Education, Feminism, and Spanish: The Definition of a Library Cuban

In the interview, Movida speaks passionately about her supervisor’s refusal to give her a more distinguished title and of her attempt to keep her below the glass ceiling. She first noticed the glass ceiling on lower levels, and then noticed the limitations in her own employment. Movida said, “You work your hiney off, you get stuck with … your employees and then from the top your bosses and middle management was like being in the middle of cooking pressure.” After noticing the glass ceiling she decided to try to break through by presenting her supervisor with the following ultimatum: She says, “Steph, I don’t want more money, I just want the title, I want to be a manager.” Steph retorts that “It’s not a good time.” Movida replies, “I quit, I quit my job right that minute… I saw the writing on the wall. I was going to be stuck at this job and this woman was not going to let me get anywhere.” According to Hurtado (1998), Movida utilizes her job as a “site of resistance” to challenge the order of power relations. The glass ceiling symbolizes a social order that “is hierarchally organized into relations of domination and subordination [and Movida attempts to create] particular subject positions within which the subordinated [Movida] can legitimately function” (Hurtado, 1998, p. 146). These subject positions, once self-consciously recognized by their inhabitants, can be transformed into more effective sites of resistance to the current ordering of power relations (Hurtado, 1998). She turns the politics of power on its head when she asks her supervisor to look past the glass ceiling and consider the excellent work she has done. She takes the dominant role by demanding a title that symbolized more power. She was really asking Steph if her diligence could be rewarded with a new title. Movida says, “So all I was doing was testing the waters to see how far I could go, see if that glass ceiling had disappeared or if it was still there.” Steph’s remark that “this is not a good time” was really her telling Movida to stay below the glass ceiling. Movida refused to be stuck in this subordinate paradigm forever, and she noticed that “this woman was not going to let [her] get anywhere because the only job to beat was hers.” Her choice to leave and pursue her dream of education was the ultimate form of resistance. In this moment, a disruption of the power structure caused the birth of the Latina feminist (Hurtado, 1998). She realized the impenetrable glass ceiling, and decided to use education as the weapon to break through. When her supervisor asked what she was going to do, she retorted, “I am going to school.”