Las madres of Squire Town: agents and producers of belonging in a rural town of northern California

• In Event: Beyond Deportability: Latinx Resilience and the Production of Belonging in the US

Abstract

Drawing on 9 years of ethnographic research of Mexican immigrant farmworker mothers in Squire Town—a community in Northern California with a long history of laborer settlement—I explore how these madres struggled to meet the needs of their families and in so doing have made significant claims to “belonging.” I will analyze how mothers struggled to open a clinic and advocate for other services in their community, and how the meaning of these struggles was tied to the creation of a sense of “comunidad.” These women challenged and contested boundaries of belonging while at the same time constructing a comunidad. By declaring themselves members of a deserving community, they came to make collective claims to entitlements to belonging. I argue that these agents do not passively accept the conditions of their marginalization. Instead, they continue to carve out a space to make claims to belonging through survival practices and community organizing. These farmworker mothers’ carve out “spaces for self-definition” that challenged their and their children’s exclusion and categorization as “other” by resisting exclusionary practices of powerful institutions, exercising agency, and resilience despite conditions of social and institutional exclusion, emerging as leaders and articulating collective demands for inclusion within the U.S. polity, and developing partnerships with medical students to develop a rural student-run clinic.This case demonstrates that while social reproduction is an arena through which farmworkers mothers are policed and regulated, it is also through activities of social reproduction that these madres emerge as agents and producers of belonging.

Author

• Natalia Deeb-Sossa, University of California/Davis