PhD Candidate in Sociology at UC Irvine with an emphasis in Chicano Latino studies
Maricela Bañuelos is the proud daughter of Mexican immigrants who valued education but were only able to obtain third-grade level educations. Maricela’s mother was her first teacher, she taught her to read and write in Spanish when she was four and her father often encouraged her and her siblings to pursue higher education so that they could have better paid and less arduous jobs. Maricela Bañuelos received her Sociology B.A. from the University of California, (UC) Santa Barbara in 2016, and graduated with Summa Cum Laude, highest honors. When Maricela started college, she took sociology of education and sociology of inequality courses that allowed her to understand the inequities she observed in educational institutions and how structural oppression limited the opportunities of the communities she comes from. This led her to pursue roles where she could support the higher education pathways of underrepresented students of color. For example, she served as an officer for La Escuelita [The Little School], a non-profit that supported the higher education pathways of low-income students of color by providing college scholarships, organizing a Student-Parent Conference at UC Santa Barbara, and offering free tutoring for students in K-12. She also worked for the Educational Opportunity Program, where she served as the Chicanx Latinx Resource Center mentor and created and facilitated programming to support the experiences of first-generation and low-income students of color. After graduating, she worked for City Year Los Angeles, and worked in an after-school program at a high school serving predominantly low-income Latinx students. She received her master’s in Educational Policy and Social Context from UC Irvine in 2020 and is currently pursuing her PhD in Sociology at UC Irvine with an emphasis in Chicano Latino studies. Maricela was awarded the Ford Pre-Doctoral Fellowship in 2021, to support her doctoral research on issues of access and persistence in higher education. She is particularly interested in the educational pathways and social mobility of first-generation college students, low-income students, and underrepresented students of color.
Maricela’s research examines the role of race, class, gender, and intersectionality in shaping educational and occupational experiences. Maricela recently published a co-authored article titled “Gendered Deference: Perceptions of Authority and Competence Among Latina/o Physicians in Medical Institutions” in the top ranked journal Gender & Society. Our study found that gendered demonstrations of deference manifested through 1) gendered cultural taxation; 2) microaggressions from women nurses and staff and; 3) the questioning of authority and competence. These findings highlight the importance of gendered deference in transforming medical schools and medical workplaces into more inclusive environments. Through this project, her research interests have extended into examining the role of peoples’ social location in shaping not only their educational trajectories but also shaping their occupational experiences.
Maricela’s research has also focused on the doctoral pipeline and improving accessibility and retention of underrepresented students. One of her studies focuses on understanding the forms of support and barriers first-generation Latine college students experience on their pathways towards enrolling in doctoral programs. She conducted 25 semi-structured interviews with first-generation Latine students who successfully enrolled in doctoral programs in California. She co-authored a paper examining professors’ influence in first-generation Latine college students’ pathways into doctoral programs, which has now been published in the journal of Race Ethnicity and Education.
Her dissertation builds on this research by employing a longitudinal qualitative methodology spanning across three years (2021- 2024), that interrogates the experiences of 45 Latine participants who either 1) applied and enrolled into PhD programs or 2) applied and but did not enroll in a PhD program. In one chapter, she compares the social capital of Latines who got accepted into PhD programs to that of Latines who did not get admitted or declined admission and the impact that COVID-19 had on their doctoral application processes. In another chapter, she examines how resources and social support affect whether Latines decide to reapply to PhD programs, and how Latines navigate the doctoral reapplication processes. In a third chapter, she interrogates how information and networks at the time of application affect students’ acclimation and satisfaction in their PhD program in the first two years and seeks to understand the long-term impact of applying and enrolling in PhD programs after the onset of COVID-19. While sociologist broadly understand the inequitable processes that shape Latine PhD trajectories, her dissertation will meaningfully contribute to the field by examining these processes longitudinally across multiple junctures, underscoring the impact of COVID-19, and including Latine with stifled and nonlinear PhD pathways, whose experiences are important to fully understanding the seals and leaks in the Latine PhD pipeline.