Handbook of U.S. Latino Psychology

Developmental and Community-Based Perspectives

Francisco A. Villarruel, Gustavo Carlo, Josefina M. Contreras Grau, Margarita Azmitia, Natasha Cabrera, T. Jaime Chahin

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781452237053
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Congratulations to Aida Hurtado and Karina Cervantez- winners of the 2009 Women of Color Psychologies Award! This award, given by the Association of Women in Psychology Association, is voted on by AWP members for contributions of new knowledge and importance to the advancement of the psychology of women of color. Offering broad coverage of all U.S. Latino groups, this volume synthesizes cutting-edge research and methodological advances and provides culturally sophisticated information that can be used by researchers, policy makers, and practitioners. The editors and contributing authors summarize theories and conceptual models that can further our understanding of the development and adaptation of U.S. Latino populations. In addition, they focus on the importance of cultural sensitivity and competence in research and intervention approaches and how to achieve it.

Key Features

• Highlights the normative development and strengths of U.S. Latino populations

• Elaborates on the heterogeneity of Latinos in that it does not assume that all Latino populations, and the contexts of their development, are identical.

• Emphasizes on cultural sensitivity and competence at all levels

• Focuses on the importance of cultural identity amongst Latinos and its contribution to healthy developmental outcomes.

1

A HISTORY OF LATINO PSYCHOLOGY

AMADO M. PADILLA AND ESTEBAN L. OLMEDO

A HISTORY OF LATINO PSYCHOLOGY

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The origins of Latino psychology can be traced to pre-Columbian times as well as to developments in Europe that were transported to Latin America (Padilla, 1980a, 1984, 2000; Padilla & Salgado de Snyder, 1988). Our purpose here is not to review the earliest developments in Latino psychology but to provide an overview of contemporary developments in the field between 1930 and 2000. We begin by briefly defining Latino psychology and placing it within the context of psychology in general and then present the careers of six pioneer Latino psychologists who contributed in significant ways to psychology in general and to Latino psychology in particular. These psychologists are deceased now, but all of them left a lasting imprint on Latino scholarship because of their research, their commitment to their cultural roots, and their advocacy on behalf of future generations of Latinos who walk in their footsteps as psychologists. In discussing each of these individuals, we place them in the context of their time and the struggles they overcame as Latino psychologists when there were no ethnic role models to emulate and when culture was not valued in the discourse of psychological inquiry.

In addition, we highlight several major developments that also contributed in unique ways to Latino psychology. The events in particular have to do with the creation of professional associations that focus on professional training of Latinos in psychology. Our historical account is intended to be not comprehensive but rather heuristic; its goal is to encourage others to take up the study of the history of Latino psychology. Our perspective, too, is personal, since we knew most of the individuals whose names we give in this history.

WHAT IS LATINO PSYCHOLOGY?

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A definition of Latino psychology is important because it sets the stage for the theoretical paradigms, research methodologies, and instruments used in our inquiry of Latinos and in the interpretations we give to our findings. We take the position that Latino psychology is a branch of ethnic psychology in which the population of interest is people of Latin American heritage who reside within the continental United States and Puerto Rico. Ethnic psychology, as we use the term, has as one of its focal points the study of Latinos within the context of majority-minority-group relations. Latinos are an ethnic group who historically have been oppressed and who can point to individual and group experiences of prejudice and discrimination in education, employment, and their communities of residence. Bernal, Trimble, Burlew, and Leong (2003), in the Handbook of Racial and Ethnic Minority Psychology, make the point in the foreword to their book that until the 1970s American psychology was the study of the behavior of White persons. Thus, Latino psychologists, along with other ethnic psychologists, have worked to make psychology more inclusive of the multicultural context that is America.

Latino psychology also has a connection to cross-cultural psychology, but it is distinct in that it concentrates less on intercultural group differences and more on intracultural group variation. In other words, cross-cultural psychology is usually concerned with the systematic study of experience and behavior as they occur across cultures in different nation-states (e.g., Japan and the United States). Exceptions to this pattern often occur, of course, because the research approaches found in cross-cultural psychology can be used both within and across cultures.

In contrast, Latino psychology seeks to understand the influence of culture, language, and majority-minority-group status on people of Latin American origin who reside in the United States. The intracultural comparison enters because Latinos, as mentioned above, maintain aspects of their culture of origin while also manifesting American cultural patterns of behavior. Latino psychology, then, seeks to learn how adaptation to the U.S. mainstream and acculturation influence a wide variety of behaviors, such as child-rearing practices, educational attainment of students, gender differences, and coping responses to stressful environments.

Also, Latino psychologists have had greater affinity for the applied areas, such as clinical, health, educational, and community psychology. This is due to social problems within the Latino community that call out for intervention and prevention programs of various types.

EARLY CONTRIBUTORS

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George I. Sanchez

The first Latino psychologist was George I. Sanchez (1906–1972). Nathan Murillo wrote an excellent biography of Sanchez for the first volume of Chicano Psychology (Martinez, 1977). At the conclusion of editing Chicano Psychology, Joe Martinez dedicated the volume to George Sanchez and called him the father of Chicano psychology. Sanchez was born in New Mexico and spent most of his professional career in his home state and in Texas. Thus, he was intimately familiar with the way of life of Latinos in the Southwest and with the social and educational exclusion they experienced because of their minority status. Throughout his life, Sanchez was an advocate of social justice and an activist for the rights of Chicanos. Sanchez received his doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley; for a time, he was on the faculty in education at the University of New Mexico and then became professor of Latin American education at the University of Texas at Austin. During his long career, Sanchez played a number of important professional roles—university professor, educational psychologist, social scientist, and frequent consultant to different Latin American countries on educational planning and policy.

The earliest contributions to Latino psychology are found in four articles Sanchez authored between 1932 and 1934 on the topic of intelligence testing of Mexican American children. In these four articles, Sanchez (1932a, b; 1934a, b) presented a series of cogent arguments for why standard intelligence tests lacked validity when used to assess Mexican American children. Considering the era in which he wrote, Sanchez provided exceptional insights into why IQ testing of Chicano children was inappropriate when these children did not have the same life experiences or level of English-language proficiency that majority-group children had and on whom the tests had been standardized. The four articles are as appropriate today as they were nearly 80 years ago. Importantly, mainstream psychologists at the time ignored Sanchez’s call for caution in testing Mexican American children. Even today, there are concerns about high-stakes educational testing of Latino children on tests similar to those discussed by George Sanchez some 7 decades earlier.

Sanchez continued to contribute to the educational and social science literature for many years. His last publication was a keynote address entitled “Educational Change in Historical Perspective” given at a conference in the early 1970s on bilingual education, which appeared in the volume Mexican Americans and Educational Change, edited by Alfredo Castaneda, Manuel Ramirez III, Carlos E. Cortes, and Mario Barrera (1971). In this paper, Sanchez expressed his anger and disappointment with the poor academic progress that Latino students had made in education. He expressed his frustration in these words:

… While I have championed the cause of educational change for American children of Mexican descent for more than forty-five years, and while I have seen some changes and improvements in this long-standing dismal picture, I cannot, in conscience or as a professional educator, take any satisfaction in those developments. The picture is a shameful and an embarrassing one. (p. 14)

Sanchez, as he had done countless times before, placed the blame on an educational system that either failed to consider or chose to neglect the impact of poverty, cultural and linguistic differences, discrimination, and educational inequity on Mexican American students in public education.

Alfredo Castaneda

Another major figure in the history of Latino psychology is Alfredo Castaneda (1923–1981). Manuel Ramirez III (1981) eulogized Castaneda in the Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences with these words: “With the passing of Alfredo Castaneda, the fields of psychology and education have lost an important leader and pioneer.” As a leader in psychology, Castaneda was one of the most often cited and most prolific researchers in the area of child experimental psychology from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s. He earned his bachelor’s degree from San Francisco State University in 1948 and received his master’s (1951) and doctorate (1952) from Ohio State University. He began his career as an assistant professor at the State University of Iowa, where he remained until 1959. Castaneda then accepted the offer of a full professorship in clinical psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also served as director of child research. He remained at the University of Texas at Austin through 1962 and subsequently relocated to New York City, where he held various teaching and research positions until 1968. During the period 1968–1970, he served as professor of psychology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). At OISE, he was also a faculty member at the Institute for Child Study.

In 1970, Castaneda became professor of education and chairman of Mexican American studies at the University of California at Riverside. It was at this point that Castaneda broke with his earlier, more traditional experimental work and began an intense and productive period in which he concentrated his talents on bilingual and multicultural education.

Castaneda was likely the first Latino psychologist to recognize the importance of biculturalism from a psychological perspective and to call for inclusion of biculturalism in research, training, and services involving Latinos. This interest culminated in Castaneda’s study of the cultural determinants of cognitive and motivational styles of learning and teaching. In 1972, Castaneda was appointed professor of educational psychology in the School of Education at Stanford University. At Stanford, he taught two very popular graduate seminars that were the cornerstone of his research interests: Cultural Pluralism and Educational Policy, and Bicultural Processes in Education. Today, courses with similar titles would be commonplace, but in the mid-1970s this was a bold step in the direction of multicultural instruction, especially at an elite institution of higher education.

It is difficult to summarize in a few lines the impact that Castaneda’s research and writing had on psychology. For more than 2 decades, Castaneda was known for his creative laboratory experiments on such diverse topics as the development of word association norms for children, paired associate learning in children, development of the Children’s Manifest Anxiety Scale, conflict behavior in children and adults, effects of anxiety on complex learning, and the relationship between anxiety and scholastic motivation. His papers were widely cited in the major research journals and handbooks of the time (see Reese & Lipsitt, 1970). In addition to his research and writing, he also served on the editorial board of the prestigious journal Child Development at a time when research on minority children was not being published in this or any other developmental journals (Padilla & Lindholm, 1992).

In addition to Castaneda’s eminence as an experimental child psychologist, he also was an important contributor to the development of Chicano studies. While on the faculty at UC Riverside, Castaneda, with Manuel Ramirez, received a grant in 1973 from the National Institute of Mental Health to convene a conference that brought together Chicano psychologists for the first time. The theme of the conference was “Increasing Educational Opportunities for Chicanos in Psychology.” At the conference, a series of recommendations was proposed having to do with admissions, recruitment, training, faculty and staff development, and supportive services for undergraduate and graduate Chicano students interested in pursuing careers in psychology. These recommendations were directed at departments of psychology, the American Psychological Association (APA), and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

Castaneda deserves to be recognized for his groundbreaking work in showing the need for cultural pluralism in education, for Latino biculturalism as a viable alternative to cultural assimilation, and for leading the way in advocating classroom instructional strategies that could enhance the learning potential of Latino students. His work on instructional strategies culminated in a 1974 book coauthored with Manuel Ramirez entitled Cultural Democracy, Bicognitive Development, and Education. The book offered a vision for multiculturalism in education (which was on the threshold of emerging as a recognizable field in education) that argued that language and culture shaped cognition and needed to be cornerstones of the instructional planning of Latino children.

Carlos Albizu Miranda

Few psychologists have had as profound an impact on the training of Latino psychologists as Carlos Albizu Miranda (1920–1984). Carlos Albizu Miranda was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and lived most of his life in Puerto Rico. He completed his bachelor’s degree in psychology at the University of Puerto Rico. Following World War II, he worked for the Veterans Administration in the area of vocational rehabilitation. Seeing the need to broaden his training in psychology, Albizu traveled to the U.S. mainland to do graduate work at Purdue University. He completed his master’s degree in experimental psychology in 1951 and his doctorate in clinical psychology in 1953.

Albizu returned to his native Puerto Rico and took a teaching position at the University of Puerto Rico, where he quickly rose to the rank of full professor. Increasingly, he saw the need to train a larger number of Puerto Rican students in psychology than was possible at the university. In addition, he was concerned that training failed to take into account the special circumstances of Puerto Ricans as Latinos who, because of Puerto Rico’s commonwealth status with the United States, were U.S. citizens and could travel freely between the island and the mainland but who were marginalized on the mainland because of their culture, language, and skin color. Thus, Albizu founded the Instituto Psicologico de Puerto Rico in 1966. The goal of the institute was to provide culturally appropriate training in clinical psychology. This bold step constituted the establishment of the first professional school of psychology. This was a remarkable feat, considering that the first freestanding school of professional psychology on the U.S. mainland was the California School of Professional Psychology, founded in 1969 by the California Psychological Association, whereas Albizu did not have the professional backing or support of an association of psychologists (Wikipedia, 2008).

In 1971, the institute changed its name to the Caribbean Center for Advanced Studies. A sister branch, the Miami Institute of Psychology, was opened in 1980. Together, these two professional schools have played a major role in the clinical and research training of Latino psychologists not only on the island of Puerto Rico but throughout the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States. As the founder of the Caribbean Center for Advanced Studies, Albizu’s vision and enthusiasm for psychology was infectious. He communicated the firm conviction that the science and practice of psychology could contribute to the social well-being of Puerto Ricans and other Latinos both on the island and on the mainland.

Carlos Albizu Miranda was active in the American Psychological Association. He received special recognition in 1980 from the American Psychological Foundation for his work in the professional development of psychologists in the Caribbean region. In recognition of his vision and pioneering spirit, on January 1, 2000, the Board of Trustees of the Caribbean Center for Advanced Studies officially changed the name of the institution in both Puerto Rico and Miami to the Carlos Albizu University. This was a fitting tribute to a man who had worked tirelessly to create an institution dedicated to training Latino psychologists to provide culturally appropriate services to the Latino community. Finally, in 1979 Albizu was also elected the first president of the National Hispanic Psychological Association.

Rene A. Ruiz

Another influential psychologist was Rene A. Ruiz (1929–1982), who was instrumental in drawing attention to the underrepresentation of Latinos in psychology. Like the other early Latino psychologists, Ruiz did not begin his career with the intent to focus on Latino issues. He was born and raised in the Los Angeles area and graduated from the University of Southern California in 1954 with a major in psychology. He completed his graduate training in clinical psychology in 1963 at the University of Nebraska. Early in his career, he held faculty appointments in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Kansas Medical School and then at the University of Arizona. In 1970, he coauthored a popular text, The Normal Personality, with Robert Wrenn. However, the turning point came in a 1971 article Ruiz published in the American Psychologist entitled “Relative Frequency of Americans with Spanish Surnames in Associations of Psychol...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. A History of Latino Psychology
• 2. Conceptual Issues in Latino Mental Health
• 3. Understanding Psychopathology Among the Adult and Child Latino Population From the United States and Puerto Rico: An Epidemiologic Perspective
• 4. Methodological Issues in Research on Latino Populations
• 5. Ethical Issues in Conducting Research With Latino Drug Users
• 6. Latino Ethnic Identity
• 7. Immigration and Adaptation
• 8. Acculturation, Enculturation, and the Psychosocial Adaptation of Latino Youth
• 9. Acculturative Stress and Adaptation
• 10. Latino Families: Parenting, Relational, and Developmental Processes
• 11. A View From Within and From Without: The Development of Latina Feminist Psychology
• 12. Theories and Research on Prosocial Competencies Among U.S. Latinos/as
• 13. Risk, Resilience, and Positive Development Among Latino Youth
• 14. Health and Mental Health Perspectives on Elderly Latinos in the United States
• 15. Early Intervention Programs: The Case of Head Start for Latino Children
• 16. Latino Pre-K-3 Education: A Critical Foundation
• 17. Parenting Interventions and Latino Families: Research Findings, Cultural Adaptations, and Future Directions
• 18. Evidence-Based Approaches to Working With Latino Youth and Families
• 19. Clinical Approaches to Working With Latino Adults
• 20. The Psychology of Health: Physical Health and the Role of Culture and Behavior
• 21. Cancer Screening and Survivorship in Latino Populations: A Primer for Psychologists
• 22. Substance Use Among Latino Adolescents: Cultural, Social, and Psychological Considerations
• 23. Sexuality and Sexual Risk Behaviors Among Latino Adolescents and Young Adults
• 24. Perspectives and Recommendations for Future Directions in U.S. Latino Psychology
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• About the Contributors