethnicity studies, the idea of “acting white” is usually equated to being successful
while resisting the idea equates to doing poorly. This is believed to keep the different students
focused on following a specific mobility they feel was assigned to them. But there are some
exceptions to this generalization. A study was conducted and found that students that knew and
studied about colonialism and institutional racism helped upward mobility.
Gender is often ignored in both of the research topics before. Unfortunately, there are
also gender studies that only focused on the difference between male and female students and did
not focus on race/ethnicity nor class so was not able to account for many groups, thus not being
intersectional. Many studies have ignored the struggles that female students have faced while
receiving their education, leaving many stories unheard. There is little research on specific things
such as the difference between working class women and their male counterparts, ignoring the
intersectionality, once again. What was interesting was that Bettie quickly examines studies done
on Chicanas that focus on their successes as opposed to their male counterparts, whether working
class or middle class. This is cut short when these same women are not able to get fair and equal
job access to the same boys they went to school with.
Bettie focuses her study on intersectional studies, instead of reducing each topic to a
specific thing, she connects all of them together. Bettie conducted her study with 60 girls; 11
were upwardly mobile but of working-class origins, 5 were white and 6 were Mexican American.
She notes that among college prep Mexican American girls in this senior class, only two were
immigrants. Bettie is also limited to this study because she is only an English speaker. She also
finds out the origins of this girls, meaning their socioeconomic background.
Her study was conducted in a high school located in the Central Valley, called Waretown
High. The population of this town is 40,000 and the high school is reflective of this population
with there being sixty percent white students and forty percent Mexican American students. It is
important to note the majority of the students that attend this high school are working class with
the middle class being a minority. There is also only one private school located in this town but
is only for elementary school.
Bettie engaged in participant observation for one year at the high school and would hang
out daily with girls in classrooms and hallways. She would meet different girls through teachers
but mainly through friendship circles. Bettie also discusses the small obstacle she thought she
was going to face as a white woman but found that though she was white, asking questions with
relative topics to the Mexican American girls helped her gain her trust. She had interviews
recorded of these different girls for approx. two hours.
Bettie found that both sets of girls were aware of having exceeding their parents’
expectations. Both sets of girls also had a greater understanding of class differences relative to
other working-class girls. Bettie also found that the there were less limitations on the white
females had less obstacles in some ways than Mexican American girls. Mexican American girls
often faced issues with identity and had to confront the idea of being pressured to forget their
identity because of the educational curriculum but also were pressured by their peers to resist this
idea. Bettie also concluded that upward mobility may also be informed by gender. In some of
these cases, gender norms allowed women to continue on the expectations of a middle class
lifestyle while men were encouraged to be more masculine.
Another interesting thing Bettie found was that the upward middle class women were
regarded as better than the girls who were focused on vocational studies. Though this was found
in Bettie’s study, she did not conduct a study on the boys at the school on this same topic,
therefore cannot argue this. Bettie also talks about the pressures of race and ethnicity and how
there can be both positives and negatives. The positives being that there is a found motivation on
learning about oppression but the negative being feeling pressured to represent a large group of
people. Bettie also noticed that the white girls in this school did not feel pressured to feel like a
part of a group but were more individualistic. Bettie also mentions that women of color are often
pressured to forget their culture in order to succeed. She mentions that the working class girls are
also often judged based on their income by counselors and are given courses that they feel they
are able to take, even when they are able to take more.