5. Ofelia’s Kitchen
A COUNTERSPACE FOR RESISTANCE

Es informal, pero para hacer todo el trabajo siempre estamos ya formalmente. O sea, es informal la manera de venir al trabajo, y tomamos café, a veces comida, pero el trabajo siempre es muy serio, y lo tomamos muy en serio.

It’s informal, but to do all the work we’re always here formally. I mean, our way of working is informal, we drink coffee, sometimes there’s food, but the work is always very serious, and we take it very seriously.

—Carmen

In our young minds houses belonged to women, were their special domain, not as property, but as places where all that truly mattered in life took place.

—bell hooks, Yearning

Ofelia and her husband rented a spacious old house centrally located on one of Fruitvale’s main avenues. Baudelia lived in an apartment building just across the street. Often, when I pulled up to park before our meeting, I would see Baudelia crossing the street with her three children, on her way to Ofelia’s house. Carmen, Amelia, and Carolina also lived nearby. Amelia often walked to Ofelia’s house with her son Ernesto, but when the weather was cold, she would ask for a ride with Carolina or me. Between 5 o’clock and 5:15 on Friday afternoons, all of us would converge on Ofelia’s house. The children, happy to see each other, would run off to play outside in back, or, on dark winter evenings, in the children’s room. We could hear the sounds of their playing throughout our meetings, and they were never afraid to come and ask for a drink or a snack. The mothers would get up to pour them a glass of juice, hand them a plate of cookies, or sometimes scold them if they came screaming through the kitchen. But this was all part of the rhythm of our meetings—soothing, comforting, like background music without which we would not have been able to work.

Although Ofelia had a comfortable living room, the mothers preferred to meet in the kitchen. The kitchen-table setting lent a relaxed and intimate tone to our meetings. We all had the sense of being welcomed into Ofelia’s home, part of the family. As Baudelia said, “Yo me siento bien a gusto de estar en el grupo, porque siento que somos como una familia, o sea porque siento que todas nos entendemos” (I feel really at home in this group, because I feel like we’re a family. I feel that we all understand each other). Meeting in the home allowed the mothers to be present in their wholeness: as mothers, whose children were playing nearby in the other room, and as friends, who cooked for each other, ate together, and shared stories of their personal experiences. It is in these ways, I argue, that Madres Unidas created a unique mujerista or Latina womanist space (Villenas 2005; Trinidad Galván 2006), based on the use of testimonio and relationships of confianza (trust) that enhanced their capacity to make change at their children’s school.

Ruth Trinidad Galván (2006) explains:

A mujerista or Latina womanist vision … aims to uncover, share, and validate the diverse knowledge and experiences of Latinas in the United States and abroad. It takes a holistic approach to self that includes spirit and emotion, and recognizes our individual/communal struggles and efforts to name ourselves, record our history, and choose our own destiny. (172)

As they explored their personal and collective histories as parents in the new small school, the mothers in Ofelia’s kitchen supported each other in naming and recording the experiences that had been suppressed, rejecting the controlling images that framed them as unworthy or “problem parents,” and recasting themselves as concerned advocates for their families and community. Ofelia, our host, offered her home as an example of the resilience born of hard times, and illustrated with her life the spirit of defiance, generosity, and love that has been nurtured through struggle.

Ofelia

On her kitchen counter, Ofelia kept a votive candle to La Virgen de Guadalupe always burning.¹ Ofelia was a devotee of La Virgen de Guadalupe. She believed she had the Virgin Mother to thank for her current home. She once told me the story: when she was eighteen years old, new to this country, and pregnant, she lived with her mother-in-law for a year. Her husband was serving prison time for drug offenses. Ofelia remembers that year as the hardest in her life: alone, away from all her friends, separated from her husband (her mother-in-law would tell him when he called that Ofelia wasn’t home), and with a mother-in-law who seemed to resent her presence. Ofelia prayed incessantly that she would be able to find her own place to live, and one night the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to her in a dream, surrounded by a pool of water. “Don’t worry,” she told Ofelia. “Everything is going to work out.” Ofelia awoke with a deep sense of peace. Soon after, a kindly neighbor told her that his rental house was becoming available. It was a Section 8 unit and, as a young mother, Ofelia would qualify. He helped Ofelia through the application process, and shortly after that, Ofelia moved in.

This was the home Ofelia now shared with her husband and two children, and where Madres Unidas met. If you shared Ofelia’s faith, you might believe that the Virgin Mother presided over our meetings, blessing Ofelia’s efforts to create the healing home she once lacked. If you were not spiritually inclined, you could see the votive candle as a visual reminder of help in hard times. In either case, the kitchen represented Ofelia’s hard-won autonomy, a place where she was free from the control of her mother-in-law, her husband, and the bruising interactions with employers, social-service institutions, and her children’s teachers. In the safety of her kitchen, Ofelia could articulate her hard-learned lessons and pass them on to her children. As she explained:

Las experiencias que yo viví y he vivido han sido bien fuertes para mi edad, han sido duras, y esas experiencias me enseñaron a hablar, a defenderme, a no dejar que me tengan de menos o pensar que yo soy menos que otra persona … No importa si no tienes estudios, no importa dónde trabajes, importa quién eres tú, cómo eres tú, eres una persona honesta, eres una persona que respeta a las demás, eso es lo importante, no lo que tengas.

The experiences that I’ve lived have been very strong for my age, they’ve been hard, and those experiences taught me to speak, to defend myself, to not let anyone depreciate me or think that I’m less than someone else … It doesn’t matter if you’re not educated, it doesn’t matter where you work; what matters is who you are, how you are, you are an honest person, you are a person who respects others, that’s what matters, not what you have.

Self-possessed and outspoken, Ofelia was a confident parent advocate who embraced the roles in Madres Unidas as a natural extension of her desire to “speak up.” But she recognized that she wasn’t always like this. She believed her experience as a young migrant from rural El Salvador to the sometimes mean streets of Oakland had shaped her ability to see clearly and be secure of herself.

Ofelia remembered her childhood home in El Salvador nostalgically, as a place where she had felt free and without fear, at least before the war. In her rural town of “pretty views, no pollution, and animals everywhere,” all the neighbors knew each other, and she never had to worry about talking to strangers the way she worries about her children in Oakland. But she also remembered extreme financial hardship, and having to work at an early age. Her mother did washing and ironing for others and occasionally worked a farm nearby, but with her meager earnings and the money Ofelia’s sister sent home from the United States, they had barely enough to get by. Ofelia helped out by carting water from the river for the washing and wood for cooking, as soon as she got home from school:

No descansaba. Estaba siempre trabajando, pero es una cultura muy diferente porque allá uno no está renegando como, “Ay, ¿por qué me pones a trabajar tanto?” Es como sus padres lo crían a uno de esa forma y uno no pone excusas o no reniega. Como yo digo acá a mi hijo, “Recoge tu cuarto,” y dice, “Ay, ¡ahorita no tengo ganas!” O, “ahorita no quiero, estoy jugando.”

I never rested. I was always working, but it’s a very different culture there, because you would never complain, like, “Oh, why are you making me work so much?” It’s like your parents raise you that way and you don’t make excuses or protests. Like here I say to my son, “Clean up your room,” and he says, “Aw, I don’t feel like it!” Or, “I don’t want to right now, I’m playing!”

Ofelia was very aware of the contrast between her childhood in El Salvador and her children’s lives in Oakland. Her children enjoyed privilege where she had suffered want, but the respect for elders that was deeply ingrained in Ofelia from her upbringing in El Salvador was missing in the United States. This respect was especially to be extended to teachers: “Los maestros son como un papá para uno [allá], es un respeto muy grande para los maestros. Y aquí, no. Acá cuando yo llegué y fui a la escuela, ¡yo estaba impresionada! Estaba como, yo no lo podía creer, cómo tratan aquí a los maestros” (Teachers are like a parent to you [there], there is a very big respect for teachers. But not here. Here when I arrived and went to school, I was amazed! I was like, I couldn’t believe it, how they treat teachers here).

Ofelia completed the eighth grade in El Salvador, and when she immigrated to the United States at the age of sixteen, she enrolled in a public high school in Oakland. The adjustment to an inner-city high school was difficult. She remembered being discriminated against as a Salvadoran in a majority-Mexican student body, and being shocked by the disrespect for teachers expressed by students. In spite of this atmosphere, she excelled in her studies and got A’s in all subjects except English. She hoped to become a nurse, but circumstances would not allow her to finish school. Her oldest sister, who she was living with, told her she would need to help out with the rent. Ofelia looked for work in all the local stores, but without a Social Security card, nobody would hire her. “Entonces yo me sentía atrapada” (I felt trapped).

Ofelia married her husband, a neighbor of her sister’s, in part as a way out of her troubles. He was older than she, legally in the country, and had a steady job. “Yo lo quería, yo sí me enamoré de él y todo, pero yo tenía otros planes para mí. Pero al mismo tiempo me sentía como presionada” (I loved him, I did fall in love with him and everything, but I had other plans for myself. But at the same time, I felt pressured). Within a year, Ofelia was pregnant with her first son. Hard times followed. She dropped out of school to take care of him after the eleventh grade. She moved in with her mother-in-law but was never accepted by her husband’s family. Once again, she was at somebody else’s mercy, and she longed for a place of her own.

Now in her own home with her husband and two children, and earning a decent income as a housecleaner in a wealthy San Francisco neighborhood, Ofelia has achieved many of the things she longed for as a teenager: financial stability, a safe, comfortable home, and enough income to send some home to her mother in El Salvador every month. The year after our research, she saved enough money to take her children to El Salvador for the first time to visit their grandmother. She wanted them to see where she came from:

[Ellos] vieron cómo mi mamá vive, no vive en una casa preciosa, seguimos siendo pobres, somos pobres, pero siempre les digo, “Yo estoy bien orgullosa de mi familia, de mi mamá, de dónde vivo, de lo que tenemos, ¡a mí nadie, nadie que tenga más, que tenga una casa preciosa o que tenga más que yo, me va a hacer sentir mal!”

They saw how my mom lives, she doesn’t live in a gorgeous house, we are still poor, we’re poor, but I’ve always told them, “I am very proud of my family, of my mom, of where I live, of what we have, and nobody, nobody who has more, who has a gorgeous house or has more than I do, is going to make me feel bad!”

Ofelia wanted to raise her children with the best of the values she learned as a child in El Salvador, but at the same time, her experiences had taught her that “being submissive” and “keeping quiet” were not always appropriate.

Te debes de quedar callada. Esa era la enseñanza de mi mamá para mí. Y ahora que soy adulta, yo sola he aprendido, que así no, ¡que esa forma no me gustó! De que todo el tiempo tienes que estar callada, siento que es al revéz, te debes de defender, y debes de luchar por lo que piensas y defender lo que piensas, y tienes el derecho a opinar y hacer decisiones … porque quedarse callado, no es bueno, para mí … esa enseñanza por ejemplo no me gustaría dársela a mis hijos …

Les enseño que se defiendan, si alguien les ofendió o les dijo algo que no les gustó, siempre les digo, “Sean seguros de lo que ustedes son. Sean seguros de lo que ustedes tienen, sean seguros de ustedes mismos.”

You should keep quiet. That was my mother’s teaching for me. And now that I’m an adult, on my own I have learned that it doesn’t work, that I didn’t like that way of being! That all the time you should keep quiet, I feel that it’s the reverse: you should defend yourself, you should fight for what you think and defend what you think, and you have the right to have opinions and make decisions … Because keeping quiet, that’s not good, for me … That teaching, for example, I would not like to pass on to my children …

I teach them to defend themselves, if somebody offended them or said something they didn’t like, I always tell them, “Be sure of who you are. Be sure of what you have, be sure of yourselves.”

Ofelia’s teaching for her children may not be the same as her mother’s teaching for her, but it was rooted in her mother’s experience of poverty, and her own experience of battling and surviving poverty and discrimination—in Spanish, sobrevivencia (survival and beyond). As she said, “We’re poor, but I’ve always told them, ‘I am very proud of my family, of my mom.’ ” This experience has given her the strength to confront whatever new assaults she or her children might face:

Siempre a mis hijos les enseño, [cuando me preguntan] “ ‘Mami, ¿dónde trabajas? ¿Limpiando casas?” Es un trabajo con orgullo que yo hago. No me da pena decir que yo hago eso, porque es la forma que yo me gano la vida … Y así les enseño a mis hijos, que no deben de sentir mal, cualquier trabajo es honrado y respetado … Y soy una persona ahora de adulta muy segura de mí.

I always teach my kids, [when they ask] “Mom, where do you work? Cleaning houses?” It’s a job I do with pride. I’m not ashamed to say that I do that, because it’s how I earn my living … And that’s how I teach my kids, that they shouldn’t feel bad, any work is honored and respected … And now, as an adult, I am very sure of myself.

In her child rearing and in her work for Madres Unidas and the school, Ofelia demonstrated the resilience and flexibility that U.S. third-world feminists have argued is a product of life lived on the margins and a unique resource for social change (Anzaldúa 1987; hooks 1990; Sandoval 2000). Ofelia directly translated her life-learned values of self-respect, cultural pride, and community into her work for the school. As she explained, “No nada más lucho por mis hijos, o nada más me defiendo yo, defiendo otros padres, les aconsejo, ‘No tienen que hacer eso si no quieren.’ O sea, he luchado no sólo por mis hijos, sino por todos los niños de la escuela” (I don’t just struggle for my own children, I don’t just defend myself, I defend other parents, I advise them, “You don’t have to do that if you don’t want to.” I mean, I have struggled not just for my own children, but for all the children in the school). This spirit of determination and defiance also helped her confront controlling images of Latina motherhood from her husband and her children’s teachers. Ofelia told us that when she first decided to take a job outside the home, her husband had opposed it. Whenever he felt that she was asserting too much control over her life, he would remind her that she had to stay with him because of her legal status (at the time, he was a legal resident, she was not). Finally, Ofelia had said to him, “If that’s the only reason I’m with you, let’s go to the lawyers and sign the divorce papers right now!” After that, he never brought it up again.

Ofelia was similarly undeterred by the negative reactions of some teachers to her and the other mothers’ research at the school. As she explained, coming across teachers who were not supportive of the research or who said things that were difficult for her to hear was a valuable learning experience for her: “Eso a mí me ayudó a ser más fuerte, aprender a tratar a la gente” (That helped me to be stronger, to learn to deal with people). She also had a sharp critique for teachers’ limited views of parents’ capabilities: “No sólo porque ellas tienen poder o más estudios, pensar que los padres no podemos hacer cambios” (Just because they [teachers] have more power or more education doesn’t mean we parents can’t make changes).

Ofelia had learned from her life that it was not education and credentials that give one the ability to work for change, but one’s own experience of hardship and sobrevivencia, and she reminded the Madres of this every week through her own example and efforts to affirm the other mothers’ experiences. Her offering of her home and her hospitality for Madres Unidas was symbolic of her commitment to community uplift and self-and social transformation. I believe that in the context of the oppression the mothers experienced in their daily lives, Ofelia’s kitchen became a sacred space: a place of healing, affirmation, and, in the words of bell hooks (1990), a site of resistance.

Creating Community and Confianza

Bell hooks (1990) has written about the significance of the homeplace for African American women, who consciously sought to create a space for “one’s own” after working all day in the white community. “Throughout our history,” she writes, “African-Americans have recognized the subversive value of homeplace, of having access to private space where we do not directly encounter white racist aggression” (47). Within the brutal reality of racial apartheid and domination, hooks writes, black women resisted by making homes where “we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world” (42).

During the year that Madres Unidas met, three of the five mothers worked as domésticas: housecleaners and caretakers for white families. Latina immigrant women have largely replaced African American women in this growing low-wage sector of the economy (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001). It is now more often than not Latina immigrant women who take multiple buses and trains to neighborhoods far from their own to service other people’s homes. Sometimes, their own children are far away, left in the care of parents and relatives in their home countries (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 2003). Other times, their children are in the United States, left in the care of white teachers at urban public schools. That the mothers in Madres Unidas returned from jobs in suburban homes and found time to attend endless meetings at their children’s school indicates their refusal to give up their own homes, their refusal to leave the care of their children completely in the hands of others. Even if their participation at school meetings left them less time to attend to their children, it was an effort to shape their children’s upbringing and the community in which they would grow up. As Ofelia explained, “We’re all here because we care about the future of our children, and we want something better for them and for our community.”

In Ofelia’s kitchen, the mothers in Madres Unidas created a safe space where they could share stories, interrogate their experiences at the school, and find new ways of being in community that preserved their dignity and wholeness. Wholeness, in Latina feminist thought, acknowledges the need for personal healing and for the emotional, spiritual, and relational resources that Latina women draw on in their struggles against oppression (Trinidad Galván 2006). As Ruth Trinidad Galván explains, “A mujerista vision enlightens our understanding of pedagogies that encompass personal, collective, spiritual, and survival undertakings” (2006, 175). In this way, Latina feminist thought bears similarity to black feminist thought and other race-based feminisms born of life at “the intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, and sexuality” (Collins 2000, 98). According to Patricia Hill Collins, African American women have long drawn upon “safe spaces,” such as extended family, churches, and African American community groups, to strengthen their resistance to controlling images and “refashion themselves” after their own role models (ibid., 101). Ofelia’s kitchen was such a space for Madres Unidas.

Unlike school meetings that excluded, silenced, and delegitimized the personal experiences of parents, Madres Unidas created a space that privileged personal experience as the foundation of its being. The beginning of every meeting was dedicated to open sharing and socializing over food. We took turns in pairs providing food for the group, and often feasted on homemade enchiladas, tamalitos, taquitos, tostadas, chiles rellenos, chile verde, and flan. The mothers discussed new jobs, child-care dilemmas, the high cost of health care, or family news. In late spring, Carmen went to El Salvador for the first time in seven years, to visit her son and mother. In the weeks before her trip, she shared her excitement and anxiety about returning to her home country. She told us that as result of her experience with Madres Unidas, she wanted to interview the director of her son’s school there, and to visit the rural school she had attended as a girl. When she returned, she showed us pictures and told us about her experiences there. Several mothers testified that this personal sharing was what they appreciated most about the group. As Baudelia said, “Era bien bonito porque se había la confianza, compartíamos, conocíamos algo que no solamente conocíamos como una compañera de trabajo, sino que fue algo más, más familiar” (It was really nice because there was trust, we shared, we got to know each other not just as coworkers, but something more family-like). They emphasized the combination of learning, working, and personal sharing that made the group enjoyable to them, as Carmen said, “Drinking coffee and relaxing, and at the same time learning and sharing personal things from your home life, your kids, and learning a lot at the same time that you’re relaxed.”

But importantly, relationships of trust allowed the mothers to retell experiences they had had at the school and debrief painful and frustrating meetings in the company of supportive friends. In doing so, the Madres drew on the practice of testimonio, which has a long tradition in Latin American activism and has recently been revived by Chicana and Latina feminist scholars (Latina Feminist Group 2001; Delgado Bernal et al. 2006; Benmayor 1991). The Latina Feminist Group describes testimonio as a “crucial means of bearing witness and inscribing into history those lived realities that would otherwise succumb to the alchemy of erasure” (2001, 2). They note that historically, testimonio as a form of expression was born out of intense repression or struggle, in which the purpose of the story was less about disclosing a personal life than it was about creating a record of violence on whole communities (13). In this way, testimonio serves both personal and collective goals, and is explicitly connected to struggles for justice and liberation. Through testimonio, the mothers in Madres Unidas reaffirmed each other’s experiences of injustice at their children’s school and supported each other in acts of resistance.

If testimonio was the medium of sharing stories, confianza (a word that means both trust and confidence) created the conditions that made this possible. Confianza enabled mothers who were newly “coming to speech” (hooks 1989) to share their stories and draw strength from them. In one meeting in Ofelia’s kitchen, Amelia described feeling scorned in a parent meeting at the school for raising a question that was critical of a new policy:

Amelia reported that the school has instituted a “complaint box” for parents, and parents are to write their complaints or suggestions on a piece of paper and place them in the box, instead of bringing them up at the meeting. The mothers thought this unfair because: (1) it keeps them secret, so parents can’t find out about other parents’ complaints, and (2) how would they know that teachers were actually reading the complaints? Amelia explained that she had brought up the latter issue in the meeting, and she described a feeling of complete mortification as she raised the question, and all eyes turned to her. I was so proud of her for having spoken up! Another new rule she thought was unfair was that parents are to be limited to one question each at the meetings. (Field notes, November 30, 2001)

This particular example was poignant to me because it so clearly revealed Amelia’s budding anger and awareness of the ways parents were being silenced by the school and her own coming to speech. Keeping parents’ complaints secret in a “complaint box,” and limiting them to one question each at parent meetings, was for the mothers a clear attempt by the staff to silence them. When Amelia attempted to break the silence, questioning teachers in front of parents about the fairness of the process, she was made to feel deeply embarrassed. She told us she turned bright red as she felt all the eyes in the room fixed on her. Retelling the event to the Madres around Ofelia’s kitchen table, she drew on their support and solidarity to recover the dignity that was denied her at the time. In confianza her act of speaking up was transformed from an experience of shame to an act of resistance. “Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed … a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible,” writes bell hooks (1989, 9). Feminist scholars remind us that resistance is as much about personal healing and wholeness as it is about transforming structures of domination (Latina Feminist Group 2001; hooks 1989, 1990). We cannot hope to transform social structures without first transforming ourselves, without “remaking and reconstituting ourselves so that we can be radical” (hooks 1989, 32). I believe, as other scholars have suggested, that this transformation in the intimacy of Ofelia’s home enabled more public forms of resistance (Villenas 2001; Scott 1990).

While the mothers said that meetings at the school frequently left them with headaches or stomachaches from the stress, they described our meetings in Ofelia’s kitchen as leaving them confident, at peace, and energized. Ofelia explained:

Para mí, esperaba cada viernes, “O, ya vamos a tener la junta,” aunque ande corriendo de mi trabajo acá a la casa tener lista la cocina y todo, es algo que a mí me gusta, y si no nos juntamos más va a ser como bien extraño … Pues sí, no veníamos nada más a vernos, sino que a trabajar, pero el modo de que nosotros trabajábamos pues me sentía cómoda, a gusto. No sentía presión, no sentía como “¡Ay! ¡Ya llegó viernes otra vez!” ¿Verdad? O sea, me sentía con energía de seguir.

For me, I looked forward to every Friday, “Oh, we’re going to have the meeting,” even though I would be running from my job to the house to get the kitchen ready and everything, it’s something that I like, and if we ever stop meeting, it’s going to feel really strange … Well, we didn’t come just to see each other, we came to work, but the way in which we worked made me feel comfortable, at home. I didn’t feel pressure, I didn’t feel like “Oh! It’s already Friday again!” You know? I felt energized to keep working.

Similarly, during one of our evaluation meetings, Carolina said, “Yo les doy las gracias a todas ustedes aquí, porque cada vez que yo vengo aquí a las reuniones me siento bien tranquila, relajada, en confianza” (I want to thank all of you here, because every time I come here to these meetings I feel really peaceful, relaxed, and in confidence). She explained to the group that when Ofelia invited her to join the group, she was going through a time of personal hardship:

Y a la vez yo pensé que Dios me ayudó, porque en ese momento que tuve yo esa problema que ya me pasó, fue cuando ella me dijo de venir a la junta, entonces dije bueno, lo voy a hacer, no no más por el problema, sino por mi hijo y por mí misma, para mantenerme ocupada … Y para mí es muy importante también para aprender. Porque yo estaba entusiasmada de desenvolverme con las personas, porque nunca había hecho nada así.

And at the time I thought that God helped me, because it was at that moment when I had that problem that has now passed that [Ofelia] invited me to come to the meeting, so I said, well, I’m going to do it, not just because of my problem, but for my son and for myself, to keep myself busy … And for me it’s very important also to learn. Because I was enthusiastic about getting involved with people, because I had never done anything like this before.

Carolina’s story signals the importance of Madres Unidas as a support network, countering the isolation that the mothers felt before. These spaces are especially important for Latina immigrants, whose jobs often isolate them from traditional contexts for collective organizing, such as the workplace (Benmayor, Torruellas, and Juarbe 1997), and for whom even family and social ties are severely conditioned by structural constraints (Menjívar 2000). Amelia, who was a housecleaner in suburban Orinda, shared the following:

Bueno, yo les doy las gracias a todas ustedes por haberme tomado en cuenta en esta investigación que estamos haciendo. Y por tener amigas, porque yo las considero mis amigas, no tengo más amigas, sólo ustedes … Para mí es difícil también tener amigas, porque yo tengo dieciseis años viviendo aquí y nunca había tenido amigas, sólo “¡Buenas tardes! Hola, ¿cómo le va?” A Ofelia le tengo de conocer desde que los niños estaban en Kinder, pero nunca en una relación que estamos ahorita.

Well, I want to thank all of you for taking me into account for this research that we’re doing. And for having friends, because I consider you my friends, I don’t have any other friends, just you … For me it is difficult to make friends, because I’ve been living here for sixteen years and I’ve never had friends, just “Good afternoon! Hey, how’s it going?” I’ve known Ofelia since our children started kindergarten, but never in a relationship like we have now.

In their daily lives as domestics or restaurant workers, and in parent meetings at the school, the mothers had too few opportunities to nurture personal relationships or their own needs for intellectual development and community service. In Madres Unidas, healing came not just from the being together—convivencia—but from the opportunity to develop their skills and apply them to new and meaningful work. As Ofelia said, “We didn’t come just to see each other, we came to work”; and Carolina said, “For me it’s very important also to learn.” In one of her earliest reflections, Amelia wrote, “Para mí fue una experiencia ser anotadora, porque uno tiene que tener rapidez para escribir, y yo no tengo rapidez, pero sin embargo me siento útil y necesito tener más experiencia” (For me it was an experience to be the note taker, because you have to be able to write fast, and I can’t write fast; however, I feel useful and I need to have more experience). This reflection signaled both the challenge and the power the role of note taker held for a woman who was not accustomed to writing in her daily life. Being in a position of writing helped Amelia to see herself in a new way (“I feel useful”).

The planning of the focus groups and interviews became the most exciting meetings for the mothers. In contrast to the impotence they often felt at parent meetings, the process of collectively coming up with questions to ask in the focus groups and preparing for the role of interviewer allowed them to experience their own agency. All of the mothers participated eagerly in brainstorming questions and discussing their meaning, and praised each other’s suggestions. As the following excerpt from my field notes shows, the energy in the room was palpable:

At the end of the meeting, I asked them how they were feeling. Amelia, Carolina, and Carmen all responded, “¡Feliz!” I was most struck by Amelia’s enthusiasm, since she is the one who often seems the least sure of her abilities and of what to contribute. But she volunteered to be primary facilitator for one of the parent focus groups! “We’re learning,” she kept saying, and Carmen, too: “We’re going to learn.” At the beginning, during our first few meetings, Carmen and Amelia used to say that they felt inferior because Baudelia “has studied” and she’s so competent in this. They don’t say that anymore. They say, “We’re learning.” I knew Baudelia and Ofelia were happy, because they had been participating eagerly throughout. Baudelia at one point exclaimed, clapping her hands together, “I can’t wait!” at the prospect of doing the focus groups. And at the beginning … Baudelia had told me, “You have really lifted our spirits [Nos has levantado el ánimo.] You really listen to us, and you give us a chance that nobody else has.” (Field notes, November 2, 2001)

While Baudelia observed that my role as a “listener” was critical in affirming the mothers’ right to speak and be heard, she also played a key role in encouraging the mothers who were less confident in their research abilities to participate equally. Baudelia often came to our meetings prepared with a list of questions or ideas (she said they should do this as “homework”), but she never dominated the discussion. She would read one or two questions from her list, then wait for others to contribute. The atmosphere of mutual support and trust, or confianza, made the learning of new skills—a risk for many of the mothers who had had limited or negative schooling experiences—possible. Ofelia commented, “Porque somos un grupo que trabajamos con mucha confianza, que podíamos decir en qué estábamos mal o qué podíamos mejorar, y eso para mí ha sido algo muy bonito, porque en confianza uno se puede decir las cosas” (Because we are a group that works with much confianza, we could tell each other what we were doing wrong or how we could improve, and that for me has been really neat, because in confidence you could say things). The following excerpts from my field notes reveal some of the ways mutual affirmation and support were enacted in the group:

[One] issue we discussed was that the parents in the focus group were too eager to list their complaints—seemingly under the impression that we work for the school and have the ability to make the changes they suggested. We talked about how we should explain in the introduction of the focus groups that we don’t work for the school and don’t have the authority to change a lot of things. How should we explain this? The mothers wanted to know. They thought it would be rude to say, “We aren’t here to resolve your problems.” Amelia suggested that we say, “We can’t guarantee” that we will resolve the problems they identify, but that we would “bring them to light.” She said it so professionally that everyone clapped for her! She said she hoped she would remember how she had said it when it was the real thing! I realize that we often clap for each other when someone has a good idea or says something well. It is a spontaneous expression of support and enthusiasm. (Field notes, November 17, 2001)

We had a lesson on note taking and writing up interviews and observations. I read some of their own notes/reflections out loud, to emphasize what I thought was good and so they could see what the others had written. Everybody praised each other’s observations. Baudelia was especially encouraging to Carmen and Amelia. (Field notes, December 7, 2001)

As the mothers ventured into the new territory of research—interviewing, observing, videotaping, and writing—and were affirmed by each other in their new roles, their confidence in their abilities grew. As I will show in further detail in chapter 6, engaging in collective research transformed their individual fears and self-doubts—the wounds of past experiences—into social critique and resistance. But if conducting research provided the mothers with new knowledge and perspectives and bolstered their confidence as intellectual actors, their transformation into critical agents was ultimately made possible by activating their own ways of being in community—what I am referring to as Latina womanist values of wholeness, confianza, convivencia, and testimonio—to heal and reimagine themselves.

Oftentimes, humor became a source of healing, as the mothers poked fun at the very things that caused them pain. Laughter—genuine shoulder-shaking, tear-making, stomach-squeezing laughter—abounded aroundOfelia’s kitchen table. The mothers laughed at themselves, at me, at each other, at the principal, and at teachers. On occasion, they broke into spontaneous role play, acting out scenes between the principal or teachers and parents that had occurred at the school, collapsing into giggles at their exaggerated renditions of the principal’s behavior.

Rosario Carrillo (2006) writes that “humor casero mujerista” or womanist humor of the home is one way in which Latina women refigure the terms of their existence and transgress relations of inequality in their everyday lives. Describing the comedic skits and humorous language of six Latina bakery workers who formed a union, Carrillo argues that their humor subverts negative and hurtful images of them and “transforms Latinas into decisive speaking subjects with self-determination” (190). Like the Latina bakery workers, the mothers in Madres Unidas, through their humorous parodies of school staff, enacted “exemplary, counter, educative ways of creating meaningful, resilient, and joyous lives—indeed ways of interacting, behaving, speaking, believing, and thinking that can transgress inequitable social relations based on class, race and gender” (ibid., 193).

A range of scholars from neo-Marxist to Chicana/Latina feminist have taught us to look beyond the formal, public, and explicit scripts to these informal, private, and “hidden” expressions of resistance to domination among the marginalized (Scott 1990; Luykx 1996, 1999; Villenas 2006b; Delgado Bernal et al. 2006). James Scott (1990), writing about slaves in the antebellum South, argues that “neither everyday forms of resistance nor the occasional insurrection can be understood without reference to the sequestered social sites at which such resistance can be nurtured and given meaning” (20). In his analysis of “hidden transcripts,” what happened between slaves in “those offstage speeches, gestures, and practices” contained insights into power relations between dominant and subordinate groups. While members of subordinate groups might maintain a mask of deference and compliance in the presence of power holders, what Scott calls the “public transcript,” what they do among themselves contains the seeds of a “sharply dissonant political culture” (18).

It is the private speeches, rituals, jokes, and gossip among subordinates, shared in the relative safety of friendship, that nurture and make possible public acts of resistance. Rebellion, or social change, in this analysis are brought about not by exceptional leaders or charismatic people, but by “charismatic acts” of ordinary people sustained by the informal rituals of the hidden transcript. Scott uses the example of Mrs. Poyser, a tenant farmer in George Eliot’s Adam Bede, who dares to speak back to the ruthless squire. “Mrs. Poyser was not a charismatic character,” Scott writes, “but she undertook a charismatic act. Understanding that charismatic act, and many others like it … depends upon appreciating how her gesture represented a shared hidden transcript that no one as yet had the courage to declare in the teeth of power” (20).

Seen in this light, Amelia’s speaking up in the parent meeting, described earlier in this chapter, and Baudelia’s and Ofelia’s confronting the principal in chapter 4, were charismatic acts animated and sustained by the shared hidden transcript of Ofelia’s kitchen: a hidden transcript shaped by the mujerista values of confianza and convivencia. As an intimate social space where mothers could come together “offstage,” away from the school, Madres Unidas provided “the social and normative basis for practical forms of resistance” (ibid.). And there is other evidence that the transformative process begun in Ofelia’s kitchen translated into public acts of resistance at the school.

One of the earliest experiences Madres Unidas analyzed was that of Baudelia, who had been elected chair of the School Site Council and then publicly warned by the principal to “change her attitude.” The other mothers, who had been present at the meeting, expressed their outrage at the principal’s falta de respeto (lack of respect) toward Baudelia and voiced their support and solidarity with her. As related in chapter 4, they encouraged Baudelia to serve as chair of the council in spite of her misgivings, because they believed the council needed someone like her. Throughout the year, Baudelia brought her experiences on the School Site Council to Ofelia’s kitchen table, where they became part of the group’s testimonio. She shared how the principal failed to inform of her of a key meeting with a city council member, to which other School Site Council members were invited, and how the principal had forced her to sign a blank form authorizing the budget, without letting her see the figures. With each testimonio, the mothers affirmed Baudelia’s anger as a rightful response to injustice. As the Latina Feminist Group (2001) asserts, “We reclaim testimonio as a tool for Latinas to theorize oppression, resistance, and subjectivity” (19).

Madres Unidas enabled Baudelia to persevere on the council in the face of much difficulty, and finally, supported her in resigning with dignity when the list of offenses became too much to tolerate. In one meeting, she read aloud the letter of resignation she had written for the principal and members of the council. The letter, itself a testimonio, listed her reasons for resigning, and ended as follows: “I don’t want to keep being a person who demands too much. I don’t want you all to think I react this way because I am worn out, but, on the contrary, because I like things to be clear, truthful, and just” (my translation). With her last point, Baudelia revealed her understanding that she was being viewed as a difficult person, “a person who demands too much,” by the other members of the committee, and her rejection of this identity. The very act of writing the letter was a form of “counterstorytelling” (Solorzano and Yosso 2001; Villenas 2001), disrupting the dominant story she knew was likely to circulate about her resignation, and making public her own critique of the committee.

The response of Madres Unidas to Baudelia’s experience on the School Site Council (SSC) illustrates the use of Ofelia’s kitchen as a counterspace, a space to critique negative images of the mothers’ roles at the school and nurture supportive relationships.² While school staff, reformers, and organizers condemned the mothers’ anger as disruptive, Madres Unidas, through testimonio, affirmed anger as a healthy alternative to the self-blame and hurt that their school experiences would have otherwise inflicted—a necessary response to the politics of exclusion. As critical race theorists Solorzano and Yosso write, “It is often our anger that fuels our spirit, gives voice and direction to the silence, and provides the energy to go on” (2001, 483). Within counterspaces, as people of color realize they are not alone in their experiences, feelings of demoralization and self-doubt are replaced by anger and collective outrage at injustice; anger is affirmed as a first step toward transformative action. Feminist and critical race scholars have documented the importance of these spaces in nurturing resilience for urban youth of color (Pastor, McCormick, and Fine 2007; López and Lechuga 2007; Torre et al. 2007); African American college students (Solorzano, Ceja, and Yosso 2000); Chicano/a and Latino/a undergraduate students (Yosso 2006); and Chicana/o graduate students (Solorzano and Yosso 2001).

Michelle Fine, reporting on her work with high school students of color conducting participatory research on educational inequality, quotes an African American principal who maintained that even if the youths’ research changed nothing, “at least they’ll know they’re not crazy.”³ Similarly, the mothers in Madres Unidas who left meetings at the school wondering if they were crazy, or if they really were the “negative” and difficult parents school staff painted them to be, were affirmed in their views of reality by the other mothers in Ofelia’s kitchen. We may never know or be able to measure the transformative effects of this profoundly personal shift, but for some Latina women, the experience is like “oxygen” (Yosso 2006). Baudelia often said our Friday meetings were “like therapy.” She explains: “Para mí me ha servido este grupo, y yo creo que a todas, porque los problemas que tenemos en la escuela, venimos y los desahogamos” (For me, and I think for all of us, this group has helped, because the problems we have at school, we come [here] and unload them). As the mothers reflected on what was most valuable about the group, in taped evaluation sessions midway through and at the end of the year, the theme of confianza surfaced with meanings more nuanced than trust or closeness. Confianza was a condition that made possible a clear-eyed and honest discussion of reality, a slicing through of the distortions and evasions that plagued social relations at the school, to face difficult truths. As Baudelia had written in her letter of resignation to the SSC, she wanted to be known as someone who liked things to be “clear, truthful, and just.”

When I asked the group how you could build confianza, I received the following responses: “El ser sincera, la sinceridad, la honestidad y el ser directo” (Being sincere, sincerity, honesty, and being direct). “El respeto” (Respect). “Respetar, hablar con la sinceridad, ser directas, y honestidad (Respect, speak with sincerity, be direct, and honest). “Sinceridad. Ser sincero, decir lo que le molesta a uno, lo que le gusta, hablar sinceramente, decir, ‘a mí no me gustó …’ ” (Sincerity. Be sincere, say what bothers you, what you like, talk openly, say, “I didn’t like …”). Importantly for all of them, confianza was not built on false pretenses of getting along or avoiding conflict: it came with the open expression of one’s opinions and experiences, as long as these were voiced with respect. Reflecting, Baudelia summed it up this way:

Confianza es, con aquella persona que puedo ser yo misma, con la que yo me puedo expresar, puedo hablar, puedo decir sin temor alguno … Sé que esta persona me va a respetar, sé que esta persona, allí va a quedar mi comentario, y no va a salir fuera de este lugar. Que esta persona me puede entender, que esta persona no me va a juzgar. Es donde yo puedo ser yo misma.

Confianza is, with that person with whom I can be myself, with whom I can express myself, I can talk, I can speak without any fear … I know that this person is going to respect me, I know that this person will keep my comments to herself, that my words won’t leave this place. That this person can understand me, that this person is not going to judge me. It’s where I can be myself.

Here Baudelia speaks to the need for self-definition, highlighting the importance of a place “where I can be myself.” Too often at their children’s school, the mothers’ identities were defined by others, in ways that fractured and distorted their sense of selves. In Ofelia’s kitchen, they could recover their wholeness, and exercise and develop those parts of themselves that were not given expression at the school. This, writes bell hooks, is the essence of resistance. Hooks quotes Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn: “I think that communities of resistance should be places where people can return to themselves more easily, where the conditions are such that they can heal themselves and recover their wholeness” (cited in hooks 1990, 43).

In many ways, the experience in Ofelia’s kitchen was a process of politicization, of coming to consciousness, in Paulo Freire’s terms (1970/2005), where consciousness combines the naming of one’s personal experience of oppression with a critical understanding of the material conditions—especially structures of domination—that shape that experience. This process is not an easy one. As bell hooks writes, “true politicization—coming to critical consciousness—is a difficult, trying process, one that demands that we give up set ways of thinking and being, that we shift our paradigms, that we open ourselves to the unknown” (1989, 25). Inés Hernández Avila, a Native American scholar and poet, describes the process this way: “Each discovery adds more light to the path, allowing us to see and be with others in solidarity. Each piece of sifted information helps us figure out the puzzles, personally, collectively, globally. Once begun, there is no turning back. To forsake consciousness is to forsake being human” (2001, 300).

I end this chapter with an image of the mothers, laughing around Ofelia’s kitchen table. They are writing down questions to ask in a focus group, laughing at each other’s wording and miswording. Their faces are radiant with confidence. During the year that we met, I often wished the teachers could see them as they were in Ofelia’s kitchen. “If only this part of them could be seen at the school.” But better now than never. Better here than nowhere. I think of a line from Inés Hernández Avila: “As we heal, we tenderly regather ourselves in our totality as physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, creative beings” (2001, 301).