María del Socorro Castañeda
Dr. María Del Socorro Castañeda is Co-Founder & Chief Education Officer, with her teenage daughter Lupita, of Becoming Mujeres, a firm that helps Latina teens and their female caregivers to translate cultural expectations into opportunities. Dr. Castañeda is a sociologist and ethnographer. She holds a BS in Sociology from Santa Clara University and MA and PhD degrees in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Castañeda is a Ford Foundation Fellow and the award-winning author of Our Lady of Everyday Life: La Virgen de Guadalupe and the Catholic Imagination of Mexican Women in America (Oxford University Press, 2018). Before co-founding Becoming Mujeres, she was Assistant Professor at Santa Clara University in the Religious Studies Department. Dr. Castañeda is a sought-out speaker and expert in the areas of Mexican popular Catholicism, Our Lady of Guadalupe devotion, LatinX cultural expectations, mother-daughter communication, and teenage girls and social pressures. Her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation, The Louisville Institute, Hispanic Theological Initiative, UC Mexus (University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States), Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, and The Ignatian Institute for Jesuit Education. Her work been featured in local and national newspapers, including the San Jose Mercury News and the National Catholic Reporter. She was born in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, México and immigrated to the United States, undocumented, as a child. Dr. Castañeda’s goal is to teach Latina teens and women how to transgress oppressive gendered cultural expectations and become the mujeres they were meant to be.
