Chicas Fuertes/Strong Girls: Latina Adolescent Girls and Their Mothers Writing, Resisting, and Becoming

• In Event: 43.020 - Women of Color Modalities of Meaning-Making: Endarkened Feminist Knowledge Production in Education

Abstract

This paper will share the voices, stories and ways of knowing of seven Latina adolescent girls (grades 7-12) as they participated alongside their mothers in Somos Esritoras/We Are Writers (Author 1). Somos Escritoras is a creative space, created with and for Latina adolescent girls and their mothers that invites them to write and perform stories from their lived experiences. The voices, stories, experiences and ways of knowing of Latina adolescent girls and their mothers are central to all aspects of workshops in which they are viewed as “holders and creators of knowledge” (Delgado Bernal, 2002, p. 107). At workshops, girls and their mothers worked alongside each other to craft writing and create artwork that examines and critiques the many ways to express and define being a Chicana/Latina/Mexican-American girl and woman.
Somos Escritoras builds upon the work of scholars that have worked alongside Black girls in intentionally designed spaces and have written about the ways Black girls have performed, written, and rewritten their lives while highlighting the brilliance of Black girls and Black girlhood (Brown, 2014; Muhammad, 2012; Price-Dennis, Muhammad, Womack, McArthur, & Haddix, 2017; Winn, 2011; Wissman, 2011). Scholars have also written of the ways that Latina mothers, some as immigrants in a new country, utilized writing and oral storytelling to challenge and critique their experiences with different forms of oppression and marginalization (Delgado Gaitan, 2005; Hurtig, 2005; Valdés, 1996; Villenas, 2005) creating a sense of solidarity with their experiences, histories and stories unifying them in changing their lived conditions. Somos Escritoras brings together Latina adolescent girls and their mothers to illuminate the importance of spaces that celebrates the brilliance of Latina girls and their unique experiences and perspectives, while connecting them to their mothers for the intergenerational exchange of stories and knowledges.
As a participant observer (Spradley, 2016) and lead facilitator, I conducted a case study (Dyson & Genishi, 2005; Yin, 2015) of the weeklong program (Monday-Saturday) consisting of six, two-hour evening workshops including a final celebration of writing. Drawing upon ethnographic field notes, girls’ and mothers’ writing, interview transcripts and video recording of workshops, I provide insights into the ways that mothers are raising their daughters to be “Chicas Fuertes/Strong Girls.” Findings will highlight how the sharing of intergenerational stories mediated the creation of a community of writers in which girls and their mothers used writing and art to define themselves, speak back to stereotypes and raised their consciousness of the lived conditions that Latina girls and women faced in the past, in the current day and how they may interrupt these conditions for future generations of girls and women. Implications highlight what we can learn from Latina adolescent girls and their mothers in this pedagogical space in order to create spaces in our schools and curriculum that privilege and draw upon their cultural and gendered ways of knowing and being in humanizing ways.

Author

• Tracey Terece Flores, The University of Texas at Austin