Martha Bernal

American psychologist and educator

• Born: April 13, 1931
• Birthplace: San Antonio, Texas
• Died: September 28, 2001
• Place of death: Black Canyon City, Arizona

Bernal was the first woman of Mexican heritage to receive a doctorate in clinical psychology from an American university. She became a leading researcher on methods of correcting behavioral problems in children and an expert in the training of psychologists on minority and multicultural issues.

Early Life

Martha Bernal (behr-NAHL) was born in San Antonio, Texas, and raised in El Paso by her parents, Alicia and Enrique de Bernal, who emigrated from Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. Her parents instilled in her traditional Mexican values, including an emphasis on the importance of family. The family spoke Spanish at home. When Bernal enrolled in elementary school unable to speak English, she began learning about discrimination toward Mexican culture. She experienced difficulties growing up in a bicultural community from this young age because interaction among children of different races was discouraged.

Bernal graduated from El Paso High School and desired more formal education, a choice that was not typical for Mexican women, who generally were encouraged to then marry and raise families. Although resistant, her parents eventually agreed to Bernal’s wishes and financially supported her while she attended Texas Western College, now known as the University of Texas at El Paso.

After graduating from college with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, Bernal continued her education by earning a master of arts degree from Syracuse University in New York (1955). She subsequently obtained a doctoral degree in clinical psychology from Indiana University in 1962. As a woman, Bernal was not allowed to participate in research projects with her psychology professors and often considered dropping out because of this gender discrimination. By persevering, Bernal became the first Mexican American woman to earn a doctorate in clinical psychology.

Life’s Work

Bernal had great difficulty obtaining her first academic job because institutions only wanted to hire male psychologists. Instead, she completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in human psychophysiology through the U.S. Public Health Service at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). With this added experience, Bernal eventually obtained her first academic position in 1969 as assistant professor at the University of Arizona at Tucson.

Bernal returned to UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute to begin her scientific research. She was awarded a grant by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to study learning theory and classical conditioning in children with behavior problems, most notably autism. Her research concentrated on altering the parents’ behavior by teaching them skills and lessons to help change their children’s behavior. Bernal believed that children with autism did not have an innate cause for their disorder but rather had learned their behaviors. For this work, Bernal was bestowed several National Research Service Awards from the NIMH and is cited as one of the first psychologists to study this subject in an empirical manner.

After several years at UCLA, Bernal relocated to the University of Denver to continue her work. There she evaluated the efficacy and validity of her previous studies. In addition to her professional research, Bernal became more involved in minority issues regarding race and gender discrimination after attending the influential Conference on Chicano Psychology (1973). Bernal refocused her scientific research in order to make it more applicable to minority issues. She also acted as an advocate for minorities and professionally sought the help of the American Psychological Association to bring attention to minority issues in the profession. In 1979, the NIMH gave Bernal another National Research Science Award to educate psychologists about multicultural issues.

Bernal’s initial findings regarding diversity in the psychology field were not encouraging: training programs lacked appropriately sensitive multicultural lectures and curricula, had little to no minority students enrolled, and did not employ minority professors. She completed a second postdoctoral fellowship through the Ford Foundation in which she studied ways to eliminate these disparities. In 1986, Bernal moved to Arizona State University, where she focused on marriage counseling of minority couples when mental illness was diagnosed in the wife. Additionally, it was at Arizona State University that she performed much of her groundbreaking work on how identities are established in Mexican American children and families. The research has been hailed as pioneering because of the creative and new interview approaches used in an attempt to understand how ethnicity is created and transmitted from influences such as parents, families, other adults, and peers.

Bernal raised awareness of multicultural issues by speaking at many professional conferences. She spoke at the 1972 Vail Conference on Training in Psychology and the Lake Arrowhead National Conference of Hispanic Psychologists (1979). She was influential with drafting the bylaws of the Board of Ethnic Minority Affairs (1979) and helped establish the National Hispanic Psychological Association (1979), now known as the National Latino/a Psychological Association, of which she eventually became president. Bernal was appointed to the Commission on Ethnic Minority Recruitment, Retention and Training (1994) and served on the board for the Advancement of Psychology in the Public Interest (1996-1998).

Among the noteworthy awards that Bernal received are the Distinguished Life Achievement Award from Division 45 of the Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues (1979), the Hispanic Research Center Lifetime Award (1979), the Pioneer Senior Women of Color Honor (1999), the Carolyn Attneave Diversity Award for lifelong contributions to ethnic minorities psychology (1999), and the Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Public Interest from the American Psychological Association (2001).

After three separate occurrences of cancer over two decades, Bernal died of lung cancer at seventy years of age. The Martha E. Bernal Memorial Award at Arizona State University was established in her honor.

Significance

Bernal overcame cultural and gender discrimination in her youth and throughout her career. She convinced not only her family but also her colleagues that Mexican women could become productive and successful in the professional and academic worlds. Although Bernal’s early career path was not focused on ethnicity or minority issues, she realized the importance of these issues and fought for more than twenty years in order to incorporate them into the field of psychology. Bernal’s groundbreaking research on minority populations serves as a basis for the now-common multicultural studies classes in undergraduate and graduate psychology and counseling programs.

Bibliography

Bernal, Martha E. “Behavioral Feedback in the Modification of Brat Behaviors.” The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 148, no. 4. (April, 1969): 375-385. Bernal’s initial clinical research findings on how to modify children’s behavior problems using classical conditioning.

Bernal, Martha E., and George P. Knight. Ethnic Identity: Formation and Transmission Among Hispanics and Other Minorities. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. Details Bernal’s research findings on multicultural awareness and the development of ethnic identification.

Bernal Martha E., et al, eds. “Mexican American Identity.” Mountain View, Calif.: Floricanto Press, 2005. Edited by Bernal and colleagues, this book focuses on how society, politics, and public policy influence views of Mexican Americans and how Mexican identity is established.

Vasquez, Melba J. T. “The Life and Death of a Multicultural Feminist Pioneer: Martha Bernal (1931-2001).” The Feminist Psychologist Newsletter 30, no. 1 (Winter, 2003). A tribute to Bernal’s life and work, chronicling the struggles Bernal faced both professionally and personally as a Mexican American woman in the field of clinical psychology.