Ehlers, Tracy Bachrach

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Ehlers, Tracy Bachrach

PERSONAL:

Education: University of Colorado, Ph.D., 1980.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of Anthropology, University of Denver, 2000 E. Asbury, Rm. 146, Denver, CO 80208. E-mail—tehlers@du.edu.

CAREER:

University of Denver, Denver, CO, associate professor of anthropology and director of graduate studies.

AWARDS, HONORS:

University of Denver travel grant, 1997; Colorado Community-Based Research Network grant, 2002.

WRITINGS:

Silent Looms: Women and Production in a Guatemalan Town, Westview Press (Boulder, CO), 1990, revised edition, with foreword by June Nash, University of Texas Press (Austin, TX), 2000.

(With Sugar Turner) Sugar's Life in the Hood: The Story of a Former Welfare Mother, University of Texas Press (Austin, TX), 2002.

Contributor to professional journals.

SIDELIGHTS:

Cultural anthropologist Tracy Bachrach Ehlers, who specializes in the study of women and women's work, is the author of Silent Looms: Women and Production in a Guatemalan Town and Sugar's Life in the Hood: The Story of a Former Welfare Mother. Based on research that Ehlers began in 1976, Silent Looms examines the impact of economic transformation on families in San Pedro Sacatepéquez, finding that development often destroyed traditional businesses and undermined women's efforts to benefit from modernization. "One of the strengths of Silent Looms is Ehlers's ability to engage the reader on academic and personal levels," commented Gloria Delany-Barmann in the Latin American Research Review. "She provides a careful analysis and integration of the data from the first edition and that of her restudy of San Pedranas. In doing so, she interweaves poignant stories to further illustrate her findings. Her apparent and unabashedly close relationship with the family with which she lived is refreshing."

Written with Sugar Turner, a former prostitute and drug addict, Sugar's Life in the Hood chronicles a single mother's struggle to escape the poverty-stricken inner city and provide a better life for her children. Booklist critic David Pitt described Sugar's Life in the Hood as "a moving look at the welfare life and a powerful testament to one woman's strength and resilience."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, June 1, 2002, David Pitt, review of Sugar's Life in the Hood: The Story of a Former Welfare Mother, p. 1654.

Latin American Research Review, summer, 2004, Gloria Delany-Barmann, "From Atitlan to Vancouver," review of Silent Looms: Women and Production in a Guatemalan Town, p. 305.