Acknowledgments

This book is the product of a long and remarkable journey. First and foremost I would like to thank the five members of Madres Unidas—Amelia, Baudelia, Carmen, Carolina, and Ofelia—for their confianza and convivencia. Their courageous honesty and collaborative spirit inspired and enabled this research, and their friendship enriched my life in ways beyond measure. The journey that we undertook together has forever transformed me.

Unconventional research must be nurtured by unconventional spaces: collectivities of people who together make it possible to challenge received norms. At the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Education, I was fortunate to be part of a tight cohort of students who were committed to participatory action research and to making space for different ways of being in the academy. As first-year graduate students, we founded the Center for Popular Education and Participatory Research (CPEPR), which supported all of us in engaging in community-based research for social change. Just as the space created by Madres Unidas supported the mothers’ transformative work at their children’s school, so my own work with the mothers was nurtured by the space of CPEPR and my graduate school colleagues, Kysa Nygreen, Patricia Sánchez, Soo Ah Kwon, Emma Fuentes, and Shabnam Koirala, and our dedicated faculty sponsor, John Hurst. Ten years after its founding I do not know if CPEPR still exists or exists in the same way as it did for us in our PhD years, but I acknowledge it here to encourage all students who feel they cannot find a home in the academy: there are others like you; seek them out and build your own home. With a group of people behind you who will say “we’ve got your back,” you will find that anything is possible.

There are very few people whose interest in one’s project endures un-waning over many years. Among my CPEPR colleagues, I owe special thanks to Kysa Nygreen, my research partner during the first year of research and writing partner thereafter, whose insights, encouragement, and friendship helped bring this book to where it is today. I am deeply grateful to my PhD adviser and mentor, Carol Stack, whose belief in the work, in the Madres, and in me encouraged me at many difficult points from the inception of the research through the completion of this book, and whose writing is an inspiration. Years out of graduate school and thousands of miles away, I would send Carol and Kysa every new chapter draft, and I relied on their thoughtful feedback as the work moved from dissertation to book. Of course, responsibility for any errors in judgment or interpretation is mine alone.

Monetary support for my research came from the James Irvine Foundation, the Spencer Research Training Fellowship, and the University of California Regents/Dean’s Normative Time Fellowship. I am especially grateful to Craig McGarvey, then a program officer at the James Irvine Foundation, for encouraging me to submit the grant that first funded the work of Madres Unidas and for affirming the principles of participatory research in the grant-making process. An early result of the research supported by this grant was a video documentary, the production of which contributed greatly to my own analysis of the data. I owe much to my associate producer and video editor, Jennifer Ho, who encouraged me to record the teachers’ testimonies that later found their way into this book and whose insightful questions and suggestions sharpened my own thinking about this story. I am grateful to Alfred Hernández, our video instructor, whose patience, good humor, and skill as a teacher gave the mothers and me the confidence to undertake this new technology. I especially appreciate the individual staff members at the new small school and partnering community organizations who supported our research and helped make it possible: I cannot name them here, but they know who they are.

In the field of anthropology of education, I am indebted to several godmothers and godfathers who, through the example of their own work and their support of mine, helped make this book possible. Sofia Villenas and Janise Hurtig, collaborating with me on a panel at the meetings of the American Anthropological Association in 2003, first made me aware that I had something important to say for the field, and they have encouraged me ever since. The humility, respect, and feminist praxis with which they approach their own work with Latina mothers have inspired me, and their comments on several versions of this manuscript have been helpful beyond measure. I am grateful to Doug Foley and Bradley Levinson for their leadership in support of activist research and for their encouragement in publishing my work.

This is a book about mothers, and so it is fitting that maternity leave finally allowed me the time to complete it. I wrote the bulk of this manuscript while on maternity leave and living in El Salvador with my husband and baby daughter. Experiencing motherhood for the first time and living in El Salvador (not for the first time) gave me new lenses through which to understand the mothers’ experience. I am grateful to my daughter, Sofia Elena, for showing me what is worth fighting for at all costs and for the new reserves of joy and hope her life has given me. My time in El Salvador also brought me face-to-face with the conditions and struggles that cause so many to migrate, and so I offer this story with renewed respect and admiration for immigrants. In El Salvador I relied on the help of a nanny and housecleaner, Angela, whose careful attention to Sofia allowed me to write this book in peace and who taught me much about El Salvador.

I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge my family, the people most responsible for my own wholeness as a person, a scholar, and an activist. I am indebted to my parents, William and Grace, for the example of a life rooted in faith, love, and joy, and for the natural expression of solidarity and activism that shaped me from my earliest days. And to my husband, friend, and colleague, Enrique Sepúlveda, who has been my sounding board, inspiration, sage, who together with our daughter has reminded me why this book is worth doing.