We are particularly grateful to Angelina Casillas, Olga Silva, and Beatriz Solis for their valuable contributions. Gloria Romero, Ph.D. is currently affiliated with the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA as a Research Associate. She is the reci- pient of a minority Group Scholars Rockefeller Research Fellowship. Felipe Castro is Assistant Professor in the UCLA Department of Psychology. He received his M.S.W. from the UCLA School of Social Welfare and his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Washington.
Job loss is usually an involuntary and uncontrollable exit from the labor force.
Approximately 1,600 of these workers were female and of these, about 970 were Latino women, predominantly of Mexican origin. For decades, the Starkist plant, located in Wilmington, the southern-most part of the city of Los Angeles, had been a major employer of Latino female laborers. Unemployment due to factory shutdowns has emerged as a major social issue in the 1980s. The original participants in this study were 114 Latino females who were former employees of the Starkist Tuna Cannery in Wilmington, California. These participants agreed to respond to a psychological survey of their life experi- ences before, during, and after the plant closure.