Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 4 | An Interview with Marta Tienda, page 3 (low bandwidth)

MT: Yes. I don’t believe in free. I think you need to work for what you get. I make my kids work for things. The only things they don’t have to earn are books—books are given. If one of my kids wants a book, I always buy it. I never argue with them, never ask why they want it, and they know that. Everything else is negotiable. And that’s just the way it is.

CR: You once told a professor that you were going to quit because you felt he was urging you to go into Women’s Studies or Hispanic Studies and towards work that you felt would pigeonhole you. It’s interesting, then, that in last few years, besides focusing on minorities in higher education in general, you have also focused on young Hispanic women. What made you change your mind and focus your studies on the ethnic group that you are part of and on young women in that group in particular?

MT: Well, because I can do it now. I can do whatever I want. And nobody’s going to say “It’s just because she’s one of them.” I’ve made my reputation and achieved what I needed to; my academic credentials are a matter of public record. So when I take on a project, I’m known for addressing the issues involved scientifically, as an investigation. I don’t approach my work with preconceived beliefs—I do have hypotheses; I have expectations based on what I know and what I’ve learned. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to confirm them with my research.

So now I am in a position to carry out objective research about Hispanics and Hispanic women. And it’s even more important because of the role model issue. It was an important and lasting lesson for me to think about the fact that somebody might be looking at what I do and who I am to legitimate herself. I had never experienced that because, being raised in Michigan, I was not a typical Latina—there were not a lot of people like me where we lived. So I never felt uncomfortable because of who I was or worried about the fact that I was Mexican or that my family spoke Spanish.

Being poor, though, I remember very well, so that was an issue, but my ethnic identity was not. And about being poor, my main thoughts about myself in relation to other people were that maybe I’m different from you, but I’m not less than you. I had heard the expressions, “poor Mexican” and “dumb Mexican,” but I never understood why those descriptions should apply. I certainly knew that I wasn’t dumb, for instance. I wasn’t at the bottom of my class, ever, so nobody could call me “dumb Mexican.” It never fit. And if somebody tried to put me into that kind of box, I never let it happen. I resisted it, which is why earlier in my career I resisted doing women’s studies or Chicano studies. I always wanted to go where my curiosity and my intellect took me. So that was the star that I always followed.

It was in graduate school at Stanford that I first realized who I was and what I did could have an impact on other women. It was a discovery for me that someone would look up to me and say, she’s like us. Young women identified with me because of how I look and the way I dress. And they said, you know, you’re like us. You dress like us and you talk like us and we see you standing up for yourself. That makes us feel that we can be like you. We feel legitimated by your example.

CR: So being an established scholar, recognized for your science and your work, liberated you to work on Hispanic and women’s issues?

MT: Becoming a mature, established scholar takes time. It takes many years and hard work—there are no short cuts. None at all! But once you reach that mature status you can choose the issues you want to explore and make the kinds of scientific contributions that are going to have lasting impact.

A young woman who came here to Princeton for a special summer science program had an opportunity to do the calculus workshop but was told by another colleague, “You don’t need calculus. You’ll never use it.” When I heard about that, I sat her down and said, “Excuse me, you invest now. Your job is to learn everything you can and invest it in yourself. You need calculus because, for example, that way you have the opportunity and the flexibility to become a demographer in the future or take mathematics or economics. But if you say no to calculus now, you’ve closed those doors and years from now you may find yourself wishing that you had taken the workshop.” There are some times when windows of opportunity appear and you just have to take advantage of them, even if it means making sacrifices.

CR: How did you end up choosing a career as a demographer?

MT: I actually have an undergraduate degree in literature though, ironically, I always tested better in math and the hard sciences and I wanted to be a biologist. I loved natural sciences when I was going to college but I was told that you couldn’t combine humanities and science. It wasn’t true, but that’s what happened, so I just stayed on the literature route because it was something secure that I knew I could do. But then, when I got to graduate school, I just gravitated toward the quantitative. It happened that in the summer between my junior and senior years, I started working with migrant farm workers, helping them to certify for food stamps. At the time, I had been thinking about becoming a Spanish teacher, but I had already done some student teaching and was demoralized by it, especially by what went on in the teachers’ room. I heard teachers simply writing students off. So when I went to graduate school, I knew that I wanted to change fields from teaching to something else. My professors all said, “Oh, Senorita Tienda, that’s because you had a very exciting summer. It will wear off.” But it didn’t. Being involved with migrant workers gave me some insight into the challenges faced by the census, for example. During that summer, I heard many people talking about the “fourth count,” which, though I didn’t quite understand it then, was aimed at analyzing 1970 census data
by certain race-ethnic groups, so, for instance, you could get an idea of how many Mexicans were living in Michigan. I was intrigued.

The rest was really sort of serendipitous. At Michigan State, where I went to college, there was a professor named Harley Browning who was a very respected demographer. He eventually became my major professor, but I met him because I was taking a course on Mexican society and in that class I did some work that attracted his attention: it was a hypothetical interview with Gloria Steinem, the leading feminist, in which I asked about her views on Mexican society. Professor Browning was intrigued with the paper and he said, “Well, you can really write. Come see me.” After a couple of papers he said, “Do you want to be a demographer?” I said, “That sounds like a good idea.” The rest is history.

Next page: “From my perspective, the importance of foundations—where they are indispensable—is that they can afford to take risks as well as trail blaze, set standards and study issues in ways that our government, for instance, cannot.”

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