Social and cultural values are believed to play a role in the types of bodies that adolescent girls consider beautiful and desirable. In this article, the authors analyzed qualitative interviews from 27 Latina mid-adolescent girls (ages 14 to 16) regarding their perceptions of what body shapes and sizes are valued in Latino culture and European American culture, the nature of their conversations with friends about appearance, and whether boys and the larger community consider large body sizes to be acceptable. There was an overwhelming consensus that a slender but curvy figure is the ideal body type in Latino culture and that European Americans value unnaturally thin physiques. Themes drawn from the adolescents' responses point to their friends' opinions, perceptions of boys' dating preferences, norms in their communities, and body shapes of female celebrities in Latino media outlets as sources of beauty and desirability. These findings have implications for body image intervention programs that expose Latina girls to multiple possibilities of beauty when their physical body shapes exclude them from attaining the ideal that they perceive is appreciated in Latino culture.

American children gain more autonomy as they progress through adolescence, however, autonomy-granting for Latina adolescent girls from immigrant families is a relatively unexplored question. In this study, we identified behaviors that Mexican mothers and their daughters deemed to be appropriate when they reach the age of La Quinceañera, a cultural rite of passage at age 15. Daughters hoped for rules regarding social activities to become less strict whereas mothers intended to continue to exert control, especially in the areas of peer and social activities, household duties, and homework responsibilities. The mothers were open to granting more independence in personal areas such as physical appearance and they were also willing to allow their daughters to group date. Although the mothers and daughters expected the mothers to continue to engage in a controlling and protective parenting style, both mothers and daughters anticipated more mutual decision-making and open communication when daughters turned 15 years of age.

Forty-six Latina immigrant mothers and their mostly U.S.-raised daughters between the ages of 12 and 17 years were videotaped having a 5-min 1-on-1 conversation about "how they feel about their bodies." We coded instances of positive and negative maternal messages to examine how the prevalence of these message types was associated with the mothers' and daughters' expressed feelings about their bodies. Mothers and daughters who expressed feeling good about their bodies had affiliative conversations, with mothers conveying body esteem-enhancing messages and few critical comments to their daughters about their body sizes and shapes. Mothers who expressed that they were dissatisfied with their own weight gave their daughters few compliments, few body esteem-enhancing messages, and made critical remarks. Girls who expressed weight dissatisfaction disclosed instances of peer criticism and their desires to have similar body shapes to those of their friends. In response, their mothers gave their daughters positive reassuring messages that their bodies were more than acceptable. In addition, the mothers relied on teasing remarks to assuage their daughters' negative feelings about their bodies which resulted in the girls being amused. More maternal teasing was associated with mothers giving more compliments and body esteemenhancing messages, suggesting that teasing may not be detrimental in all cultures.

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Using pláticas, the sharing of cultural teachings through intimate and informal conversations, this article analyzes our personal college choice processes as Chicanas by examining the impact of being raised by Chicano college-educated fathers. Drawing on two theoretical frameworks, college-conocimiento, a Latinx college choice conceptual framework, and critical raced-gendered epistemologies, we demonstrate how intimate and informal conversations occur within our own Chicana/o daughter-father relationships in negotiating higher education and household contexts. Our analysis responds to the need to explore daughter-father relationships in higher education research. This work expands the college choice scholarship by moving beyond traditional models to examine the gendered and raced experiences of families of color, particularly focusing on how father involvement is associated with the college choice of daughters.