Recuerdos Caminantes: Mother-Daughter Mappings of Pasts and Futures Through Language

• In Event: Linguistic M(other)work as Pedagogy, Resistance, and Disruption: Language and Immigrant Futurity in Education Research

Abstract

Purpose
This paper examines research as a relational learning space between my mother and I as everyday acts of care that pass knowledge and foster healing. It explores how my mother uses memory and language to map her sense of place and belonging. Through walking, mapping, and storytelling, she enacts care, resilience, and meaning-making that connects her experience as a youth with her present and future as a mother and grandmother. This research centers immigrant mothers as holders of place-based knowledge shaped by migration, language, and memory that resist erasure and racialized spatial exclusion (Abrego & Schmalzbauer, 2018; Canizales, 2024; Gaxiola Serrano, 2023; Mangual Figueroa & Barrales, 2021; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015). By remembering, mapping, and walking together, we learn and share by revisiting past experiences to understand the present and imagine the future for immigrant youth.

Theoretical Framework
Engaging with my mother’s memories, I draw on frameworks that understand place as socially constructed (Cresswell, 2014; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015; Tuan, 1991). I approach narrative as a living vessel through which language carries knowledge and identity (Benally et al., 2016; Orellana & Phoenix, 2017), while acompañamiento (Dyrness & Sepúlveda, 2021) guides a relational and ethical approach to research as a learning space where “acts of solidarity, community buildings, claiming space, and bearing witness” can serve to combat fragmentation, alienation, and olvido (Dyrness & Sepúlveda, p. 235).

Methods
Grounded in acompañamiento, this study was guided by a relational ethic of care shaping both research and meaning-making. Ethnographic methods inform the design: 1) interviews, and 2) memoria-recuerdos walk visiting those sites together 3) photographs and hand-drawn maps and 4) researcher-daughter reflections and notes from our conversations. Narrative analysis traced how language mapped memory through storytelling, mapping, and walking. All data were coded iteratively to identify themes and narratives revealing intersections of language, memory, and place (Saldaña, 2021).

Findings
As my mother walked, mapped, and remembered places, memory unfolded as an active process of naming and reinterpreting moments of belonging and exclusion. Parks, apartments, restaurants, labor, schools held layered meanings and were sites of everyday negotiation and self-definition, where her agency was both shaped and constrained. Across past and present, she continued to make place through care, labor, and by mapping her present-day concerns about schooling, access to public spaces, and transformation of neighborhoods. Through language, my mother actively reinterpreted these spaces as we talked and walked together: mapping through conversation, movement, and acts of re-membering in Spanish, Spanglish, and moments of language-brokering.

Significance
This project centers mothers as epistemic agents whose experiences of care, labor, and learning, along with their desire to connect and reflect through memory, offer insight into how immigrant communities navigate exclusion and reimagine belonging. It explores how relational learning spaces that value mothers’ stories foster shared witnessing and healing. Grounded in lived experience, the research challenges deficit views of immigrant knowledge and highlights language and memory as vital for shaping educational spaces that reflect the identities, desires, and histories of mothers and youth who take care of and sustain immigrant families and communities.

Author

• Sarah Perez, University of California - Los Angeles