Building Community Alongside Latinx Mothers and Daughters

• In Event: Latinx Experiences in U.S. Schools: Students, Teachers, Teacher Educators, and Education Allies as Collaborators

Abstract

Objectives/Purposes
This purpose of this chapter is to illuminate the learnings and pedagogical possibilities (Villenas & Moreno, 2001) cultivated by Latina mothers and their adolescent daughters (grades 9-12) as they worked alongside one another in [Program Name]. The goal of [Program Name] was to open space for the intergenerational sharing of stories, experiences, and knowledges between Latina mothers and their adolescent daughters while exploring the potential of art and writing as a tool to define themselves, share silenced stories, and make sense of their worlds. (Author, 2018)
Theoretical Framework
Drawing on Chicana Feminist Epistemology (Delgado Bernal, 1998), Third Space (Gutiérrez, 2008) and Sociocultural Theories of Writing (Goncu & Gauvain, 2012), to provide a glimpse into the ways Latina mothers and daughters engaged in “literacies of convivencia,”(Villenas, 2005), through the writing and sharing of intergenerational stories and knowledges to cultivate a community of writers (re)writing their pasts and authoring their futures (Delgado Gaitan, 2005; Hurtig, 2005).
Methods and Data Sources
For this chapter, as a participant observer (Spradley, 2016), I draw on ethnographic field notes of workshops, writing samples, video recordings and interviews from workshops that convened for one week (Monday to Saturday) in June 2017. The weeklong program consisted of six, 2-hr evening workshops including a final celebration of writing. I analyzed data using grounded theory coding methods and constant comparative methods (Corbin & Strauss, 2015).
Results
At workshops, girls and their mothers created texts and artwork addressing the tensions, contradictions, and uncertainties they navigate as girls and women at the intersections of age, gender, culture, language, and race at a microlevel within a state with a history of anti-Latinx and anti-immigrant policies (Abrego & Menjívar, 2011) and at a macrolevel under a presidential administration that increasingly works to silence and control their voices and bodies. However, within these spaces of marginalization, these girls and their mothers are not only surviving, but thriving as they express and define themselves on their own terms.

Significance
Within the current political context under a presidential administration that is increasingly silencing and controling the voices and ways of knowing of communities of color, particularly through anti-Latinx and anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric, there is a grave urgency for spaces like [Program Name], in which to build community and mobilize strength and resources. For educators, [Program Name] is an example of the importance of creating opportunities in classrooms for students to develop tools to critically read and write their worlds (Freire, 1970). For researchers, more work alongside Latina girls and mothers in family engagement spaces is necessary to continue to learn about their experiences in schools during the middle and high school years, in order to create classrooms and spaces based on their cultural and gendered ways of knowing grounded in the needs and concerns of their lived realities.

Authors

• Tracey Terece Flores, The University of Texas at Austin

• Iris Trienies, Austin Independent School District