ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how gender, as main organizing category, interacts with class and ethnicity to mediate Salvadoran and Peruvian entrepreneurs’ access to resources and their articulation of business strategies. The chapter is divided in four parts. First, it focuses on gender stratifi cation in the immigrant economy. Second, it discusses how gender socialization processes differentially shape men’s and women’s motivations for migration and self-employment. Next, it engenders Salvadorans’ and Peruvians’ cultural, ethnic and social capital, tracing participants’ gender role ideology back to Latin American ideological constructs such as ‘Marianismo’ and ‘Machismo.’ Equally important, it reviews gender patterns in informants’ deployment of familial resources and in their levels of social solidarity. Finally, it discusses gendered business strategies, exploring the ways in which class, ethnicity, and gender remain interwoven in informants’ commercial and personal lives.
