Heterosexually acquired HIV infections and their consequent deficiency syndrome continue to increase among Latinas despite more than a decade of prevention and education programs. Most programs targeting the non-IDU Latina attempt a reorientation of her personal beliefs and attitudes. They use “empowerment” education as a means of generating more sexually assertive women, in the hope that these will negotiate safer sex more effectively with their male partners. Despite the well-proven social paradox that knowledge and beliefs are not a good predictor of behavior, such programs maintain their popularity while missing fundamental understandings about Latinas, both idiosyncratic and subculture-specific, which are essential for effective prevention education. The failure of current programs which target Latinas is underscored, sadly, by the continued escalation of infections in this population. The state of empowerment rhetoric is examined and its deficits underscored in treating sexual negotiation as a fundamental, subcultural and interpersonally-determined dynamic which severely impacts a Latina's ability to enable safer sex. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data from two anthropological studies of at-risk Latina subpopulations by the author (combined n = 472), this article explores how diverse the sexual, attitudinal, and emotional universe of Latinas really is, and how distinct subcultural issues about negotiating sex often impede such women from obtaining safer sex via any present “empowerment” recipe. Implications for the design of prevention education programs are aired, as are recommendations, in light of findings from medical anthropological studies.
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