“Somos Mujeres Empoderadas”: Building Solidarity and Collective Leadership Among Immigrant Mothers in the Schools

• In Event: Building Coalitions of Solidarity: Humanizing Praxis, Indigenous Epistemologies and Education for Transformation

Abstract

In an era marked by the erosion of democratic processes and the amplification of racial-colonial violence, schools can serve not only as sites of learning but as centers of resistance, healing, and justice. This paper draws on Freirean humanizing praxis through a series of collective narratives examining how a group of immigrant mothers cultivated solidarity, purpose, and political consciousness through their involvement in a school-based food pantry. Centered in a Spanish dual language community school, the Mercado – originally designed as a resource-distribution site, has transformed into a space of encuentro [coming together], care, and organizing. Here in the mercado, the women transcend historically manufactured labels that reflect acceptance or rejection. These labels associated with im/migration status, nationality, citizenship, language(s) – that are so prevalent in today’s violent anti-immigrant narratives and deportation crusades, are recognized and sometimes discussed, but always in ways that offer the dignity that every person deserves and are seen only as one of the many other experiences, identities, strengths, and wisdom that each of them bring and share with each other.
Through a series of collective pláticas and individual narratives, this study traces the emergence of mother-led leadership rooted in cultural memory, reciprocity, and shared struggle. These stories underscore how what may appear as peripheral, logistical work becomes the groundwork for building constancy, deepening trust, and developing a pedagogy of solidarity. Rather than being defined by formal roles or positional authority, the mothers’ leadership emerges relationally, horizontally, and in resistance to the hierarchies that often dominate school systems. As families with varying forms of capital—cultural, linguistic, and economic—collaborate in the mercado, they challenge the deficit frameworks that traditionally separate “helpers” from “helped.” The mothers’ work challenges dominant narratives of charity and pivots toward a Freirean understanding of solidarity as a shared historical task of liberation (Freire, 1970/2018). Their engagement resists the scarcity logics that pit community members against one another and instead affirms a collective ethic of care and justice.
Findings from this study aim to highlight how community schools can intentionally cultivate conditions for grassroots leadership and unity—not through top-down initiatives, but by recognizing and resourcing the spaces where solidarity is already being lived. The mercado becomes more than a pantry—it becomes a site of critical pedagogy, where mothers reimagine their role in the school and in society. This paper contributes to conversations in critical educational leadership and community schooling by theorizing solidarity-in-practice—a form of leadership that emerges from the margins, guided by love, memory, and shared resistance. As bell hooks reminds us, solidarity among women cannot be built within the terms of the dominant culture: “we must define our own terms” (hooks, 1984). This work affirms that when schools are rooted in justice and relationship, they can become fertile ground for a different kind of power—one cultivated collectively. The mothers at the heart of this work are doing just that.

Author

• Jenny Zavala, Chapman University