Irene Mata
WHEN I TELL people that I moved to Massachusetts from San Diego, California, I always get the same question: “Why?” Why would one choose to leave sunny California with its perfect weather for the cold of the Northeast? A valid question, but one that most young academics coming out of graduate school know too well is not really a question of choice. Always aware of the tight job market and the looming student loans that must be repaid, we go where the job takes us. The weather, however, is the more manageable of challenges I have faced in my relocation. The most troubling aspect of the move has been helping my children make the transition from the Southwest—a place of cultural familiarity—to the previously unknown world of affluent white suburbia in the Northeast. My formal education did not prepare me for the challenges of raising a family in a space where difference remains suspect and where real diversity is almost nonexistent. We feel as if we have stumbled into an alien world, where real Mexican food does not exist, where we rarely hear the sounds and rhythms of Latino music pouring out of the car windows, where the cadence of Spanish is nearly absent, even though Puerto Ricans have resided in the Northeast for many generations. In the neighborhood in which we reside, I find myself concerned with the project of raising children in a space of isolation and trying to find ways to help them survive the alienation. In this essay, I offer my testimonio of challenges and strategies of resistance in an effort to expand our dialogue of what it means to be a mother in academia and the role that intersectionality continues to play in the daily decisions we make in educating our children.
Making the transition from graduate student to faculty member is a challenging process rife with professional pitfalls. From learning to negotiate department politics to figuring out the balance of service and multiple student demands, the first few years out of graduate school are difficult, to say the least. When we add class and racial difference as well as the job of motherhood, one’s professional life becomes that much more complicated. Women in academia continue to confront a system that persists in supporting a hierarchy of gender (Monroe et al. 2008; S. Warner 2010). A woman’s advancement on the tenure ladder is further affected by the choice to have children. In their project “Do Babies Matter?” Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden endeavor to understand the role that family formation plays in the advancement of women in academia, specifically the University of California system. In their preliminary findings, they found that women with babies were 29 percent less likely than women without babies to enter into tenure-track positions (2002, 5). The same cannot be said for men: the project found that, “for men, being married with young children is the dominant mode of success” (4). Although men may now be more involved in child care, the gender gap remains; Mason and Goulden point out that “women with children clock about 94 hours per week between caregiving, housework, and professional responsibilities compared with a little over 80 for men with children” (2004a, 10).
The issues of race and class are also important factors in the rates of success of women in academia. In her essay “The Tender Track,” Sara Warner points out that “women born into working-class and working-poor families are less likely to attend college, and those who do are less likely to pursue graduate school and to secure full-time employment in the academy than their middle-class and upper-middle-class peers” (2010, 176). In addition to the financial hardships faced by students from economically disadvantaged communities, what one learns in the classroom cannot easily compete with the inherited knowledge that comes with multiple generations of college graduates and academic families. When one considers the difficulties experienced by faculty of color in academia, it is easy to see why the dismal processes of hiring and retaining minority faculty continue to be such a problem (Delgado Bernal and Villalpando 2002; Segura 2003; Moody 2004). Given the intersection of these multiple factors, my professional life is difficult enough without the constant concern regarding my children’s cultural survival. It is this worry, however, that most often occupies my mind.
In thinking of possible ways to help my family navigate the space we inhabit, I have come to realize that the most important tool at my disposal is my own family history—the background that helped me attain a tenure-track position at Wellesley in the first place. In Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (2001), the Latina Feminist Group outlines the importance of using our own individual stories for resistance. This group of Latina feminist academics argues that in the process of using testimonio, or testimony, “the personal and private become profoundly political” (13). The group’s work advocates for a reclamation of testimonio “as a tool for Latinas to theorize oppression, resistance, and subjectivity” because of its ability to “capture Latinas’ complex, layered lives” (19). By using my own history to theorize and create knowledge around my experiences growing up as an immigrant in West Texas, I can offer my own testimonio as a way of teaching my children the tools to resist a homogenous culture that seeks to erase difference.
Moving from the southwestern United States to the Northeast may not seem like a big change. After all, it is not my mother’s experience of migrating from one country to another. However, moving from an area with a diverse Chicana/Latino community to a homogeneous white Anglo community has been extremely difficult. The diversity we enjoyed in Southern California and West Texas is nonexistent where we now live. I have two children, one in high school (Alyssa) and one just beginning middle school (Jaime). In the town in which we live, most minority students in the public-school system are bussed in from areas in Boston through the Metropolitan Council for Education Opportunity program, a desegregation program that began in 1966 in the Boston area and is “intended to expand educational opportunities, increase diversity, and reduce racial isolation, by permitting students in certain cities to attend public schools in other communities that have agreed to participate” (Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education 2011). These students might attend the schools, but they are not a part of the community because they are bussed out as soon as the school bell rings. It would be easy to dismiss my kids’ marginalization in the schools based on their “new kid at school” status and claim that race doesn’t play a role, but the longer they attend schools in Wellesley and the more contact we have with their teachers, the more convinced we are that their racial and class background plays a major role in their treatment.
The cultural model privileged in the town of Wellesley is one that positions whiteness and class at its center. Students of color are marginalized in this model, and they are taught to view the communities they come from as inferior because it is assumed that no persons of color live in Wellesley. One of Jaime’s teachers actually asked a young African American boy what it was like to live in the “ghetto” just because he lives in an urban community in Boston. My son has been told by other students that “Mexicans are stupid,” knowing that Jaime identifies as Chicano. My daughter’s bus driver has made racist comments about “dirty Mexicans” and the swine flu. Even as these young students of color are being relegated to the margins, they are being encouraged to see themselves as “lucky” because they are attending an elite public school. When I mention to individuals that I don’t like living in Wellesley, I usually get the same reaction: “At least the schools are good.” I always want to yell in frustration. How can a school be good when it makes students of color feel ashamed? When it is a place where wealthy white students are taught to embrace their privilege without questioning structures of inequality? When economic disparities are blamed on individuals? The myth of meritocracy—the belief that the system rewards those who work hard—remains strongly entrenched in the larger surrounding community. According to many of my children’s friends, poor people are poor because they are lazy. This is the message that Wellesley’s “good schools” are teaching my children, and no one seems to be questioning their definition of success. As Angela Valenzuela’s research on public schools in Texas illustrates, the labeling of teachers or schools as “good” is most often based on a “clinical definition of teaching” that “produces higher tests scores and other measurable outcomes in children” (2002, 236). Through her study of a “good” charter school in Texas, Valenzuela learned that “a 100% passing rate on the TAAS [the state’s standardized test] does not necessarily a good school make.… Although technically speaking, the children appeared to be learning the three Rs, their harsh persuasion into a materialistic, status-seeking value system was profound” (2002, 237).
When we are thinking about which cultural models are valued, it is important to acknowledge the ways in which the ideas of cultural capital have positioned white, middle-class culture as the standard. In her critique of Pierre Bordieu’s theories of cultural, social, and economic capital, Tara J. Yosso argues for an alternative understanding of cultural wealth. Drawing on critical race theory, Yosso introduces the concept of “community cultural wealth.” She identifies six forms of cultural capital found in community cultural wealth: aspirational, linguistic, familial, social, navigational, and resistant (2005, 77–81). Aspirational capital is the value that the idea of hope holds for people of color. Instead of complacency, communities of color rely on aspirations for a better future for the next generation to keep motivated. Linguistic capital is the advantage that being multilingual holds for students of color. Unlike the racist rhetoric of English-only movements, Yosso relies on decades of research on the value of bilingual education to position linguistic cultural capital as an important part of community cultural wealth. Although teachers will often place the blame of a student’s failure in school on the family, the concept of familial capital positions the family as the site of knowledge, community history, and memory. The family, defined as more than just the traditional nuclear family, is the place where students learn alternative histories and the importance of community. Social capital refers the networks of people and resources tapped into by communities of color in order to negotiate through systems of power. Navigational capital describes the skills used by communities of color to navigate through social institutions that have traditionally marginalized them. Resistant capital can be understood as a form of “oppositional consciousness,” to use Chela Sandoval’s words (2002, 2), a level of consciousness that allows for communities of color to challenge inequality and injustice. These different definitions of capital wealth serve to acknowledge the value that is found in the culture of communities of color. Such a framework rejects the practice of deficit thinking that blames these communities for poor academic performance. The amalgamation of scholarship that challenges hegemonic systems of thought with the alternative local knowledge passed down through our families creates a powerful tool for resistance and opposition. With Yosso’s framework in hand, I now rely on my own familial and cultural background for support as I work toward tenure and create an environment so my children can be successful.
For inspiration in withstanding a discriminatory cultural model, I find myself thinking back to the ways in which my immigrant mother attempted to bridge the distance between my home and school life. As is the case with many women’s stories, my testimonio is multigenerational and built upon the stories of the women who came before me. I struggle to ensure my children are successful in a school system that does not value who they are, while trying to keep them grounded in our own culture. I have had to learn to incorporate multiple forms of knowledge—academic and communal—and strategies in attempting to help my children survive the difficulties of living in a place where they will always be seen as outsiders. I am learning how to supplement their education with a type of knowledge that will help them reject damaging lessons imposed on them by an education system that promotes the myth of assimilation. I am working to ensure my children grow up to value their culture and embrace the idea of difference.
My mother was a strong woman, una mujer con fuerza. She raised me and my siblings in a working-class immigrant home in El Paso, Texas. My father worked the second shift at a cardboard-manufacturing plant, so we saw him only on the weekends. He was a good provider—a breadwinner—but daily parenting duties always fell to my mother. As an immigrant, she didn’t speak English and felt uprooted from her home across the border in Mexico. She must have felt so isolated in the home, so far from everything familiar. Even though she never complained, she seemed so lonely. In Texas, her knowledge of remedios (cures) and food and tradition had little to no mainstream cultural value. She had only a third-grade education and would often be silent outside the home and with my teachers, but she was an intelligent woman, and inside our home her voice was strong. Although she regretted not being able to help us with our homework, she always encouraged us to be academically successful.
She loved us dearly, but I’m not sure she ever felt truly fulfilled by her roles as a mother and wife. It is one of the reasons I believe she emphasized graduating from high school and attending college. Like other mothers, she wanted her daughters to learn from her own experience. Sofia A. Villenas argues in her work on the teaching and learning that takes place between mothers and daughters that “somewhere in our living pedagogies, as we learn to ‘see’ and engage the often ambiguous lessons of our mothers’ bodies, words, and silences, we find the decolonial imaginary” (2006, 157). Villenas employs Emma Pérez’s (1999) concept of the decolonial imaginary to explain that out mothers’ performative narratives offer “those shades of gray, those spaces of possibilities to make new meanings, to be creative and self-fulfilled” (2006, 157). For my mother, an education would make it possible for me to create a life for myself that would no longer be dictated by rigid gender roles, reliance on manual labor, and dependence on men.
In my mother’s understanding, education meant more possibilities and choices, especially for her daughters. It was the inspirational capital she passed down to us. Unlike the stereotype of the Latino family that doesn’t value education, for my family and so many others, the belief in education as a precursor to upward mobility in fact permeates our culture and has been embraced by many immigrant communities. The findings of a survey conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center indicated that “Latinos demonstrate an overarching faith in their local schools and in educational personnel and institutions overall.… Hispanic immigrants … profess particularly positive attitudes and a sense of optimism” (2004, 1). Although important differences exist between the foreign-born and native-born Latinos, “Latinos appear distinctly optimistic and eager to engage American institutions” (2). According to the survey, 95 percent of Latino parents believe “that it is ‘very’ important to them that their children go to college” (9). This is not to say, however, that Latino parents are not aware of difficulties encountered by their children in the education system. The survey also reveals Latino parents’ “concerns that the educational system does not always treat Latino students fairly” (1). Education is supposed to help one achieve a better life than one’s parents, but it is always a much more complicated process as one tries to negotiate different forms of knowledge and ways of knowing.
Like other immigrant parents, my mother must have felt challenged and sometimes even powerless to compete with the contemporary, white American influences we found at school. We came home speaking English and rejecting our native language, following our teachers’ advice. If we wanted to speak without an accent, we were told to constantly practice our English, especially at home. Our mother’s insistence that we speak Spanish at home could not compete with the message we received at school. After struggling for several years to keep us speaking Spanish at home, she eventually gave up, learning to understand our English while responding to us Spanish—her own small form of resistance. While picking up the basics in math, science, and English, we were also learning to see our parents’ values as old-fashioned and antiquated. We were being exposed to values that were different from those taught at home. The strict rules regarding going out and hanging out with friends were based on my mother’s own parents’ ideas of protection and keeping children safe, but they only made us resent her and see her as out of touch. And school changed us. Our friends changed us. Our teachers—sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly—taught us different traditions, different worldviews. We came home different. We talked back, argued, and rejected her efforts to teach the skills we didn’t learn at school. It must have been horrifying for her. How could she transfer her knowledge and values to us when our daily lives from 8:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. took us to such a different place? How could she teach us about the importance of family traditions when we were being taught to appreciate only the information garnered at school? The simple task of teaching her daughters how to make tortillas or gorditas, sharing recipes passed down for generations, became impossible. We were too busy with our schoolwork to make time for her lessons. Although she appreciated the fact that we were learning the skills necessary to succeed in the future, she felt rejected and came to resent the lessons cloaked in whiteness that we were learning at school.
I believe myself to be a strong woman in the model of my mother, and my experience with raising children in a wealthy white suburb has helped make me aware of how difficult it must have been for her to raise children outside of the space she considered home. When our daughter, Alyssa, began the eighth grade in the middle school in Wellesley, she transferred in with a straight A average. In California, she had tested into the state’s gifted program and had been enrolled in advanced classes, including eighth-grade math as a seventh grader. Our son, Jaime, had also been in the gifted program and had done well in his elementary school. Entering the school system in the town of Wellesley proved a challenge to both of our children, however, and they struggled to acclimate to a very different school system. My conversations with some teachers made it clear that they believed Massachusetts’ schools were much more rigorous than schools in other states and thus insinuated that Alyssa and Jaime’s previous education was inferior. By the end of their first school year, our daughter began to lose confidence in her intelligence, and our son had started to develop test-taking anxiety. I now understood the frustration my mother must have felt being told her children were not prepared to enter English-speaking classrooms, the anger she must have experienced as she watched my siblings and I being placed in the more remedial Spanish-speaking classrooms. My mother believed in education, but it was the process of becoming educated that was the issue, as it is here in Wellesley.
Like my mother before me, I moved my family with the hope of providing my children with the opportunities I lacked. My multiple college degrees and tenure-track job—plus, my partner’s career—have ensured our entrance into middle-class status, which would normally be considered a marker of success. Instead, our move has become a source of constant conflict. I watch as my children are being changed in negative ways to fit into a place that does not value difference. Just as my siblings and I were encouraged to give up our Mexican background, my daughter and son are being encouraged to lay aside their Chicana/o heritage in order to fit in more comfortably with an Anglo-owning class culture. If it is hard to see my children making choices about their cultural background and ethnicity in order to stand out less, I can now imagine how difficult it must have been for my mother to watch us reject our home culture in our efforts to assimilate. After all, our mainstream education system teaches that in order to be successful, one must fit into the mold already in place, a model of education that does not favor critical thinking skills or an investment in multiple knowledge traditions.
When I entered the education system in the United States, I came in with one year’s schooling from Mexico. My mother was often told how lucky I was to be receiving a “good” education in an American school. What people don’t know is that in the one year I had attended school in Mexico, I had learned the equivalent of three years of reading and math in the United States. Because my education had occurred across the border, however, it didn’t count. Instead, I was immersed in a curriculum that demanded I forget the knowledge I had in order to become an “Americanized student.” My mother stood by and watched me turn against my culture because she had been told this is what I needed to do in order to become successful. It hurt her to see me reject our traditions and thus, in essence, reject her. As Villenas argues, though, “Somewhere in the dark shadows of a woman’s sufrimientos we might find … a mother’s immense capacity to dream and prepare us for lives she could not imagine” (2006, 157). My mother’s attempts to share family stories became less and less frequent, but the foundation she created—through the sharing of her knowledge—was strong, and although it cracked, it never fully crumbled.
In college, I began to question the assimilation process I had embraced and now came to begrudge. Being a Chicana studies scholar brought me back to my mother’s cultural knowledge (her music, her stories, her language, her knowledge of remedios and different forms of healing), a wisdom I was once taught to devalue in favor of “American” (read “white, middle-class”) models mass-produced and disseminated for a mainstream audience. I learned to embrace the language she loved and to read value in the stories she had once shared with me, recognizing them as a powerful testimonio. I rejected the ideological position that situates Spanish (and Spanglish) as inferior to English in a hierarchy of language and began to see my bilingualism as a form of linguistic capital. Although it was too late to learn to cook the many dishes I grew up with, I learned the importance of cooking with my own children and discussing the role food has in passing down family history and tradition—an important form of familial capital. In short, I became adept at recognizing value in our community knowledge and ways of knowing that are often marginalized and dismissed as inferior.
The knowledge that we can redefine the meaning of cultural capital has become an important instrument in resisting my children’s “suburbanization.” With this knowledge and the strategies it offers, I can more effectively challenge the traditional ideas of cultural capital taught in the school system. Knowing my mother’s own struggles with trying to keep our family’s culture intact, I sometimes find myself asking the same questions she must have pondered: How can I transfer my knowledge, traditions, and values to my children when they encounter and negotiate such different worldviews at school and with their friends? How can I encourage my children to be proud of their cultural roots and traditions when their schools do not or cannot overtly value them and promote them?
Rejecting the cultural model being promoted by the school system is somewhat easier when one has an alternative model to embrace. Whereas traditional cultural theory may not find value in the cultures of communities of color, Yosso’s (2005) concept of community cultural wealth and the research it has produced provide us with ways to help children of color resist marginalization. Many of us already share with our children the six forms of capital that are present in the community cultural wealth model, but by explicitly positioning them in opposition to the traditional cultural model, we can more effectively challenge the race and class hierarchy perpetuated by our school systems. Understanding the ways in which our culture is dismissed helps Jaime and Alyssa fight for acknowledgment and recognition. They have begun to see this dismissal as another form of injustice, and so they employ resistance capital that allows them to rely on tactics used by previous social justice movements for opposition. They are learning to practice what education scholars Daniel Solorzano and Dolores Delgado Bernal have defined as “transformational resistance,” a strategy of resistance that “refers to student behavior that illustrates both a critique of oppression and a desire for social justice” (2001, 319). The fight might not be easy for them, but it helps them develop the navigational strategies they will need to continue in an education system that often demands unquestioned assimilation. In her work on pedagogies of the home, Delgado Bernal discusses the ways in which Chicana students use biculturalism “to see things in ways that students of the dominant culture might not, and how their biculturalism can help others understand things from a different perspective” (2001, 630). My children are acquiring the skills necessary to shape an identity that helps them embrace the multiple cultures they inhabit—in both Texas and Massachusetts—without sacrificing their own cultural background. Our conversations about ways to talk back to racism in the classroom are preparing them to identify technologies of race and to recognize and navigate covert racism.
The survival of Alyssa and Jaime’s psyches will be based on their ability to navigate the education system’s strategies of cultural erasure. As Angela Valenzuela has observed, “Rather than building on students’ cultural and linguistic knowledge and heritage to create biculturally and bilingually competent youth, schools subtract these identifications from them to their social and academic detriment” (1999, 25). I am always looking for ways of helping Alyssa and Jaime find pride in their Chicana/o background and reject the “subtracting model of schooling” (Valenzuela 2002, 236). Because we are so far from our community, the cuentos (stories) I share with them, versions of my testimonio, now take on an added importance. I keep our family history alive by constantly making connections to our past and ensuring they feel grounded in a space they do not daily inhabit. They do not need to be physically in the Southwest surrounded by our family and culture in order to feel connected to it. I have tried to find ways for them to remain connected to our community even while living in Wellesley. For the past several years, Alyssa has been dancing ballet folklorico with the Latina organization at Wellesley College. More than just dancing, she is learning a form of social capital from these young Chicanas/Latinas that is preparing her for the challenge of being a Chicana in college and teaching her the importance that community support will continue to play in her success. With each year that we are away, Jaime becomes more vocal about his Chicano background, finding his voice and learning to make alliances with other students of color. Although young, he is learning to implement navigational capital in creating support networks. Both of my kids are discovering ways to stay true to themselves and succeed in a system that does not necessarily value who they are and their background. They are developing and learning to rely on resistant capital, or “those knowledges and skills fostered through oppositional behavior that challenges inequality” (Yosso 2005, 80).
In addition to fighting marginalization in the school system, as a family we have also been struggling with the reality that we are middle class and have climbed up the social status ladder. Yet despite holding a class status different than my parents’, Jaime and Alyssa nevertheless find it difficult to attend school with children possessing historical legacies of enormous financial privilege. When these kids return from school breaks, they share stories about their skiing vacations or Caribbean beach getaways. Their fathers are successful lawyers, doctors, and financial-sector employees who have the privilege of taking time off to vacation with their families. Most of their mothers revel in the economic freedom that allows them to be stay-at-home moms, with time and money to spare. I know it can’t be easy for my children to encounter such privilege, knowing that they will never experience this type of childhood. Beyond getting them to accept this fact and not feel inferior, I am constantly struggling to help them develop a class consciousness that will prevent them from aspiring to be part of a system that rewards individual achievement over the value of community. It is too easy to equate the privilege of wealth with success. This is a challenge that many women academics of color face.
In a lecture given at Wellesley College in November 2008, Cherríe Moraga recounted to the audience her choice to send her teenage son, Rafael, to Chicano boot camp, a place where he would reconnect with nature while being surrounded by strong Chicano role models. She saw him as getting too invested in consumer culture and wanted to make an intervention. Although anxiety inducing, this intervention was about making her child uncomfortable about social and economic class. For many of us who were born into working-class families, the discomfort we feel in terms of class is something we intimately know, but as our children are raised in middle-class households, they no longer face the same struggles we encountered. On the surface, we can feel good about the fact that we are providing our sons and daughters with more opportunities and maybe more economic stability. However, the question now becomes: How do we instill in our children the same working-class values that built our character? Moraga argued in her lecture that “with our children of privilege, character building becomes more problematic because the only way to build character is by opposition … by discomfort” (2008). For Moraga, dislocating her son from the comfort of their home helped remind him of his privilege and denaturalized it. I am trying to build my children’s character by helping negotiate the discomfort but not remove it. I cannot afford to give up my job in order to move them to a community in which they will feel more comfortable. Instead, by embracing a community wealth model, I am hoping to build in my children a strength they will carry with them through the many challenges they will face as people of color.
As I struggle to instill in my kids a strong sense of self and pride in our cultural background, I think of my mother and how hard it must have been for her to raise a family in an Anglo community so alien to her. Like her, I’m now away from my extended family and the support system they offer. My faraway relatives are the individuals who keep our family history alive through their memories and cuentos. I find myself floundering and trying to re-create a sense of the familiar, attempting to fashion for my family a space where they will feel safe and at home. Without the cultural affirmation provided by my extended family and Chicana/o community, I sometimes fear my children will lose the sense of where they come from and the importance of their history. I now understand much better the anxiety my mother must have felt at having to raise us in a place that seemed so disconnected from her own background. I take heart, however, in knowing that I am not alone and that other dislocated Chicanas share this struggle. In “Building Up Our Resistance: Chicanas in Academia,” Chicana literature and feminist scholar Anna Sandoval reminds us that, “as academics and third world women, we are constantly in a border space, straddling the elitism of the academy and the communities where we are raised.… For those who are isolated from any semblance of home … passion for one’s community is rarely lost and comes from comfort with the familiar” (1999, 86–87).
I believe ultimately that I am making an intervention in my children’s education process by making it difficult for those around us to dismiss our culture. For her tenth-grade thesis assignment, my daughter was handed a list of American authors to choose from for her literature project. Some African American writers were on the list, but no Chicana/o authors were included. I contacted her English teacher and argued that Alyssa be allowed to study and write on the works of Helena María Viramontes. Her teacher agreed after being reassured that I would help Alyssa with the assignment because no one else at the high school was familiar with Viramontes’s work. As a result, Alyssa has been exposed to some wonderful literature, and the project has offered us the opportunity to discuss issues important to our community. She has also had to learn to explain to her classmates that a Chicana writer is an “American” author. My children are learning to stand up for themselves and defend their background. They inhabit a space of discomfort and are learning to be conscientious young people. In the process, I am learning to look back at memories of my own mother for lessons on how to raise strong children outside of the familiar. I am using my testimonio to help my children resist and create their own testimonios of opposition.
