Courtesy photo.
By Debra Herrick • UCSB
SANTA BARBARA — A lot goes into the selection for a prestigious fellows program, including a peer-nomination process, a selection committee and a governing board’s approval — and Aída Hurtado, who was recently named an American Education Research Association (AERA) fellow, doesn’t take that for granted.
“I was honored to be selected as an AERA fellow because I know the process by which the selection takes place, and it’s arduous,” said Hurtado, Luis Leal Endowed Chair of the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara. “Your colleagues have to rally around you, so the fact that people did that for me was meaningful.”
Hurtado is among 24 individuals named to the 2023 AERA Fellows Program which honors scholars for their exceptional contributions to education research. Her work has focused on intersectional feminisms, particularly the effects of gender on educational success. In a novel way, she has looked at educational achievement with a focus on Latinas and Chicanas, ultimately disproving the idea that traditional Latino families just want their children to get married and have more children.
“My work contributes to debunking the deficit point of view that Latino families don’t care about education or discourage it,” she said, “but a lot of the work I do shows how committed the families are, especially to their daughters. I’ve documented that Latinas and Chicanas will go out of their way, even when they haven’t received an education, even working three jobs to send their girls to Catholic schools because they think it will help them get into college or not doing a cultural event like a quinceañera in order to have the money for education — and these parents might not even know what college is but they have a deep belief in the idea of education in general.”
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