Rincones de Desahogo, Juego y Risa: Playdates and Pláticas With Immigrant Latina Grand/Mothers and Children

• In Event: Working in, With, and for Our Communities: Humanizing Method(ologie)s in Transnational Literacies Research

Abstract

Purpose & Significance
Low-income Latinx undocumented immigrant parents face significant structural inequalities in the United States. Socioeconomic status, level of English proficiency, ethno-racial positioning, and immigration status are factors that impact immigrant families on an everyday basis (Olivos & Mendoza, 2010). The rising costs of rent and racial disparities in home ownership, especially in California’s Bay Area, also impact immigrant families. Understanding this structural inequality more deeply and qualitatively is critical to better serving Latinx immigrant parents in urban dual language bilingual education (DLBE) programs. Recent research has documented the experiences of low-income Latino immigrant fathers in their children’s education (e.g. Gallo, 2017), but less explores the experiences and everyday teachings of mothers (Chaparro, 2020) and grandmothers whose domestic labor is at the heart of their urban cities’ economy.

Theoretical Framework
This paper draws on the theoretical and conceptual contributions of labored rhetorics and transnational motherhood (Hondagneu Sotelo & Avila, 1997), Latina mothers’ experiences with their children’s dual language schools (Chaparro, 2020), and Latina feminist participatory action research alongside immigrant mothers (Dyrness, 2011).

Methods & Data Sources
Drawing on ethnographic and community-based participatory research approaches alongside a collective of 8 immigrant Latina grand/mothers in California’s East Bay, we engage playdates and pláticas (Latina Feminist Group, 2001) as research methodology, which both situate relationality. Across five years, these mothers and I have utilized bimonthly playdates and grand/mother-led pláticas–30 total–in playgrounds (while our children play) as sites of knowledge production. These grand/mothers are employed as nannies, house cleaners, and cooks in affluent Bay Area neighborhoods and have their elementary-aged grand/children in DLBE programs. Together, these grand/mothers and I jointly identified questions that matter to them, including why they invest in DLBE, what informs their grand/mothering, and how they’ve managed the rising costs of living as their wages have not kept up with rising inflation. Participatory data analysis included both inductive and deductive approaches.

Findings
The findings discuss how the grand/mothers’ jobs (e.g. nannies, house cleaners, restaurant cooks) were central themes in their everyday teachings and civic pedagogies with their grand/children. Specifically, the grand/mothers apprenticed their grand/children into certain civic engagement practices and critical community biliteracies that were connected to the type of work they did during the day. The playdates and pláticas brought to the surface mothers’ economic and educational concerns, laughter and joy, and grand/mother-led spaces where they shared resources about their children’s biliteracy development and emerging civic and sociopolitical development. My co-authors and I co-theorize these playdates and pláticas as rincones (corners) where the mothers fostered solidarity, new rhetorics around labor-informed mothering, and found solace in their children’s critical literacies of struggle and empowerment. The paper ends with implications for further research about and alongside immigrant families.

Authors

• Cati V. de los Rios, University of California - Berkeley

• Colectiva Madres de la Bahía N/A