In the Academy, faculty and institutional leaders traditionally have been white, male, and heterosexual. Of the 173,395 Full Professors identified in the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) of the U.S. Department of Education in 2007, women represented almost 46,000, and Latinas held only 1,254 of those positions (U.S. Department of Education, 2010). Slow improvements (Valian, 1999) in institutions' structural diversity vis-a-vis Latina faculty means that they find themselves in alien territory, i.e., in contexts that do not readily understand or accept their difference, such that Latinas find it challenging to become incorporated into and legitimated within academe. Latinos of both genders in the faculty ranks experience subtle racism and hostility from students and peers (Solorzano, 1998) while Latina faculty members report feeling that their credibility as scholars or faculty members is challenged, and that White colleagues underestimate their abilities and discount the value they place on community advocacy. In response to experiences like these, researchers in a range of disciplines have focused on the need to be more welcoming and culturally responsive to communities of difference. Whether the focus is categorical difference associated with race and gender, or identity, scholars and practitioners have come to accept that traditional practices and conceptualizations in education tend to marginalize diverse or non-normative individuals and group members. This article contends with Latina faculty members' questions of identity and agency in the largely male and largely white world of academe. Grounded in a multi-year engagement and dialogue involving eight female Latina faculty members in a southwest urban city, authors opened up their experience as Latina faculty members and their struggles to maintain authenticity in the face of cultural, gender, and institutional pressure for conformity to existing institutional norms. The intent in doing was to foreground the complex experience of Latina faculty, and to encourage a reconsideration of institutional practices and norms--many with a deficit orientation--that inhibit Latina faculty authenticity and identity within academe. (Contains 5 notes.)