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The Mothers: Negotiating Feminist Activism in/with the Family

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Negotiating Feminisms

Part of the book series: Literatures of the Americas ((LOA))

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Abstract

Chapter three focusses on Cisneros’ ‘Woman Hollering Creek’ and Castillo’s So Far From God and The Guardians and the women characters who adopt feminist mothering practices that allow them to move beyond their prescribed roles as women in the family. Compadrazgo, motherwork, and second-mothering all serve to renegotiate the familial framework, placing the needs and concerns of mestiza conscious women at its centre. Through resistance these women reclaim their place in the family on feminist terms, functioning as activists who live out their commitment to social justice by developing alternative roles as wives and mothers. Through collectivist negotiations in the traditional patriarchal family, Cisneros and Castillo reveal the ways in which the family can become a potential space for collective empowerment and social change.

I have found a sense of place among la Chicanada. It is not always a safe place, but it is unequivocally the original familial place from which I am compelled to write, which I reach toward in my audiences, and which serves as my source of inspiration, voice, and lucha [fight].

—Cherríe Moraga

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “Queer Aztlán: The Reformation of the Chicano Tribe,” The Last Generation (Boston: South End Press, 1993), 147 (emphasis added).

  2. 2.

    Cherríe Moraga, “Queer Aztlán: The Reformation of the Chicano Tribe,” The Last Generation (Boston: South End Press, 1993), 147.

  3. 3.

    Richard T. Rodríguez, “Making Queer Familia,” The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, ed. Donald E. Hall and Annamarie Jagose, with Andrea Bebell and Susan Potter (New York: Routledge, 2013), 325.

  4. 4.

    Kafka, (Out)Classed Women, 10.

  5. 5.

    Deborah M. Kolb and Judith Williams, Everyday Negotiation: Navigating the Hidden Agendas in Bargaining (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2003), 195.

  6. 6.

    The term ‘activist mothering’ was coined by Nancy Naples in her 1988 work, Grassroots Warriors: Activist Mothering, Community Work, and the War on Poverty (New York: Routledge, 1988).

  7. 7.

    Andrea O’Reilly, “Introduction: Maternal Activism as Matricentric Feminism: The History, Ideological Frameworks, Political Strategies and Activist Practices of the 21st Century Motherhood Movement,” The 21st Century Motherhood Movement: Mothers Speak Out on Why We Need to Change the World and How to Do It, ed. Andrea O’Reilly (Bradford, Ontario: Demeter Press, 2011), 2.

  8. 8.

    O’Reilly, “Introduction,” 21st Century Motherhood, 1–36.

  9. 9.

    Ibid., 24–25. See also: Judith Stadtman Tucker, “Motherhood and its Discontents: The Political and Ideological Grounding of the 21st Century Mothers Movement,” Mothers Movement Online, October 23, 2004, http://www.mothersmovement.org/features/Copy/jst_arm_presentation_10-04.pdf.

  10. 10.

    Susan Conradsen, “Activist Mothering,” The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, ed. Nancy Naples et al. (Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 17–19.

  11. 11.

    Vasquez, “Chicana Mothering in the Twenty-First Century,” 27.

  12. 12.

    See also: Lorraine Bayard de Volo, Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs: Gender Identity Politics in Nicaragua, 1979–1999 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Cynthia L. Bejarano, “Las Super Madres de Latinoamerica,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 23 (2002): 126–150; Maria del Carmen Feijoo and Marcela Maria Alejandra Nari, “Women and Democracy in Argentina,” in The Women’s Movement in Latin America: Participation and Democracy, ed. Jane S. Jaquette (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994): 109–130; Rosa D. Manzo and Natalia Deeb-Sossa, “Political Maternal Involvement: A Comparative Study of Mexican Mothers’ Activism to Address School Board’s Deficit Practices,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 49, no. 4 (2018): 352–370; and Maxine Molyneux, “Mobilization Without Emancipation?: Women’s Interests, the State, and Revolution in Nicaragua,” Feminist Studies, 11 (1985): 227–254.

  13. 13.

    See Collins, Black Feminist Thought; Glenn, Chang, and Forcey, Mothering; Linda Gordon, Black and White Visions of Welfare: Women’s Welfare Activism, 1890–1945 (Madison: WI: Institute for Research on Poverty, 1991); Stanlie M. James, “Mothering: A Possible Black Feminist Link to Social Transformation?,” Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women, ed. Stanlie M. James and Abena P. A. Busia (New York: Routledge, 1993); Mary Pardo, “Mexican American Women Grassroots Community Activists: Mothers of East Los Angeles,” Frontiers 11 (1) (1990); and Dorothy Roberts, “Race, Gender, and the Value of Mother’s Work,” Social Politics 2 (1995).

  14. 14.

    Naples, “Women’s Community Activism and Feminist Activist Research,” Community Activism, 23.

  15. 15.

    Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, ed., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993), 4.

  16. 16.

    Interrogation of the relevance of maternal activism for a more radical project of female emancipation given that women’s traditional position within the family has been the main source of their subordination has been undertaken by scholars. Two central figures in this debate are Jean Bethke Elshtain and Mary G. Dietz.

  17. 17.

    Naples, Community Activism, 23.

  18. 18.

    Mary Pardo, “Creating Community: Mexican American Women in Eastside Los Angeles,” in Community Activism and Feminist Politics: Organizing Across Race, Class, and Gender, ed. Nancy Naples (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2012), 275.

  19. 19.

    Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 102; and Yarbro-Bejarano, “The Multiple Subject,” 65–66.

  20. 20.

    OED, s.v. “adapt,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/2110.

  21. 21.

    OED, s.v. “adaptation,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/2115.

  22. 22.

    This is a reciprocal process by which the negotiation techniques employed influence the adaptations, just as the adaptations then influence the types of negotiation techniques employed.

  23. 23.

    Mercado-López, “From Lost Woman” in (Re)Mapping the Latina/o Literary Landscape, 222.

  24. 24.

    Ibid. Reading of Laurie Ann Guerrero’s poem “Early Words for my Son”.

  25. 25.

    Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 101–2.

  26. 26.

    Denise A. Segura, “Working at Motherhood: Chicana and Mexican Immigrant Mothers and Employment,” in Glenn, Chang, and Forcey, Mothering, 227.

  27. 27.

    Yolanda Flores Niemann, Chicana Leadership: The Frontiers Reader (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 45.

  28. 28.

    Theresa Delgadillo, ‘‘Forms of Chicana Feminist Resistance: Hybrid Spirituality in Ana Castillo’s So Far From God,’ Modern Fiction Studies 44 (4) (1998): 893.

  29. 29.

    Collins, “Shifting the Center,” 173.

  30. 30.

    Collins, Black Feminist Thought; Bonnie Thornton Dill, “Our Mothers’ Grief: Racial Ethnic Women and the Maintenance of Families,” Journal of Family History 13 (4) (1988): 415–31; and Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “Racial Ethnic Women’s Labor: The Intersection of Race, Gender and Class Oppression,” Review of Radical Political Economics 17 (3) (1985): 86–108.

  31. 31.

    Quintana, “The Novelist as Ethnographer,” 74.

  32. 32.

    Rodríguez, “Making Queer Familia,” 325.

  33. 33.

    Kath Weston, “The Politics of Gay Families,” Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions, ed. Barrie Thorn and Marilyn Yalom (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 137.

  34. 34.

    See Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “‘If It Wasn’t for the Women…’: African American Women, Community Work, and Social Change,” in Women of Color in U.S. Society, ed. Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994).

  35. 35.

    Pardo, “Creating Community,” 298.

  36. 36.

    Linda La Rue, “The Black Movement and Women’s Liberation,” Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: The New Press, 1995), 164. See also, Eilidh AB Hall, “We Called Ourselves ‘Feministas:’ A Reading of Ana Castillo’s So Far From God and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique,” History of Women in the Americas 3 (2015): 77–87.

  37. 37.

    Cisneros, “Woman Hollering Creek,” 45.

  38. 38.

    Cisneros, “Woman Hollering Creek,” 47.

  39. 39.

    Deborah Madsen, “Over Her Dead Body: Talking About Violence Against Women in Recent Chicana Writing,” Violence and Gender in the Globalised World: The Intimate and Extimate, ed. Sanja Bahun-Radunović and V. G. Julie Rajan (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), 200.

  40. 40.

    Anna Marie Sandoval, Towards a Latina Feminism of the Americas: Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2008), 33.

  41. 41.

    Ibid., 34.

  42. 42.

    LatDict Online, s.v. “felix, felicis,” and “gratia, gratiae,” http://latin-dictionary.net/search/latin/felix, and http://latin-dictionary.net/search/latin/gratia.

  43. 43.

    Cisneros, “Woman Hollering Creek,” 53.

  44. 44.

    Ibid.

  45. 45.

    Ibid., 54.

  46. 46.

    Ibid., 49.

  47. 47.

    Ibid., 50.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., 43.

  49. 49.

    Tracy López, “Family Versus Familia,” Multicultural Familia, http://www.multiculturalfamilia.com/2011/06/22/family-vs-familia/.

  50. 50.

    The original Spanish word compadrazgo originates from the Latin compăter (co-father) and is defined by the Real Académica Española as: “[conexión] o afinidad que contrae con los padres de una criatura el padrino que la saca de pila o asiste a la confirmación. [Connection or affinity linking the parents of a child with the person who stands as godfather at baptism or assists in the confirmation.]” (Real Academia Española, s.v. “compadrazgo,” Diccionario de la lengua española, 22nd edition, http://dle.rae.es/?w=compadrazgo&o=h.) Indeed, José Genis claims that compadrazgo is so widespread in Latin America that it is a strong candidate for being included in the list of universales culturales (universal cultural truths) for the Latin American population (José Genis, Sistemas de parentesco ritual en México (Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia, mecanoescrito, 1990)).

  51. 51.

    Alfredo Mirandé, “The Chicano Family: A Reanalysis of Conflicting Views,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 39 (4) (1977): 747–56. The study of compadrazgo in social sciences began with the 1950 work of Sidney Mintz and Eric Wolf with their study ‘An Anthropological Analysis of Ritual Co-parenthood (compadrazgo)’. Interestingly this paper was published in the Southwestern Journal of Anthropology published by the University of New Mexico, thus situating compadrazgo in not just a Central and South American context but one fundamentally connected to the United States and therefore particularly pertinent to Mexican American communities.

    Prominent Chicano social scientist Richard Griswold del Castillo emphasises the important ceremonial role of compadrazgo, stating that “god- parents [are] required for the celebration of major religious occasions in a person’s life: baptism, first communion and marriage” (La Familia, 42). On such occasion, padrinas/os (godparents) enter “into special religious, social and economic relationships with the godchild as well as the parents of the child.” They act as co-parents, providing discipline and emotional and financial support when needed (La Familia, 40–4). Griswold del Castillo’s description of compadrazgo relies heavily on the organisation and structure of the kinship network and emphasises the role of godparents at specific moments in a child’s development. However, one of the most interesting and still relevant observations from the 1950 Mintz and Wolf paper is that “los mecanismos del compadrazgo pueden multiplicarse para alcanzar el ritmo acelerado del cambio [the mechanisms of compadrazgo/co-parenthood can multiply themselves in order to keep up with an accelerated rate of change]” (Sidney Mintz and Eric Wolf, “An Anthropological Analysis of Ritual Co-parenthood (Compadrazgo),” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 6 (4) (1950): 364). This recognition of the flexibility of the compadrazgo network is crucial in understanding its adoption by Mexican Americans living in the often hostile environment of Anglo America. See also: Carol Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1974); Helen Rose Ebaugh and Mary Curry, “Fictive Kin as Social Capital in New Immigrant Communities,” Sociological Perspectives 43 (2000): 189–209; Connie M. Kane, “African American Family Dynamics as Perceived by family members,” Journal of Black Studies 30 (2000): 691–702; and Susan E. Keefe, “Real and Ideal Extended Familism among Mexican Americans and Anglo Americans: On the Meaning of Close Family Ties,” Human Organization 43 (1984): 65–70.

  52. 52.

    Alvirez and Bean, “The Mexican-American Family,” 289. N.B. Familism is sometimes used as another way of describing the connections associated with both fictive kin relationships and the compadrazgo network. The cultural value of familism represents the strong identification, loyalty, attachment, and solidarity of individuals with their nuclear and extended kin, and the understanding that the behaviour of an individual is a reflection of the whole family. See Ana Mari Cauce and Melanie Domenech-Rodríguez, “Latinos Families: Myths and Realities,” Latino Children and Families in the United States: Current Research and Future Directions, ed., Josefina M. Contreras, Kathryn A. Kerns, and Angela M. Neal-Barnett (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002); and Celia Jaes Falicov, Latino Families in Therapy: A Guide to Multicultural Practice (New York: Guilford Press, 1998).

  53. 53.

    Cisneros, “Woman Hollering Creek,” 54.

  54. 54.

    Lillian Comas-Díaz, “Comadres: The Healing Power of a Female Bond,” Women and Therapy 36 (2013). See also: Jenny Rivera, “Domestic Violence Against Latinas,” The Latino/a Condition; and Elizabeth L. MacDowell, “Theorizing from Particularity: Perpetrators and Intersectional Theory on Domestic Violence,” Scholarly Works, Paper 769 (2013), http://scholars.law.unlv.edu/facpub/769.

  55. 55.

    Cisneros, “Woman Hollering Creek,” 55.

  56. 56.

    Angie Chabrám-Dernersesian, “En-Countering the Other Discourse of Chicano-Mexicano Discourse,” Cultural Studies 13 (2) (1999): 275.

  57. 57.

    See: Bert N. Adams, “Isolation, Function and Beyond: American Kinship in the 1960’s,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 32 (1970): 575–97; Kathleen Gerson, “Changing Lives, Resistant Institutions: A New Generation Negotiates Gender, Work, and Family Change,” Sociological Forum, 24, no. 4 (2009): 735–53; Naomi Gerstel, “Divorce and kin ties: The importance of gender,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 50 (1988): 209–19; Gerstel and Sarkisian, “Sociological Perspective,” 237–66; Gunhild O. Hagestad, “Family Networks in an Aging society: Some Reflections and Exploration,” Opportunities and Challenges, ed. Wim J. A. van den Heuvel, Raymond Illsley, Ann Jamieson, and C. P. M. Knipscheer (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1992): 44–52; Glenna Spitz and John R. Logan, “Helping as a Component in Parent-Adult Child Relations,” Research on Aging, 14 (1992): 291–313; and Teresa Swarz, “Intergenerational Family Relations in Adulthood: Patterns, Variations, and Implications in the Contemporary United States,” Annual Review of Sociology 35 (2009): 191–212.

  58. 58.

    See Sandra K. Eggenberger, Jane S. Grassley, and Elizabeth Restrepo, “Culturally Competent Nursing Care for Families: Listening to the Voices of Mexican American Women,” Online Journal of Issues in Nursing 11 (3) (2006); Lucy Martinez-Schallmoser, Sharon Telleen, and Nancy J. MacMullen, “The Effect of Social Support and Acculturation on Postpartum Depression in Mexican American Women,” Journal of Transcultural Nursing 14 (2003): 329–38; and Padilla and Villalobos, “Cultural Responses to Health.”

  59. 59.

    See Shawn Malia Kana’iaupuni, Kathryn M. Donato, Theresa Thompson-Colón, and Melissa Stainbank, “Counting on Kin: Social Networks, Social Support, and Child Health Status,” Social Forces 83 (2005): 1137–64; and Rebecca A. López, “Las Comadres as a Social Support System,” Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work 14 (1999): 24–41.

  60. 60.

    Cisneros, ‘Woman Hollering Creek,’ 54.

  61. 61.

    Castillo, Massacre, 192: emphasis added.

  62. 62.

    López, “Las Comadres,” 26.

  63. 63.

    Sandoval, Toward a Latina Feminism, 42.

  64. 64.

    Cisneros, “Woman Hollering Creek,” 56.

  65. 65.

    O’Reilly, “Introduction,” 21st Century Motherhood, 1–36.

  66. 66.

    Castillo, “Toward the Mother-Bond Principle,” Massacre, 186.

  67. 67.

    The name ‘Sofía’ is derived from the Greek for wisdom.

  68. 68.

    Collins, “Shifting the Center,” 175.

  69. 69.

    OED, s.v. “mediation,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/115665.

  70. 70.

    Joanne Goodwin, Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform: Mothers’ Pensions in Chicago, 1911–1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 10.

  71. 71.

    Collins, “Shifting the Center,” 175.

  72. 72.

    Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 101–2.

  73. 73.

    Cecilia Caballero, Yvette Martínez-Vu, Judith Pérez-Torres, Michelle Téllez, and Christine Vega, eds., The Chicana M(other)work Anthology (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2019), 4.

  74. 74.

    Castillo, So Far From God, 137–38.

  75. 75.

    Yolanda Martínez, “Contesting the Meaning of Latina/Chicana Motherhood in Dreaming in Cuban by Cuban American Cristina García,” Latina/Chicana Mothering, 202.

  76. 76.

    Mirandé and Enríquez, La Chicana, 98.

  77. 77.

    As Karen Offen described in the late 1980s, individualist feminism has deep historical roots in European culture, and became increasingly characteristic of American discourse since the political philosopher John Stuart Mill published The Subjugation of Women in 1869. See Karen Offen, “Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach,” Signs 14 (1) (1988): 119–57.

  78. 78.

    Offen, “Defining Feminism,” 136.

  79. 79.

    Collins, “Shifting the Center,” 173–6.

  80. 80.

    Mirandé and Enríquez, La Chicana, 108.

  81. 81.

    Shereen Marisol Meraji, “Lending Circles Help Latinas Pay Bills and Invest,” 1 April 2014, NPR Code Switch, http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/04/01/292580644/lending-circles-help-latinas-pay-bills-and-invest.

  82. 82.

    Pardo, “Creating Community,” 297.

  83. 83.

    See Nancy Naples, “Activist Mothering: Cross-Generational Continuity in the Community Work of Women From Low-Income Urban Neighborhoods,” Gender and Society 6 (3) (1992): 441–63; Nancy Naples, “Contradictions in the Gender Subtext of the War on Poverty: The Community Work and Resistance of Women from Low Income Communities,” Social Problems 38 (3) (1991): 316–32; and Nancy Naples, “‘Just What Needed to Be Done’: The Political Practice of Women Community Workers in Low-Income Neighborhoods,” Gender and Society 5 (4) (1991): 478–94.

  84. 84.

    Naples, “Activist Mothering,” 448.

  85. 85.

    Lu, Mother, She Wrote, 45. N.B. There is further discussion of matrilineal narratives in the following chapter.

  86. 86.

    Amaia Ibarran Bigalondo, “Ana Castillo’s So Far From God: A Story of Survival,” Revistas de Estudios Norteamernicanos 8 (2001), 28.

  87. 87.

    Castillo, So Far From God, 218.

  88. 88.

    Ibid.

  89. 89.

    Melissa Schoeffel, Maternal Conditions: Reading Kingsolver, Castillo, Erdrich, and Ozeki (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008), 45.

  90. 90.

    Castillo, So Far From God, 130.

  91. 91.

    Bigalondo, “A Story of Survival,” 28.

  92. 92.

    Roland Walter, “The Cultural Politics of Dislocation and Relocation in the Novels of Ana Castillo,” MELUS 23, no. 1 (1998), www.jstor.org/stable/467765: 91.

  93. 93.

    Yarbro-Bejarano, “The Multiple Subject,” 65–66.

  94. 94.

    Castillo, So Far From God, 146.

  95. 95.

    Ibid.

  96. 96.

    Laura Pulido, “Sustainable Development at Ganados del Valle,” Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots, ed. Robert D. Bullard (Boston: South End Press, 1993), 123. In making this connection explicit, Castillo demonstrates her own ongoing commitment to social activist concerns, and indeed, in the acknowledgements to So Far From God, she expresses her indebtedness to the members of the Southwest Organizing Project, a social and environmental justice movement. “What We Do,” SouthWest Organizing Project, http://www.swop.net/about-swop/what-we-do/.

  97. 97.

    Pulido, “Sustainable Development at Ganados del Valle,” 131.

  98. 98.

    Laura Halperin, Intersections of Harm: Narratives of Latina Deviance and Defiance (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 118.

  99. 99.

    Rachel MacHenry, “Building on Local Strategies: Nepalese Fair Trade Textiles,” Artisans and Cooperatives, 25–44.

  100. 100.

    Brenda Rosenbaum, “Of Women, Hope, and Angels: Fair Trade and Artisan Production in a Squatter Settlement in Guatemala City,” Artisans and Cooperatives: Developing Alternative Trade for the Global Economy, ed. K. M. Grimes and B. L. Milgram (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2000), 102. See also: Anne Brit Nippierd, “Gender Issues in Cooperatives,” Journal of Co-operative Studies 32 (3) (1999): 175–81.

  101. 101.

    Schoeffel, Maternal Conditions, 46.

  102. 102.

    Patricia Hill Collins, From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006), 131.

  103. 103.

    Josh Fisher, “Fair or Balanced? The Other Side of Fair Trade in a Nicaraguan Sewing Cooperative,” Anthropological Quarterly 86 (2) (2013): 546.

  104. 104.

    Ibid.

  105. 105.

    Segura, ‘Working at Motherhood,’ Mothering, 216.

  106. 106.

    Castillo, So Far From God, 215.

  107. 107.

    Delgadillo, “Forms of Chicana Resistance,” 910.

  108. 108.

    Elisabeth Mermann-Jozwiak, “Gritos desde la Frontera: Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and Postmodernism,” MELUS 25 (2000): 105.

  109. 109.

    Bonnie TuSmith, All My Relatives: Community in Contemporary Ethnic American Literatures (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 22.

  110. 110.

    Castillo, So Far From God, 218.

  111. 111.

    Gail Pérez, “Ana Castillo as Santera: Reconstructing Popular Religious Praxis,” A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice, ed. María Pilar Aquino, Daisy L. Machado, and Jeanette Rodríguez (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 63.

  112. 112.

    Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 63–4.

  113. 113.

    Castillo, So Far From God, 250.

  114. 114.

    The U.S. Government Printing Office, “Secure Fence Act of 2006,” Public Law 109–367, 109th Congress, https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-109publ367/html/PLAW-109publ367.htm.

  115. 115.

    OED, s.v. “guardian” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/82151.

  116. 116.

    See mention above of the idea of the ‘chosen family’; Weston, “The Politics of Gay Families.”

  117. 117.

    Regina’s mothering is an example of maternal activism found in regions with frequent political unrest where mothers have been at the forefront of struggles for social justice. See for example Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia L. Bejarano’s Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Américas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

  118. 118.

    Orr, Subject to Negotiation, 116.

  119. 119.

    Ana Castillo, Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me (New York: The Feminist Press, 2016), 252.

  120. 120.

    Téllez, “Mi Madre, Mi Hija y Yo,” 64.

  121. 121.

    Rosalie Riegle Troester, “Turbulence and Tenderness: Mothers, Daughters, and ‘Othermothers’ in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones,” SAGE 1 (1984): 13–16.

  122. 122.

    Patricia Hill Collins, “Black Women and Motherhood,” Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions ed. Barrie Thorne (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 220.

  123. 123.

    Collins, “Black Women and Motherhood,” 215–45.

  124. 124.

    Elva F. Orozco Mendoza, “Maternal Activism”, The Wiley Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, ed. Nancy A. Naples (New York, John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 1.

  125. 125.

    Hurtado, “Relating to Privilege:” 833–55.

  126. 126.

    See OED s.v. “negotiation,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/125879.

  127. 127.

    In such cases, the lateral inclusion of the othermother in the Chicanx family, as described in Castillo’s work, is an extension of the compadrazgo and comadres network discussed above with reference to ‘Woman Hollering Creek’.

  128. 128.

    Martínez, “Contesting the Meaning,” 196.

  129. 129.

    Herrera, (Re)Writing the Maternal Script, 205.

  130. 130.

    Ibid.

  131. 131.

    Ana Castillo, The Guardians (New York: Random House, 2008), 210.

  132. 132.

    Janet L Lauritsen et al., “The Link Between Offending and Victimization Among Adolescents,” Criminology 29 (2) (1991): 265–292; Jody Miller, “Gender and Victimization Risk Among Young Women in Gangs,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 35 (1998): 429–53; Donna Eder, School Talk: Gender and Adolescent Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995); and Sue Lees, Sugar and Spice: Sexuality and Adolescent Girls (New York: Penguin, 1993).

  133. 133.

    Joan W. Moore, Going Down to the Barrio: Homeboys and Homegirls in Change (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).

  134. 134.

    Chanequa J. Walker-Barnes and Craig A. Mason, “Factors for Female Gang Involvement Among African American and Hispanic Women,” Youth and Society 32 (3) (2001): 303–36.

  135. 135.

    Ruth Horowitz, Honor and the American Dream: Culture and Identity in a Chicano Community (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983); Avelardo Valdez and Jeffrey A. Halley, “Gender in the Culture of Mexican American Conjunto Music,” Gender and Society 10 (2) (1996): 148–167; and Williams, The Mexican American Family.

  136. 136.

    Collins, “Black Women and Motherhood,” 233.

  137. 137.

    Castillo, Guardians, 211.

  138. 138.

    Castillo, Guardians, 209.

  139. 139.

    Malgorzata Poks, ‘Home on the Border in Ana Castillo’s The Guardians: The Colonial Matrix of Power, Epistemic Disobedience, and Decolonial Love,’ Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017): 130.

  140. 140.

    Castillo, Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me, 182.

  141. 141.

    Rosario Ceballo et al., “Always Aware (Siempre Pendiente): Latina Mothers’ Parenting in High-Risk Neighborhoods,” Journal of Family Psychology 26 (5) (2012): 805–15.

  142. 142.

    Herrera, (Re)Writing the Maternal Script, 171.

  143. 143.

    Richard Mora, “Life, Death and Second Mothering,” Latina/Chicana Mothering: 71–87.

  144. 144.

    Ibid., 71.

  145. 145.

    Ibid., 83.

  146. 146.

    Ibid., 71.

  147. 147.

    See Isasi-Díaz, En La Lucha/In the Struggle; and Comas-Díaz, “Comadres,” 65.

  148. 148.

    Castillo, Guardians, 7.

  149. 149.

    Castillo, Guardians, 152.

  150. 150.

    OED, s.v. “guardian”.

  151. 151.

    Ruth Trinidad Galván, “Portraits of Mujeres Desjuiciadas: Womanist Pedagogies of the Everyday, the Mundane, and the Ordinary,” Womanist Reader, 258.

  152. 152.

    Mora, “Second Mothering,” 78.

  153. 153.

    Vincent Guilamo-Ramos et al., “Parenting Practices Among Dominican and Puerto Rican Mothers,” Social Work 52 (2007): 17–30.

  154. 154.

    Ceballo et al., “Always Aware,” 813–4.

  155. 155.

    Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 122.

  156. 156.

    Range H. Hutson, et al., “The Epidemic of Gang-Related Homicides in Los Angeles County from 1979 through 1994,” Journal of the American Medical Association 274 (13) (1995): 1031.

  157. 157.

    Michelle Cruz-Santiago and Jorge Ramírez García, “‘Hay Que Ponerse en los Zapatos del Jóven’: Adaptive Parenting of Adolescent Children Among Mexican-American Parents Residing in a Dangerous Neighborhood,” Family Process 50 (1) (2011): 100.

  158. 158.

    See Nancy A. Gonzales et al., “Acculturation and the Mental Health of Latino Youths: An Integration and Critique of the Literature,” Latino Children and Families in the United States: Current Research and Future Directions, ed. Josefina M. Contreras, Kathryn A. Kerns, and Angela M. Neal-Barnett (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002): 45–75; and Mark W. Roosa et al., “Ethnic Culture, Poverty, and Context: Sources of Influence on Latino Families and Children,” Latino Children and Families: 27–44.

  159. 159.

    See Manuel Barrera Jr., et al., “Pathways from Family Economic Conditions to Adolescents’ Distress: Supportive Parenting, Stressors Outside the Family, and Deviant Peers,” Journal of Community Psychology 30 (2002): 135–52; Jean Brooks-Gunn, Greg Duncan, J. Lawrence Aber, Neighborhood Poverty: Context and Consequences for Children (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997); Frank Furstenberg et al., Managing to Make It: Urban Families and Adolescent Success (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Jorge I. Ramírez García, Jennifer A. Manongdo, and Michelle Cruz-Santiago, “The Family as Mediator of the Impact of Parent–Youth Acculturation/Enculturation and Inner-City Stressors on Mexican American Youth Substance Use,” Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 16 (2010): 404–12.

  160. 160.

    See Brooks-Gunn, Duncan, and Aber, Neighborhood poverty; and Furstenberg et al., Managing to Make It.

  161. 161.

    Gilda L. Ochoa, “Transformational Caring: Mexican American Women Redefining Mothering and Education,” Latina/Chicana Mothering, 109.

  162. 162.

    Ochoa, “Transformational Caring,” 109.

  163. 163.

    Castillo, Guardians, 121.

  164. 164.

    Ceballo et al., “Always Aware,” 814.

  165. 165.

    See, for example, Ingrid Gould Ellen and Margery Austin Turner, “Does Neighborhood Matter? Assessing Recent Evidence,” Housing Policy Debate 8 (4) (1997): 833–66.

  166. 166.

    Rebolledo, Women Singing in the Snow, 189.

  167. 167.

    Téllez, “Mi Madre, Mi Hija y Yo,” 64.

  168. 168.

    Castillo, Massacre, 204.

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    Eilidh AB Hall

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Hall, E.A. (2021). The Mothers: Negotiating Feminist Activism in/with the Family. In: Negotiating Feminisms. Literatures of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50637-7_3

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