Arredondo, Patricia (1945-s)

Patricia Arredondo, born July 17, 1945, is a nationally acclaimed Latina psychologist who has achieved prominence through her work on multicultural counseling competencies. Additionally, she is an international leader in the areas of counseling, counseling psychology, and psychology and is the founder of Empowerment Workshops, Incorporated, a consulting company that focuses on issues of diversity as they relate to the workplace. Through her research, outreach, and leadership, she has guided and inspired a generation of counselors and psychologists to examine what it means to be culturally competent to work with diverse populations. As someone who has negotiated several tensions in the field of mental health (e.g., counseling vs. counseling psychology, ethnic minority psychology vs. psychology), Arredondo serves as a visionary leader and role model for all mental health professionals.

Arredondo, a Mexican American, grew up in Loraine, Ohio, a town with a small Latino/a population at the time. Arredondo was a second-generation American on her father's side and third generation on her mother's side. Her grandmother was a Zapotec Indian from Oaxaca, Mexico, who later worked as a laborer at the steel mills in the small town near Cleveland, Ohio. The experiences of her family in the United States inspired and informed Arredondo in her work. Arredondo received her undergraduate degree in Spanish and journalism from Kent State University, received her master's in counseling from Boston College, and was the first in her extended family to receive her doctorate in counseling psychology (from Boston University). She began her career as an assistant professor in counseling psychology at Boston University, where she found her academic competence questioned; some suspected that she was hired to be a token woman and ethnic minority in her department. Arredondo left Boston University in 1985 to launch a career as the founder and president of Empowerment Workshops, Incorporated, a consulting company based in Boston.

Through her work as the founder and president of Empowerment Workshops, Arredondo took on the roles of entrepreneur, psychologist in private practice, and organizational consultant. She worked with a variety of organizations providing a range of services, including training workshops and diversity initiatives with assessments, management consultations, and management training. Arredondo's consulting company focused on assessing workplace culture, addressing barriers to workplace diversity, and offering business strategies to increase workplace diversity. Through Empowerment Workshops Arredondo reported that she gained a sense of personal and professional success.

Arredondo pioneered the use of the dimensions of personal identity model in her consulting work (see Figure 1). The model partitions identity into three dimensions: A, B, and C. The A dimensions include the following: age/generational status, culture, ethnicity, gender, language, physical/mental status, race, sexual orientation, and social class. These dimensions can have positive and negative valences, which impact self-concept, self-esteem, and empowerment, and they are the least changeable. The B dimensions are less visible and are developmental in nature: They include educational background, geographic location, hobbies/recreation, healthcare practices/beliefs, religion/spirituality, military experience, relationship status, and work experience. The C dimensions emphasize historical contexts and external forces that individuals and families must deal with. The C dimensions are personal/familial/historical, eras/events, and sociopolitical forces. Through the use of this model counselors can conceptualize clients in context and [Page 992]focus their interventions on specific dimensions. There is some emerging empirical support in the research literature for the use of the model, and the model has been adapted for use with specific populations (e.g., Latinos/as).

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