Storytelling With Girls and Their Mothers: Illuminating Black and Brown Brilliance Together

• In Event: Centering Epistemologies of Family: Relationality, Mutuality, and Care

Abstract

This paper shares the stories and ways of knowing of seven Latina girls (grades 7-12) as they
participated alongside their mothers in Program Name (Program Name Blinded for Review). (Author, 2018; 2021). Program Name is a creative space that invites Latina girls and their mothers write and perform stories from their lived experiences. 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 chica y mujeres.

Program Name builds upon the work of scholars working 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, 2013; Muhammad, 2012, 2014; Price-Dennis, Muhammad, Womack, McArthur, & Haddix, 2017; Winn, 2011). In addition, scholars have 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, 2016; Villenas, 2005).

From my personal and professional history, I drew upon the many papelitos guardados (Latina Feminist Group, 2001), I occupy through my lived experiences as a second-generation Chicana, educator, teacher educator, and mother to develop Program Name. The stories and voices of my students from my years as a classroom teacher and my learning alongside youth and families in writing workshops (Author, 2019) were foundational to my understandings of the power of writing, story & comunidad built through collective sharing and testimoniando.

Drawing upon ethnographic field notes, girls’ and mothers’ art and writing, interview transcripts and video recording of workshops, I provide insights into the ways mothers are raising their daughters to be “Chicas Fuertes/Strong Girls,” armed with tools to blaze their own trails while stay connected to their cultural and familial resources (Yosso, 2005), for strength and guidance. In addition, findings highlight the ways that mothers and daughters engaged in “literacies of convivencia” [communalism] (Villenas, 2005), through the crafting and sharing of intergenerational stories, knowledges and histories to cultivate a community of writers authoring and (re)authors their lives as mujeres/chicas.

Implications highlight how the work of Program Name, and other feminist-womanist-centered spaces (e.g., SOLHOT, Black Girls W.R.I.T.E.) that illuminate and celebrate the brilliance, creativity, fight and love of Black and Brown girls can provide educators and teacher educators with important pedagogical and theoretical tools for reconstructing classroom spaces to move our teaching into real action.

Author

• Tracey Terece Flores, University of Texas at Austin