Learning and Teaching Latino Mental Health, Social Justice and Recovery to Visiting Students: A Pilot Study

Almost 18% of the U.S. population is estimated to be Hispanic (United States Census Bureau, 2019), and of that, 15% had a diagnosable mental illness in the past year (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2020); still, Latinos receive half as often mental health services compared to Caucasians (Office of Mental Health, 2020). Evidence suggests that minority ethnic groups may receive more inferior care standards due to biased beliefs or attitudes held by health professionals (Shepherd et al., 2018). The number of Latino Psychiatrists is not enough to care for the on-growing Latino population in the U.S. (Alarcón, 2001; American Psychiatric Association, 2017). There is a need to train medical students and residents in cultural competencies pertained to the Latino Culture and Health Services (Alarcón, 2001). We developed a pilot study of a curriculum created by Latino bilingual and bicultural mental health providers. The course lessons include (a) Health Disparities and Implicit Bias, (b) Recovery in Mental Health, (c) Immigration and Acculturation, (d) Cultural Formulation Interview, (e) Latino Values, and (f) Mental Health Systems. All topics focused on Latino Mental Health and used the “reverse classroom” teaching technique with interactive exercises. We measured the impact on knowledge, attitudes, and comfort level related to the concept taught in the lessons of this course. Teaching Latino Mental Health has a positive impact on improving the comfort level and knowledge of students. Nevertheless, there are not enough educational opportunities and information about these topics. Therefore, replicating this curriculum and expanding the education in Latino Mental Health will improve the health services provided to this community.

Experiences With Machismo and Pain: Latino Veterans

Physical and emotional pain from combat-related injuries and experiences are serious problems among Latino veterans. This study fleshes out existing cultural constructs and concepts (e.g., machismo and familism) from the participants’ point of view and may serve as an important step in unraveling the influence of Latino culture on pain, providing a deeper and more critical theorization between masculinity, race/ethnicity, and the military. Using 26 interviews from U.S.-born Latino veterans, this study analyzes the meanings and experiences of pain from combat, masculinity, and how culture affects expressions of pain. The following themes emerged: (a) Latino culture and ethnicity, (b) machismo and pain, (c) the transforming self, and (d) feeling disconnected and dealing with pain. Overall, respondents were governed by strict gender standards influenced by their ethnic identity and exacerbated by military masculinity. Findings suggest that the study of race/ethnicity acts as a fundamental framework from which to understand the experiences and behaviors of pain.

Lessons Learned From Recruiting Latino Fathers in Child Health Research

Latinos are the largest minority population group in the United States, and Latino children currently account for one fourth of U.S. children under age 18. Family is a core value in the Latino culture, and fathers play a central role within the family, including making decisions that influence their children’s health. Nonetheless, Latino fathers are often underrepresented in child health research. This study was designed to describe effective strategies to recruit Latino fathers into five child health research studies. Using a data recruitment log, we collected quantitative and qualitative data on recruitment strategies used to reach and enroll Latino fathers into five child health research studies from 2016 to 2020. Methods classified as direct recruitment strategies involved interaction between potential participants with research staff, whereas indirect methods involved no interaction with research staff and potential participants. In total 113 Latino fathers, majority low-income, immigrant, participated in the studies. Direct recruitment methods in combination with snowball sampling were the most successful strategies for recruiting Latino fathers, contributing to approximately 96% ( n = 107) of the total participants. Indirect methods were much less effective, with social media contributing to only 3.6% ( n = 4) of total participants. Not a single participant was recruited through printed materials (e.g., flyers posted or distributed). Furthermore, qualitative findings revealed the importance of culturally and linguistically relevant approaches in efforts to recruit and enroll Latino fathers. Future research should consider directly asking Latino fathers’ preferences for recruitment and participation in child health research.

From Nationalist Movements to Transnational Solidarities: Comparative and Pan-Latina/o Literary Studies

While literature by Latin American origin groups within the United States (e.g., Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican) has been treated as a single literary corpus—“Latina/o Literature” or “Hispanic Literature”—since the last decades of the 20th century, in practice, the commonalities among such texts were more comparative than panethnic in nature until significantly more recently. That is, while literature by different national-origin groups revealed some strong similarities in theme and form, the writing itself reflected the specific concerns, background, and history of the specific national-origin group, rather than giving evidence of intra-Latino group interaction or a developing sense of a shared intra-Latino culture. This essay traces the commonalities among these bodies of literary production, including in the “pre-Latino” period, the 19th to mid-20th centuries, before there was even a commonly understood concept of “US Latino literature,” as well as during the Chicano and Nuyorican Movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It then turns to a discussion of developing representations of inter-group interactions and tensions, including in the more recent emergence of “Central American American” literary production. Particularly in the increasingly cosmopolitan urban centers of the United States, an evolving sense of intra-Latino solidarity and panethnic Latino “community” has come into view in the literature produced by Latinx writers of the later 20th and 21st centuries.

Gracias Mujer

Throughout my life, my relationship to womanhood has been an ever-changing phenomenon. In reflecting on the instances that have come to define this relationship, I wrote “Gracias Mujer,” an homage to the women who have shaped my womanhood and a simultaneous rejection of all that has burdened me. In light of the gendered dynamics within Latino culture, this piece reflects on my complex relationship with my parents and my desire to find healing from personal experiences. Incorporating themes of womanhood, memory, childhood, and family, “Gracias Mujer” is an acknowledgement of my traumas, a love letter to my mother, and a validation of my desires as a Latina woman within an often-confined space. In this poem, without romanticizing them, I try to honour the sacrifices the women and ancestors in my life have had to make, expressing a gratitude for their contribution to my personhood, but also explicitly stating that the trauma that has resulted stops within me.

The Taco Truck

When primarily immigrant, day-laboring clientele eat a meal at a traditional taco truck, the taco truck becomes a significant social space in which Mexican cultural identity is reaffirmed. But the traditional taco truck is also a politically charged symbolic space that can spark heated debates about Latino culture and the uses of street spaces in cities. This book uses the taco truck as a vehicle to tell a story about the Mexican American experience and identity and deconstructs the myriad meanings taco trucks represent to diverse community groups and how such meanings influence urban politics and the built environment. The traditional taco truck is a powerfully transformative feature of the American landscape because the trucks’ social spaces intersect with complex geographic processes of immigration, class, ethnicity, gentrification, commodification, food-ways, and the right to public space. Thus the book is also about power, privilege, and the political economy of cities and the novel ways marginalized Mexican immigrants take and remake urban space through their food practices. Through investigating taco trucks in various U.S. metropolises, this book elucidates the ways neoliberal cities work and how Mexican immigrants claim their right to the city.

School Counselors’ Self-Efficacy and Training Needs When Working with The K-12 Latino Student Population

According to the US Department of Education, Latinos represent the second largest racial/ethnic group enrolled in public K-12 schools (25%). Yet, little is known about how school counselors see their ability to work with Latino students. Thus, we asked school counselors to tell us how they view their ability to work with Latino students on 16 different tasks. Using these same tasks, we asked them about their inservice needs. The top task in terms of ability was: Conceptualize Latino students’ cultures as different rather than deficient. The top three training needs were: (1) Use functional Spanish to work more effectively with the Latino population, (2) Understanding how the students’ Latino culture heritage impacts their education values, and (3) Interpret Latino students' nonverbal body language and its significance in counseling. The school counselors also identified the training modalities they would be willing to use: “Anytime Web” (71%), “In Person” (70%), and “Live Web” (50%).

Queer Citizenship

This chapter sutures the pre- and post-civil rights movements—a divide that operates as a historical schism for Latino Studies. Analyzing José Antonio Villarreal’s novel Pocho (1959, which many have hailed as the first Chicano novel), this chapter argues that the novel is better understood not as an origin point but rather as a node within a longer genealogy of Latino culture. This chapter focuses on sexuality, homoeroticism, and homophobia, depictions that are at odds with some of the stated objectives of the Chicano movement’s foundational documents, but that situate the novel within earlier discussions of American democratic values. Read alongside early Chicano movement manifestos and correspondence, the chapter calls for a more historically expansive understanding of the emergence and legacy of the Chicano movement.