Gender and School Success in the Latino Diaspora

More and more Latinos are moving to areas of the US where few Latinos have settled before - a migration that has been called "the new Latino diaspora" (Hamann, 1999; Villenas, 1997). This paper describes an isolated community of about two hundred Latinos, located in a small rural Northern New England town that I call Havertown. When I knew them in the mid-1990s, almost all community members were Mexican immigrants or Mexican Americans who had lived in or passed through South Texas, whose families had at some recent point been involved in migrant agricultural labor, and who came from rural working-class backgrounds. Over the prior ten years they had been recruited to Havertown to work at a local meat processing plant.