"Metida en Todo": Knowledge Sharing, Mothering, and Understandings of Indigenous Diaspora Discourse

• In Event: 72.024 - The Multiple Contexts of Indigenous Mexican Students and Their Families: Knowledge, Praxis, and Educational Opportunity

Abstract

This paper draws from our three-year project with Maya-speaking families from Yucatan at Metropolitan Elementary School (pseudonym) who reside in the Mission District of the San Francisco Bay Area of California. We discuss our work with mothers whose knowledge and inquiries about school and social issues generated critiques and offered new opportunities that redefined spaces and roles for their participation. We examine one of these redefined spaces in the form of a colaborativo that designed and held a series of parent worskhops.

Following Delgado-Gaitan (1993) and Villenas (1996), our project engages community participation and problematizes the sources and aims of academic research in schools. Given the deficit approach that has historically framed the participation of racialized parents in schools we are mindful of our entry into the school as researchers working and intervening to advance indigenous knowledge. We draw from the concepts of hemispheric migrations and of hemispheric indigeneity (Biolsi, 2005; DeLugan 2010) as a critique of “latinization” in schools (author) to examine when and how indigenous subjecthood emerges in the context of (colonial) Latino homogenizing in educational contexts. Taking mothers’ activities as the focus of this paper we analyze the tension between the schools’ predetermined parent roles and parents’ understanding of who they are in relation to the school.

Preliminary findings indicate that parent engagement is both spatially and temporally ordered. Temporalities of the school are marked by specific regiments of parent-children interaction that limit parent involvement. Yet, in these spatial and temporal orders, mothers found windows of opportunities that promoted and facilitated knowledge and skill sharing through parent directed programming even when they were critiqued by school personnel as being “busybodies” or to be metidas en todo. At the core of our work is a focus on the materiality of language made evident in mothers’ activities at the school. As Shankar & Cavenaugh (2012) remind us, the materiality of language is intricately related to material conditions and political economies that shape language and ideologies. In an immigrant context, how indigenous cultural practices and objects are talked about and received in schools is important because they help us understand how parents are recognized and included in school programming. The school site is bilingual English-Spanish adhering to a multicultural model of education, yet it is host to a growing community of largely invisible indigenous immigrant students and families who speak other languages (currently 20% indigenous). In our analyses of school discourses and face-to-face interactions we also examine the role of transfer and translation in intercultural communication at the school (Pym, 2010). The “diversity in a box” approach in place at the school contrasts sharply with the parent-initiated themes covered in the workshops which addressed complex-living situations, such as mixed-families statuses, deportation, newly arrived children, reunification, topics on sexuality, race and racism in schools, and academic tracking. We understand these motthers’ demands as opportunities to think critically about their position within the school and to redefine their participation more broadly in US society.

Authors

• Patricia Baquedano-Lopez, University of California - Berkeley

• Omi S Salas-SantaCruz, University of California - Berkeley

• Rosalinda Godinez, University of California - Berkeley

• Gabriela Borge Janetti, University of California - Berkeley