To Not Be a Worry: How Latina Daughters Use Invisible Emotion Work during College Transitions

• In Event: Parental Involvement in Education

Abstract

This paper examines how Latina immigrant daughters employed invisible emotion work during their college transition, theorizing it as a bidirectional, gendered form of familial involvement that sustains cohesion during a period of disruption. I leverage a two-year, longitudinal, qualitative study with 18 Latinx immigrant parents and 21 children of immigrants, as students applied to and transitioned into their first year of college. Through periodic semi-structured interviews, 200+ hours of participant-observation at a Bay Area college access program, pláticas with parent participants, and informal interviews, I learned deeply about how the college transition impacted families both collectively and as individuals.

In this paper, I focus on how daughters strategically suppressed feelings of stress, guilt, and anxiety during their college transition. They enacted performances of confidence and self-sufficiency in order to shield their resource-constrained parents from additional stressors during this moment of significant life change. I utilize Arlie Hochschild’s emotion work (1979) with Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical impression management, in order to understand the daughters’ actions not as acts of individual emotional withdrawal, but rather as functions of collectivistic sacrifice. Moreover, there were significant mental health strains for daughters—such as emotional exhaustion and eroded persistence—that emerged partly from institutional norms promoting U.S. higher education’s individualism, clashing with daughters’ collectivist actions.

The contributions of the study are threefold: 1) I promote a bidirectional understanding of familial involvement in education, showing the work that students do to support their parents during educational processes, 2) I expand our sociological understanding of how sacrifice is constructed and highly gendered — informing who sacrifices during periods of change and in what ways, and 3) I demonstrate how individual emotion work can have collective implications within the home and how such work can be enacted to sustain cohesion, even if it is self-damaging for the individuals performing it.

Author

• Leslie Patricia Luqueño, Stanford University