"Checkin' up on my guy": Chicanas, social capital, and the culture of romance

The purpose of this paper is to examine the culture of romance among regulartrack Chicanas in a large, inner-city, virtually all-Mexican high school in Houston, Texas, fictitiously known as Juan Seguin High.' By culture of romance, I refer to a romanticized view of heterosexual relations where love, warmth, and intimacy are dominant emotions. In their classic study of romance among college-going women, Dorothy C. Holland and Margaret A. Eisenhart refer to the culture of romance as one of the main factors explaining why women scale back their own aspirations. That is, to achieve love and attention from males, women often make compromises to the detriment of their careers. An irony of romantic love for these college-going women is that as they become more deeply involved in their relationships and as they envision more traditional roles for themselves as future spouses, women minimize their investment in academics and their pursuit of careers becomes less important.2

Romantic relationships at Seguin clearly involve similar kinds of compromises. However, qualitative evidence gathered from fieldwork lends support to a complementary hypothesis: At least for the more seriously involved, when young women provide support to their male friends, however excessive, they enact or perform a version of femininity that promotes school as a goal. For reasons that are largely related to context, the evidence suggests that a cultural meaning system can develop that runs in the opposite direction of what Holland and Eisenhart would predict. That is, romantic love can evolve into a pro-school ethos. Whether this ethos translates into higher academic achievement, however, depends on the levels of social capital that students possess.

By social capital, I mean the social ties that connect students to each other, as well as the levels of resources (like academic skills and knowledge) that characterize their friendship groups.3 In contrast to other better known forms of capital, like human and cultural capital,4 social capital is known by its function. That is, through the interactive web of social relationships, social capital enables the attainment of goals that cannot be accomplished solely by the individual. This collectivist ethos is evident among youth at Seguin when, in the context of their peer group and even their romantic relationships, exchanges involve a marshaling of academically productive social capital.5

Holland and Eisenhart maintain that the shape that the culture of romance takes will vary depending on social context. For this reason, I do not see my findings as seriously challenging theirs. The present discussion instead highlights the capacity of social context to engender a pro-school ethos within the boundaries of romance. After describing the larger study and addressing some of its key findings, I turn to the primary sources of data, participant observation and group interviews, that permit me to explore my hypothesis.6

The Seguin High School Study

This research is part of a larger study that investigates generational differences in achievement and schooling orientations between immigrant and U.S.-born Mexican youth.7 Data were collected through a survey, participant observation, and open-ended interviews with individuals and groups of students between 1992 and 19958' My study helps explain a widely observed empirical pattern of higher immigrant achievement vis-a-vis their acculturated, U.S.-born counterparts found in both small-scale ethnographies and national-level data.9 Rather than revealing the upward mobility pattern historically evident among European-origin groups, research on generational attainments points to an "invisible ceiling" of blocked opportunity for Mexican American people."

Although these widely observed differences between early- and later-generation youth are regarded by scholars as reflecting a "decline in achievement,"" the framework I elaborate recasts the evidence as reflecting how schooling subtracts resources from youth. Borrowing from Robert D. Putnam, I argue that Mexican immigrant and U.S.-born Mexican youth alike are subjected to forces of "social decapitalization" (or loss of social capital in students' networks) through a process I term "subtractive schooling."12 This means that the ways that youth are schooled or assimilated translates into the following interrelated outcomes: students' cultural and linguistic divestment, including their de-identification from Mexican culture and the Spanish language; psychic, social, emotional, and cultural distance between immigrant youth and their more culturally assimilated U.S.-born peers; and finally, a limited presence of academically productive social capital in the peer group networks of U.S.-born youth.13

As I argue in Subtractive Schooling, institutionally mediated social decapitalization is the antithesis of social capital. It not only fails to build on the cultural value that Chicanas and Chicanos attach to the sharing of norms, values, and resources, but also obstructs the transference of human and cultural capital. James C. Coleman forcefully argues that without social capital, human capital, embodied in individuals' levels of training and educational attainment, is negligible for the goal of academic success.l4 In Coleman's view, it is therefore not enough to possess human capital. One must also be enmeshed in exchange networks characterized by bonds of trust that permit an easy flow of resources and support that benefit both the individual and the collective.'5