After a guest professor abandoned her podium and rearranged the chairs into a circle at the Puerto Rican/Latin American Cultural Center (PR/LACC) Wednesday night, the audience prepared for the unexpected.
Dr. Gloria Gonzalez-Lopez, professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, spoke last night at the PR/LACC about her 2005 book, "Erotic Journeys: Mexican Immigrants and their Sex Lives." The book explores non-traditional views of sex lives led by immigrant men and women and how they are vastly impacted by society, economics and gender inequalities. The purpose of her talk, as Gonzalez-Lopez said, was to highlight the "unexpected" findings her book reveals.
"It is always a pleasure to talk about my sexuality research," Gonzalez-Lopez said, after rearranging the room. She prefers to get closer to her audience and encourage dialogue. To open the discussion she said that many people ask her, "Why sex? And why Mexican Immigrants?" Her response was, "Back in '95, I was not interested in sex . . . professionally speaking." She then continued to explain how "Erotic Journeys" came to be.
In the mid-1990s, while Gonzalez-Lopez was living in Los Angeles and working on her Ph.D., she started a support group for Mexican women seeking help in coping with immigration. The group had weekly meetings and talked about every issue imaginable, except sex. One day, Gonzalez-Lopez came to the group and asked the women about their sex lives and one of the women said emphatically, "Oh, its OK to talk about sex?" Sex then became the weekly topic of conversation and Gonzalez-Lopez realized she had found her professional future.
"It's an important topic because we don't know a lot about it," said Marysol Asencio, about the issue of sexuality among Mexican immigrants. "We assume that people don't want to talk about it, but they actually do."
Asencio is a professor of family studies and Puerto Rican and Latino Studies and said that Gonzalez-Lopez is one of few people who do want to find out about this mysterious and intriguing issue.
"She looks at immigrants from a different lens," Asencio said. "She has us look at immigrants through a different way, and more fully, and sexuality makes them appear more human."
"Erotic Journeys," sprung from Gonzalez-Lopez's 1,400-page, single spaced, radical-feminist dissertation, for which she had interviewed 40 Mexican women. After submitting it in 2000, and realizing she had failed to involve men's perspectives, she set out to further her research and interviewed 20 men. Half of the men and women were from big cities and half from small towns. Her subjects were all aged 25 to 45 and were mostly self-selected because, as Gonzalez-Lopez said, people who wanted to talk about sex were generally people who loved to talk. As Pepper Schwartz, author of "Gender and Sexuality," says, the revealing interviews are what make "Erotic Journeys," "a model for further studies about diversity and sexuality."
"It's a very foundational piece because she's challenging traditional research," said Katie Acosta, a sociology graduate student.
Acosta noted that Gonzalez-Lopez, unlike previous researchers, is forcing people to observe the sexual side of immigrants, which is not typical. Typically, as Gonzalez-Lopez noted, Mexican immigrants are viewed purely as workers not having sexual sides. At first, Gonzalez-Lopez was apprehensive about doing sexuality research, but once she started, she wanted to know everything. Gonzalez-Lopez interviewed subjects individually in two to four hour, taped sessions where they talked about sex, family, religion, rape, dating, romance, culture and society. One of the most fascinating aspects of researching for "Erotic Journeys," was that it changed her own beliefs, opened her to ideas about masculinity and she said, "It helped me tremendously to challenge my own prejudices as a woman."
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