As Covid lockdowns have eased, employment among Latinas is recovering faster than among Hispanic men, said Mónica García-Pérez, an economics professor at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, who specializes in labor economics.
So far, trucking isn’t attracting Latinas nationwide, but there may be regional increases in areas with concentrations of warehouses and distribution centers, García-Pérez said.
Those re-entering the workforce appear to be filling jobs in fields that have been more male-dominated, such as packing and shipping, she said.
Antoinette McIntosh, 42, was working as a financial adviser at an East Coast bank when the market crashed in 2008. Her job and her six-figure salary disappeared overnight.
A good friend, Robert Montgomery, who later became her fiancé, told her to cash in on her love of driving and join him at his company as a truck driver.
The company they worked for paid for her transportation to Salt Lake City and training in exchange for the couple’s working for the company for a year.
“I’ve been in it ever since,” said McIntosh, who is Black and Puerto Rican and lives in the Cleveland, Mississippi, area. She has been a truck driver for 15 years.
McIntosh’s father also had been a truck driver, and her parents “did everything they could to keep me out of a truck,” she said. Trying to fulfill their wishes, she went to college, double-majored in psychology and social work and “made everyone else happy.”
McIntosh now makes more than she did at her bank job, she said.
“What a lot of people don’t tell you is this pays you better than a white-collar job in a lot of businesses, so it’s not so much of a stigma anymore,” McIntosh said.
Shifting in the pandemic
Rosio Villagrana, 35, got her Class A truck driver’s license on July 30. The company that hired her told her it hadn’t had a female truck driver for several years, she said.
She had worked in and managed a pawn shop for about a decade. But her friends’ work driving semi-trailer trucks had long intrigued her.
With time on her hands and feeling restless confined to work and home early in the pandemic, Villagrana decided to give truck driving a try.
“Why not?” she recalled saying. “I’m so for women empowerment. I feel like we are capable of what we do, plus more, especially in this male-dominated industry.”
Ultimately, her goal is to be an owner-operator and one day own her own fleet of trucks.
Tracy Barajas, 27, of Corona, California, has been driving trucks for three years. She had worked in online fashion stores and as a dispatcher for a plumbing company.
Her boyfriend, Oscar Hernandez, and cousins, who were truck drivers, inspired her to make the jump into trucking, she said.
Barajas said…
Read More: Latinas in trucking talk about their jobs and the industry