6. En Confianza
LESSONS FOR EDUCATORS ON WORKING FOR CHANGE WITH IMMIGRANT PARENTS
On a sunny spring day in a leafy annex of the university campus, a conference room fills with professors and graduate students, and a few community members from local nonprofit organizations, who have come to hear about parent participatory research in new small schools. Sitting behind a long table at the front of the room, with water glasses and filled pitchers in front of them, Amelia, Baudelia, and Carmen are dressed in their best formal attire. Baudelia looks elegant in a black suit, her hair pinned fashionably behind her head. Amelia is wearing a pretty lavender sweater, and, for perhaps only the second time since I have known her, has applied makeup. Carmen is wearing a pressed white blouse and pearl earrings. Looking at them waiting for their presentation to begin, one would never know that they have never done this before.
An hour and a half later, we emerge into the sunshine outside, laughing and congratulating each other on our performance. Relieved that it is over, and elated at their accomplishment, the mothers tease each other about the painful moments of preparation and rehearsing. They excitedly recount humorous or tense moments in the presentation—a minor slipup, laughter from the audience at their video, Baudelia’s dramatic hand gestures—like actors reveling backstage after a show. Tonight, they will be at home with their families, presiding over rituals of homework, dinner, bath, and bedtime, and life will resume pretty much as it has been. But something is different. Even as they put their children to bed, the mothers cradle new images of themselves in their minds. They see themselves in the conference room as speakers, professionals, experts; and they nurse the memory like a precious secret.
“At first it was horrible” (“al principio era horrible”), recalled Carmen later, about the lead-up to their first presentation:
Yo tenía mucho temor desde que empezamos acá la práctica, era para mí era como que ¡oy!, como que yo me iba a desmayar, me temblaban las piernas, yo pensaba que realmente no iba a poder. Pero por pensar en que tú creíste en nosotros … Entonces si tú dices que sí, más yo tengo que poner mi esfuerzo. Pues yo digo si tú crees en mí, ¿cómo yo no voy a creer en mí misma? Entonces por eso es que yo hacía y he tratado de superarme.
I was so afraid from the time we started practicing [in Ofelia’s house], it was like ¡Oy! Like I was going to faint. My legs shook, and I thought that I really was not going to be able to do it. But to think that you [Andrea] believed in us … So, if you say I can, I’ve got to put in my effort. I said if you believe in me, how am I not going to believe in myself? So, that’s why I did it and I’ve tried to overcome my fears.
For Carmen, the fact of somebody else believing in her was important in triggering her own self-confidence, in giving her the will to “put in my effort.” Once she made the effort, however, the experience of presenting successfully made her realize that she had the abilities within herself. As she explained: “Y después, cuando ya acabó la conferencia, ¡uy! era como dije yo, si ahora yo pude hacer esto, ¡ya puedo hacer más! Y sentí también como que éramos bien importantes todas, porque habíamos ido a la universidad” (And afterwards, when the conference was over, wow! It was like I said, if I could do that, now I can do more! And I also felt that we were all very important, because we had gone to the university).
The experience of presenting at the university, at a conference on the topic Popular Education and Participatory Research, was transformative for the Madres. Initially reticent and uncertain of their abilities, they had prepared painstakingly. They had never participated in a conference before, and, with the exception of Baudelia, who had given testimony at OCCA actions, none of them had public speaking experience. They were particularly worried about how they would field questions from the audience. What if people ask us questions we can’t answer? they asked me. My attempts to reassure them seemed useless, and our first and only rehearsal, in Ofelia’s living room, dissolved in chaos. I began to wonder if it was really such a good idea to ask them to do something that seemed to only add stress to their already stressful lives. But on that spring morning, encouraged by the warmth of a supportive audience, the mothers relaxed into the personalities I knew them to be and delivered their presentations with grace and flair.
By the time they invited questions from the audience—the part they had worried about beforehand—the mothers seemed to be positively enjoying themselves. Rather than catching them off guard, the questions allowed them to exhibit their leadership and expertise, and they relished the opportunity. Carmen, who had claimed to be “only a housewife,” became an authority on how to conduct interviews with parents, while Amelia, who had also worried she would faint, was indulging in telling humorous stories from her experience as a researcher. The more the audience laughed, the more stories the mothers would dig up, as if finally realizing what rich experience they had.
Our first presentation together revealed several lessons about the products of participatory research and the hard-won changes Madres Unidas achieved that will be the focus of this chapter. In their efforts to take their research public, and to use their new knowledge to make change, Madres Unidas publicly challenged controlling of images of Latina mothers that sought to limit their roles in reform and enacted new identities as experts, advocates, and agents of change. But in order to be seen differently by their children’s teachers and other professionals, the mothers first had to see themselves differently. Creating change at their children’s school and beyond depended on a transformation that was as much personal as political, and illustrated the third-world feminist insight that in order to transform social structures, we must first transform ourselves (hooks 1989).1 As Carmen’s story testifies, her newly developed self-image as something more than “a housewife” came hand in hand with an increased capacity to intervene effectively in the public world—speaking at conferences, and later, opening and running a parent center at the school—and none of these changes came without a struggle. Professionals, I learned—whether teachers, organizers, reformers, or university researchers—had a key role to play in this transformation. They could support it, sometimes as simply as by providing a respectful audience for the new researchers. Or they could obstruct it, by refusing to recognize the mothers as change agents. But once the struggle was under way, they could never fully stop it. In the remainder of this chapter, I describe how the mothers sought to educate professionals at their children’s school about parents’ needs, insights, and values, and how they used their own stories of change to make change possible for others. I end with a series of lessons for educators on working for change with immigrant parents.
“If They Were Interested, They Would Have Come”
The day after our conference presentation at the university, Baudelia, Carmen, Amelia, and I make our way through the crowded hallways of a local public high school, where another conference is under way. The event is the annual Small Schools Conference, sponsored by BACEE and OCCA, and the people bustling to and fro are teachers, parents, and reformers interested in new small schools. The mothers and I find our way to our assigned classroom, where we are to present in a workshop session called “The Parent Experience.” That this is their second conference presentation and the locale seems considerably less formal than the university helps put the mothers at ease. They greet Martha, the OCCA organizer, and some other parents outside our classroom.
Two doors down from our classroom, I spot Marie, the principal, and several teachers from UCS waiting for another workshop to begin. I pop in to say hello, and to find out if they know that Madres Unidas is presenting down the hallway. There had been a room change at the last minute, and many people did not receive the program insert indicating the correct room for our workshop. But it turns out the teachers intend to be where they are, and they show only a vague and polite interest in hearing that the Madres are presenting two doors down. A man dressed formally in a suit stands at the front of the room, holding handouts, clearly the presenter. I ask the teachers which workshop this is and Yvonne tells me, “Paradoxes of School Change.”
In the weeks before our two conference presentations, Madres Unidas spent hours poring over our data, selecting and analyzing the most important themes, and debating how to present sensitive and controversial findings to an audience that might include their children’s teachers. The issue of how to take our findings public was of some anxiety to the Madres and myself, and also of considerable political importance to UCS’s staff and reform partners. I had already been cautioned on more than one occasion by BACEE and OCCA staff to avoid publicly naming the conflicts at UCS because of the fragility of the new small schools and the larger reform movement. Two weeks before the small schools conference, I met with Martha, from OCCA, at a café to discuss our workshop presentation, which was also to include OCCA parents from two other small schools. During that meeting, I shared my concerns with Martha that many of the Madres’ findings touched on areas of conflict between teachers and parents, and risked offending the UCS teachers. Martha was thoughtful and asked for examples of some of the things that might cause controversy. We discussed at length the issue of the student selection process and the violations that the Madres had discovered. In the end, Martha said it was important to name the conflicts, because, in her words, “it is their [the parents’] community.” Since this workshop was on the parent experience in starting new small schools, it was important for teachers to hear from the parents about the effects of their actions on the community.
But on that Saturday as we gathered in the classroom of Bridgemont High, the small group of people in the audience were mostly parents. Although we had been informed that all of UCS’s teachers were attending the conference, and we had informed them about our workshop, not one of them came to hear Madres Unidas. Carmen, Baudelia, and Amelia (Ofelia was recovering from surgery) engaged in an informal discussion with other parents, which Martha facilitated.
As we walked to the car afterwards, the mothers expressed their dismay that the teachers had not come to their presentation. Amelia was the first to comment on it. She told us, “Si ellas me preguntan cómo nos fue, yo les voy a decir que si les interesaba, hubieran venido” (If they ask me how it went, I’m going to tell them that if they were interested, they would have come). In her view, the teachers’ failure to show up revealed a lack of interest in the parents’ work. Baudelia, too, thought it was inexcusable that not a single teacher had cared to come. Wouldn’t they want to hear what the parents were saying about their school? she wondered.
I wondered, too. I had hoped that the Madres’ presenting in a professional venue such as the small schools conference—one that was recognized and respected by the teachers, as evidenced by their attendance at the last small schools conference—would elevate their status in the school and lend credibility to their work among teachers. Perhaps the teachers’ refusal to come to their workshop was a refusal to grant them that credibility, a refusal to view them as professionals. Or perhaps the teachers didn’t want to hear what the parents had to say, because they were afraid of facing their conflicts. More likely than not, the teachers suspected that there would be nothing new in the Madres’ presentation: that it would be the same griping they had been hearing Monday through Friday for the past several months. Why should they listen to it on a Saturday when they had come to a professional conference to hear something new, something they could learn from?
Although our small schools conference presentation failed to attract the attention of UCS teachers, it helped to develop the Madres’ public speaking confidence, and their awareness that their roles as “experts” would not be easily recognized by their children’s teachers. Even when they spoke in a professional venue that was respected by the teachers, their presentation was not chosen by a single teacher as worth attending. “If they were interested,” as Amelia said, “they would have come.”
“I Don’t Want Another Tostada Meeting”
While those of us who are based in the university often debate whether and how to use our research to promote change, for Madres Unidas, making change was the purpose of undertaking research on their children’s school. As they said repeatedly, they hoped that their research would help correct problems at the school and enable the school to fulfill its promise of change. Throughout our research, the Madres demonstrated the seamless relationship between research and action that is at the heart of participatory research, but nowhere was this more evident than in the planning of our research products.
The concern about how to address the problems they identified emerged early in the research when Carmen observed that her first parent focus group had been “almost all complaints.” In her reflection after the focus group, she had written, “This really worries me, because we’re going to bring the problems to light, but we can’t resolve them right now.” While the mothers were heartened by stories they heard indicating that the school was making a difference in the lives of some children, they were troubled by the continuing pattern of excluding parent voice, and they felt a personal responsibility to the parents who shared stories of pain and exclusion. As they debriefed, analyzed, and shared stories in Ofelia’s kitchen, the question was always raised, “What can we do about this?”
The Madres decided on two main action items intended to change the relationship between teachers and parents at the school. The first was a presentation to the school staff of their research process and findings, at the end of the school year. If teachers would not come to their public presentations, they would bring their presentation to them. The second was the opening of a parent center at the new small school. As products of their research, both the presentation and the parent center assumed special significance for the mothers as expressions of their transformation and their aspirations for the school and their children. Through both products, the Madres attempted to extend the practices of testiminio and confianza, key to their own transformation, from the intimacy of Ofelia’s kitchen to the school and to establish new forms of community in the school. Their efforts to carry out these actions, and the responses of professionals, reveal the obstacles Latina mothers face and the unique strategies they deploy in their pursuit of social justice.
In planning the presentation for their children’s teachers, the Madres faced a challenge professional social-science researchers rarely undertake: that of sharing their findings with their research subjects, face-to-face, along with their critical analysis. As Baudelia reflected in our video, “Yo creo que a veces el riesgo de hacer una investigación es que la gente no entiende cuál es el objetivo de que nosotros estemos allí, o no entiende, puede malinterpretarse nuestra investigación. Puede ser que digan, ‘Están tratando de buscar lo malo nada más’ ” (I think that sometimes the risk of doing research is that people don’t understand what our objective is, why we are there, they don’t understand, or they can misinterpret our research. They can say, “They’re just out to find the bad and nothing else”). The charge that the mothers were only out to find the negative—central to the controlling image of the “angry parent”—had resurfaced with a vengeance as word got out of their upcoming presentation to the staff.
Martha from OCCA had met with me to share her concern that Madres Unidas were “too far ahead” of the rest of the parents and would isolate themselves in the school. She was particularly concerned about the anger the mothers expressed at parent meetings, which she felt was alienating them from teachers and other parents. Amelia especially, Martha told me, was “too angry,” and was becoming difficult to listen to. Martha wanted me to work with Madres Unidas to encourage them to talk to other parents. Although the censorship of anger was a well-established pattern at UCS, as discussed in chapter 4, I was a bit surprised to hear this critique coming from OCCA, given the role of parent anger at OCCA actions. I told Martha that from my perspective, Amelia’s anger represented a new and promising confidence, considering that she never used to speak up at all. But Martha was worried that if our presentation to the staff took an angry tone, it might do more to divide the parents and close down discussion at the school. I agreed, and told her that this was a serious concern of the mothers.
Madres Unidas wanted nothing more than for their research to be a positive force for change at the school, to stimulate dialogue and reflection that would break through the impasse of the past year. As Baudelia explained, “Nuestro objetivo siempre fue descubrir para mejorar, para hacer planes de acciones, para ver de qué manera pudiéramos mejorar y de evitar lo malo que estaba sucediendo” (Our objective was always to discover in order to improve, to make action plans, to see how we might improve and avoid the bad things that were happening). But Martha’s urging me to discipline the Madres was revealing of several factors that shaped professionals’ responses to our research. The first was their tendency to hold me responsible for the actions of Madres Unidas at the school, thereby denying the Madres any agency or legitimacy in their own right. Like the principal’s request for me to work with the Madres after the infamous “tostada meeting,” Martha expressed her concern to me with Amelia’s “excessive” anger, as if I could or should do something about this. Amelia’s anger, or Angry Amelia, was a problem. Presumably, she was a problem that I, as another professional, could help solve. But in no instance was she someone whose anger deserved to be confronted. Martha’s warning about the mothers’ anger also revealed the common pattern of professionals assuming negative intentions. Why was the assumption that the mothers wanted to divide or hurt the school? Couldn’t the Madres be angry because they wanted the best for the school and their children? And while there were certainly some parents who disapproved of the mothers’ outspoken habits and preferred to stay silent in parent meetings, why was their behavior not seen as worrisome?
Finally, Martha’s concerns revealed professionals’ commitment to defending organizational interests that could not accommodate any agenda for change apart from their own. Martha wanted me to go about things as an organizer would, encouraging the mothers to talk to other parents (apparently, the focus groups and interviews and daily conversations they had with parents were not sufficient) and channel their energy collectively in a public action at the school or district. While participatory research empowers participants to take action—in whatever form they choose—to address the problems they identify, organizing trains participants to build a movement.2 In the planning of our presentation to the UCS staff, it became increasingly clear that Martha did not understand or support participatory research, and would try to assert an organizing agenda on the Madres’ presentation.
We also received advice about our presentation from two BACEE school coaches, or “school change facilitators,” who worked with the school. Their task was “to work with leaders in the school community to articulate their vision for a high achieving and equitable school” and to support leaders in implementing this vision.3 The two BACEE coaches were part of a “Support Providers Team” that met with the principal every two weeks. At the principal’s invitation, I had participated in these meetings on two or three occasions, but the coaches had never met the Madres, and, as I soon discovered, they understood very little about our work.
Madres Unidas knew about the presence of BACEE in the school and believed that we needed the support of BACEE and OCCA to pull off a successful presentation to the staff. So, in mid-April we scheduled a meeting with the two BACEE coaches and Martha from OCCA, to discuss our research findings and enlist their help in preparing our presentation. This was the Madres’ first attempt to work with the school’s reform partners to counter controlling images that circulated at the school and speak “the truth” about their experience.
We met at Ofelia’s house on a weekday evening. Carolina and Carmen, who had a new job at a nursing home, had both had to get excused from work in order to be there. Ofelia and Amelia had made child-care arrangements so that we could meet uninterrupted. The meeting lasted nearly three hours and contained much rich discussion. Here, I will highlight those aspects that illustrate the coaching agendas of BACEE and OCCA for the Madres’ presentation. I will also show how the Madres utilized the meeting for their own ends: to strengthen their own professional credibility and to project an image of themselves that challenged what the professionals wanted for them. In this way they both appropriated and subverted the professionals’ agendas for their own purposes.
To all of our surprise, Martha had arrived with Lucia, an OCCA parent organizer from another school, and offered no introductions or explanation for why she was there. The mothers later fumed that Lucia’s presence and behavior in the meeting were inappropriate, and that she had been brought specifically to challenge Baudelia’s role in the school. Indeed, as the Madres explained our research process and major findings to the coaches, Lucia would repeatedly jump in to argue with the findings, singling out Baudelia for questioning and debate. Baudelia explained that these were just some examples, and that we could go on forever, but we wanted their advice on how we could present them in a positive way to the school. She said we also had some positive findings to share. Then Martha said, “I would like to hear something positive right now.” I suggested the case of Sr. Romero, a single father raising three daughters on his own, and Carmen volunteered his story: how this father has received special attention and care from the staff. Lucia asked loudly, “Can that really be the only positive thing you’ve found in all this research?” “No!” we all said.
Baudelia immediately listed a series of positive findings (we had prepared this list at a previous meeting, and she had it in front of her), including positive commentaries about the teachers, better treatment from the office staff, and more. But Lucia persisted, lecturing Baudelia about the need to talk to more parents, telling her, “Tu liderazgo ha bajado” (Your leadership has dropped). Baudelia explained that we have focused on the negative in this meeting because that is what we need the most help with. She said it was never our intention to hurt the school or anyone in the school, that they wanted what’s best for the children. “What can we do so that these problems don’t continue?” she asked. Here Baudelia reminded the guests that we had invited them specifically to help us figure out how to address the negative findings in a constructive way. And she reminded them that the mothers’ ultimate interest was in seeing these problems solved.
Cynthia, from BACEE, then addressed the group, asking, “What kind of feedback do you want from us right now?” I translated for the parents, and Ofelia immediately responded, in careful English: “How did you feel listening to all of this?”
There was a momentary pause, as if the question had caught Cynthia by surprise. Then she responded, saying she had two things to say. First: “I am very proud of you” for doing all of this work and for “caring so much about your kids.” Her voice broke and she stopped, wiping tears from her eyes. The room was silent, and she composed herself and continued. “I hear your sadness and frustration, and that hurts.” She said the tragedy was that everybody in the school came together because they wanted to help the kids, so what went wrong? Baudelia and Ofelia nodded, but Amelia asked for translation, so I translated. Cynthia then said that she also heard the teachers’ voice on the other side of her head, and she could imagine what they would say, that they have worked so hard, and so on.
Cynthia said that when she heard the Madres as a teacher, she got defensive. She pointed out the places where teachers could critique our research: the parents should be careful about adding their personal experience to the research, making it clear when they’re talking about something that happened to them or something they learned from an interview. She counseled parents to separate their personal experiences from the research, and to depersonalize the presentation. In this way, Cynthia affirmed the positivist paradigm that holds personal experiences as less valid than “objective” data, the very paradigm participatory research was meant to dismantle (Park 1993; Gaventa 1993). Cynthia gave several more pointers, saying that the Madres should start with the warm feedback, the things the teachers do well. Thank the teachers for their efforts, and thank them for listening to what you have to say. Since Madres Unidas didn’t have a trusting relationship with the teachers, they had to be careful how they phrased things. Using humorous examples, Cynthia explained the importance of framing critique as questions. The mothers listened attentively, laughing and nodding in agreement. They welcomed any advice that would help them be heard by the teachers.
At certain points, however, Cynthia’s coaching strayed from stylistic suggestions for the presentation and challenged their analysis. For example, when the mothers discussed how the principal had betrayed the parents’ trust, Cynthia defended her, saying she “is a Latina principal with an almost entirely white staff.” We had discussed this issue before, and the parents felt the bizarreness of a situation in which the label of “Latina” was used to protect the principal from their own—Latina mothers’—critique. In the discussion that ensued, Cynthia revealed her refusal to accept the mothers’ analysis, offering her own interpretive lens, which flatly denied the reality of the mothers’ experience at the school.
Cynthia said that the Madres should have three outcomes in mind for the presentation: (1) to bridge the gap with the other parents, (2) to visualize what the school would look like in an ideal world, and (3) to create a vision that has student achievement at the center. The need to honestly communicate the parents’ pain and the truth of the history they had uncovered was not included in this vision. In fact, the coaches urged the Madres not to dwell on “the past,” but to look forward, toward the future. This reflected BACEE’s coaching agenda for schools. In a private meeting with me, Cynthia had emphasized the need to be “objective,” telling me she did not take sides in “adult politics and squabbles,” because the only thing that mattered was student achievement. In this way, the coaches urged the Madres to be team players, for the sake of community. They encouraged a sanitized presentation that would protect the staff (and the partners) from personal stress and public embarrassment.
The Madres were not discouraged by this advice. On the contrary, they embraced much of the coaching as useful in their struggle to represent themselves as positive, credible researchers, and they eagerly added the new wisdom to their repository of professional skills and capacities. As Ofelia reflected later, “Nos ayudó mucho juntarnos con BACEE. Los consejos que nos daban eran impresionante. ¡Yo de ellos aprendí un montón!” (It really helped us to meet with BACEE. The advice they gave us was impressive. I learned a lot from them!). As we will see, they incorporated the advice they saw as helpful, and ignored the rest.
Between the first meeting with the coaches and our presentation at the school, we lost two members of our group. Carmen went to El Salvador for three weeks to visit her mother and son, amid much excitement. On a sadder note, Carolina was hospitalized after a sudden illness. Although she recovered, she remained under the care of family members in a neighboring city and never rejoined our group. We missed her greatly. As we prepared for the presentation, we were a small, sad, and somewhat subdued group.
The coaches had asked for one more meeting with the Madres to prepare the agenda for the presentation, and they wanted the principal to be present. They thought it was important for her to know as much as possible about the presentation beforehand. When I told this to the Madres, Baudelia remarked, “Yo siento que ellos apoyan a Ms. Campos” (I feel that [the coaches] support [the principal]). Indeed, while the BACEE coaches officially maintained a neutral position in the school, they met regularly with the principal and with the staff, but never with parents. The Madres were apprehensive about including the principal in the meeting to approve our agenda. As we talked about it, they arrived at a firm resolve to maintain control of the presentation, regardless of what the coaches or the principal said. We decided to begin the presentation with a discussion of confianza, in which we would explain to the staff the meaning of the word for us and what it had allowed us as a group to accomplish, and invite them into confianza. It was only in confianza that the truth could be spoken, and if confianza did not exist, then the mothers would try to create it. Confianza, then, became the key that enabled the mothers to maintain control: to be themselves, as Baudelia had once said, and to hold on to their own goals for the presentation.
At the start of the meeting with Marie, each person shared her hopes and fears for the upcoming presentation. Baudelia said she hoped the presentation would bring confianza, and that teachers and parents would be able to work openly together. Amelia hoped parents and teachers would be able to understand the problem, and work together in confianza. Ofelia hoped the presentation would help everyone “learn from our mistakes,” and “learn to recognize our mistakes.” Her fear, she said, was simple: “La verdad duele” (The truth hurts).
Marie’s fear was expressed by invoking a previous painful event. She said, “I don’t want another tostada meeting.” Her reference to the infamous meeting at Ofelia’s house that had left two teachers in tears indexed the tensions simmering below the surface that threatened to boil over if the forbidden subjects were broached. It was an implicit warning to the Madres that the teachers would not hear them if they approached matters as they had in the past.
As we moved forward to discuss the agenda, I had expected our biggest opposition to come from Marie. Instead, it came from Martha. We were discussing how to involve the teachers in planning our next steps, when Martha suddenly exploded. “What do you mean, ‘next steps’? Isn’t this research over?” She directed her outrage at me, yelling in English and Spanish that she had been waiting patiently for this to finish so that Baudelia could come back to organizing. She said we had promised that this would not become an “organization,” but it looked like we were becoming one. “Madres Unidas sounds like an organization!” she cried. And she told us that none of us would be there if it weren’t for OCCA. Martha’s outburst reflected her belief that the Madres’ research was a distraction from the “real” (legitimate) change-work of organizing. It may also have reflected the belief that the mothers, apart from OCCA, were not capable of making change.
I told Martha that any future steps would be taken in consultation with OCCA, but for now, it wasn’t fair to rob the mothers of the opportunity to plan a productive presentation (what Martha had claimed to want). In the silence that followed, only Ofelia dared to speak up. She addressed Martha directly, saying that this wasn’t a competition, and reminding her that they all wanted unity in the school community. Furthermore, she said, “We don’t care what name we work under, whether it’s BACEE or OCCA or Madres Unidas, we just want to help our children’s school!” Her reminder was a poignant critique of the organizational politics that tried to stifle their work for change.
We received two final cautions in the remainder of the meeting. The first, from Marie, warned that we should expect questions from the teachers about why we had not involved any non-Latina mothers on the team. As a group of Spanish-speaking mothers, Madres Unidas did not reflect the school as a whole, she said, and teachers would want to know why we didn’t include any Chinese, African American, or Bosnian parents on the team.4 Madres Unidas had already seen how the claims of diversity and integration could become grounds to exclude Latino parents. Now, at the moment when they began to assert their collective voice, the Madres were told that a solely Spanish-speaking parent voice was not welcome. They were expected to produce an integrated parent voice or no voice at all.
The final caution came from Cynthia, one of the BACEE coaches. She told us that teachers should not be expected to sit quietly through a one-hour presentation, and suggested that the Madres build in pauses to give the teachers a chance to respond. We discussed this as a group later, and decided against it. We opted instead for a structured discussion after the presentation. We all believed that if we let the teachers talk before the parents were finished, we would never get through the presentation. Furthermore, I remarked, parents were regularly expected to sit quietly through hour-long meetings at the school, during parent meetings when the staff talked at them. Why was it too much to expect teachers to listen to parents?
Armed with the advice of many coaches, the stories of all the parents, students, and teachers they had interviewed, and their own determination to be heard, Madres Unidas prepared to tell the truth to their children’s teachers.
The Presentation
At the end of the school day, on a warm afternoon in late May, the classrooms are empty of children, chairs stacked on tables, with the exception of one. In that room, Ofelia, Baudelia, and Amelia, dressed elegantly in spring clothes, are hurriedly preparing for the arrival of their children’s teachers. They have arranged a lavish spread of food on one table: vegetables and dip, fruit salad, taquitos, crackers and cheese, bottles of juice and soda (in case the teachers want caffeine). The TV and VCR are set up at the front of the room, ready to show the Madres’ video.
As the Madres finish arranging, the teachers begin entering the room, in twos, threes. They are exhausted after a long day and survey the room anxiously, as if trying to deduce what this meeting will expect from them. Several of them light up at the sight of food, and exclaim gratefully to the Madres as they help themselves to plates of snacks. But the room is quieter than usual as the teachers take their seats, and it’s hard to know who is more anxious about this presentation: the parents or the teachers. They have never come together in this way before. Amelia, Ofelia, and Baudelia take their places at the front of the room and resolutely draw up their professional selves. This is the moment they have been waiting for.
“I sort of felt this sense of anxiety,” recalled Yvonne, a bilingual teacher, later. “Not a lot, just a little bit, sort of, ‘Oh, what are they going to tell us?’ ’Cause we knew there had been miscommunications and mistakes that we had made and—we felt like there were better ways to get off to a year at a new school. So I was sort of feeling like, hmmm, so here’s the other perspective, what are they going to tell us?” But the anxiety dissipated as she watched the presentation. “I remember feeling after the presentation so incredibly appreciative of all the work that they did … I just remember feeling, my God, that’s the most incredible thing that’s happened at the school this year!”
As Yvonne’s story testifies, the Madres’ approach succeeded in earning the teachers’ respect and support for their process. Despite the advice they had received from BACEE to “depersonalize” the presentation, the mothers were convinced that they had to speak from the heart, that the only way to communicate these difficult truths was to make it clear how much they cared about them. They structured the presentation in a way that would allow the teachers to see and experience some of the emotion that they as parents had felt during the research. At my suggestion, they selected some of their personal reflections to read aloud to the teachers after presenting the “data” around each theme. These written reflections were powerful and eloquent testimonies about why the research mattered to them. Importantly, they introduced their testimonies by explaining the confianza in Madres Unidas that had nurtured these reflections, and inviting the staff to enter into their confianza. They shared with the staff about their process in Ofelia’s kitchen, describing the food and the jokes and the learning experiences they had shared as new researchers.
The Madres showed video clips, summarized the findings, and shared their reflections around several different themes, including the advantages of a small school, dedicated teachers, the different perspectives between teachers and parents on the founding of the school, the selection of students, autonomy, and parent voice. Following the BACEE coaches’ advice to start with positive findings, or “warm feedback,” they clustered heart-warming stories from students and parents at the front of the presentation. Teachers laughed and cooed at video of their students explaining class projects. When the Madres arrived at points of conflict between teachers and parents, teachers listened to the Madres’ reflections with rapt attention. The mothers ended with a discussion of obstacles and their reflections on the research process. They then passed out a list of questions for reflection and discussion (see Appendix), and asked the teachers to break into small groups to discuss the questions. The room buzzed with conversation as teachers discussed the questions, and when the Madres called the group back together, some groups were reluctant to stop talking.
The opportunity to see parents in a new light was powerful for many teachers. As Susan testified later, “I was just like, wow. They’re so awesome—I’ve never had the opportunity to see this person in this light. Maybe she goes around in her personal life all the time like this, but I’ve never seen her this way and that was really fun for me.” Laurie, a bilingual teacher, told the Madres after the presentation, “I’m so impressed with your questions. We teachers have many of the same questions.” Linda said, “I’m glad you haven’t lost so much confianza that you don’t want to keep working with us.” And she added, “When can we meet again to discuss next steps? I know you have lots of ideas for what to do, and we want to hear them.”
Teachers testified that they appreciated the opportunity, so rare in their daily lives, to see things from the parents’ perspective. As Rachel said, “I think that we get really involved in what we’re doing as teachers, that there’s always the danger of becoming a separate entity from the parents and to become very isolated and to have this kind of insulated perspective … so I think it’s really important and healthy for us as a school to have a chance always to listen to what the parents are seeing.” Some insights were surprising. Susan remarked, “I learned from that meeting that … the group of moms had a perspective about how the enrollment process was conducted that may have been different from the teachers’ perspective. And there were some issues there that I wasn’t aware were still so present in the minds of the parents.” As Yvonne said, “It was a really good lesson for us … to get some feedback, but also just to see what they’ve been doing without us.”
The mothers’ presentation revealed that parents could be and were very different outside of the school, and had ways of being in community that the school could learn from. Teachers testified that they were moved by the mothers’ courage and honesty. As Laurie told me later in an interview:
I was really impressed with their honesty … the honesty with which they presented what they had found. They touched on issues that people—staff in general—have been dancing around but not willing to confront … And I was thinking, “I wish the staff would learn to do this the way this group of mothers has.”
The Madres provided a model and a forum for engaging in this kind of conversation, Yvonne observed: “I think that format, especially having parents in that role, has really helped, at least for some of the staff to be able to talk about some things that don’t have a venue at this point.” Similarly, Rachel remarked, “There were some difficult conversations that came out of it, but it was presented in such a positive framework and it really felt like the mothers were being very honest with us and were framing things in a way that was very constructive and would … move this school forward.” Perhaps most surprising to the Madres, Marie, the principal, thanked the parents for their honesty, and wondered how we could make it possible for more parents to engage in this research.
Madres Unidas had succeeded in bringing the confianza they developed in Ofelia’s kitchen—based on sincerity, honesty, and respect—to their presentation at the school. Ruth Trinidad Galván (2006) writes, “Good pedagogy, like everyday living, consists of making present our entire selves” (173). In being present in their wholeness, exposing the intellectual, emotional, relational, and spiritual foundations of their work together, the Madres modeled a mujerista approach to learning and community at their children’s school.
Only one voice of disapproval marred the mothers’ presentation. It was Martha’s. She argued that “the role of organizing didn’t come out in the presentation,” and that OCCA was not mentioned enough. “The danger of not recognizing the role of organizing,” she said, “is that you need power to make change, and OCCA is a powerful organization.” This was the clearest statement of her belief that parents were incapable of making change without OCCA. Now, voiced in the angry tone that it was, it communicated the message to the parents that “you’re either with us or you’re against us.” As one of the mothers observed later, “That sounds like a threat.” The mothers later pondered why OCCA was so unwilling to recognize their research, suspecting that perhaps it was “envidia” (envy). But in the euphoria after the presentation, and the excitement of having won the support of the teachers to push forward with their ideas, the mothers were not long deterred.
A Second Home for Parents
On a cold January morning, Amelia is on duty at the parent center. The classroom has now been fully outfitted, and looks bright and cheerful. New, colorful rugs cover the floors, and festive papel picado, Mexican paper decorations, are hung around the room. Three Latina mothers come in to have a cup of coffee and “warm up.” The coffeemaker, Amelia tells me, remains on with coffee brewed, so parents can come in any time they want and have a cup of coffee. The mothers sit down at one of the big, round tables with their coffee and pastries, talking and laughing. They are talking about the latest parent workshop from the People’s Clinic. Then Angela, another mother, comes in with her toddler son, joking that she didn’t expect to find anyone here and she had come to change his diaper! She sets him up on one of the rugs and changes his diaper while participating in the conversation. About the workshop discussions she says, “Es bueno cuando uno puede salir de la rutina” (It’s good to get out of one’s routine). Then she asks the other mothers to watch her son while she goes to the bathroom.
The parent center, which had been a fantasy of the Madres from our earliest meetings, became real in the fall of 2002. When I observed this scene at the school more than a year after we had finished our research, I couldn’t help noticing how at home Amelia, and the other mothers, appeared. It struck me that this was one of their primary goals for the parent center. As Ofelia explained, “El Centro de Padres era un sueño de todos nosotros, del grupo Madres Unidas … porque vemos que un Centro de Padres es como un lugar donde los padres se sientan a gustos” (The parent center was a dream of all of ours, of the group Madres Unidas … because we see that a parent center is a place where parents feel at home). In a grant proposal they wrote collectively, the Madres articulated the center’s goals this way:
Our goal is for parents to be heard and feel part of the school, creating a family atmosphere where all families receive support … since one of our purposes is to orient, assist, involve, and motivate the parents, so that they participate actively in the school, and for the Parent Center to be a second home for them. (Emphasis added)
Plans for the parent center began immediately after the Madres’ presentation to the staff, when Linda and two other bilingual teachers volunteered to join the Madres on a committee to form and oversee the center. The group met throughout the summer and opened the center that fall in half of a resource classroom. Most encouragingly, they convinced the staff to designate space for the parent center in the plans for the new building, so, when the school moved into its beautiful new facilities in January 2004, the center had a classroom of its own.
The parent center had the twin goals of bringing parents into the school by offering them support and services, on the one hand, and training and development, on the other. First and foremost, it was a place for parents to drop in at any time, chat with other parents, and receive assistance and support in a variety of areas. With Carmen, Amelia, and Ofelia as its first volunteers, the center offered drop-in counseling, food and clothing, referrals to community and public services, and, in collaboration with local agencies, an impressive array of workshops on topics including domestic violence, immigration, and early childhood education. The Madres used their research skills to canvass local agencies and inquire about the services they provided, bringing these services to the school wherever possible. They continually surveyed parents at the school about what kinds of workshops they would like. As Amelia explained, “Los padres dicen como qué clase de taller quieren recibir. Y si está en nuestra alcance buscar el taller, lo buscamos para traer” (The parents tell us what kind of workshops they want. And if it’s within our reach to find it, we find it to bring to the school).
For Carmen and Amelia, who embraced the tasks of running the center with uncharacteristic fervor, the parent center signified newfound community and a place to try out new leadership roles in the school. Neither of them would call themselves “leaders” when asked, and would emphasize that they were still learning. Amelia would use the phrases “Me voy superando mi temor” (I’m overcoming my fears) and “Sigo adelante” (I keep moving forward) to explain that her journey was still in progress. The parent center was important precisely because it enabled them to learn and grow even as they helped others, and to see themselves as people who were changing and “moving forward.”
Carmen
For most of the year that Madres Unidas met, Carmen claimed she couldn’t write. It had been so long since she had been in school, she said, that her brain had gotten rusty. Her written reflections after research activities were short, but almost always packed with insightful observations and critique. Then, at the end of the year, she surprised me by handing me her autobiography, a stream-of-consciousness story of her life, ending with a nostalgic poem.5 We were putting together a grant application for the parent center, and the assignment was for each of them to write their “bios.” Carmen produced an autobiography. She said she hadn’t realized how interesting her life was until she wrote that, and she appreciated the opportunity to tell her story. The telling of one’s personal story can be a cathartic experience for many immigrant women (Hurtig 2005, 2008; Benmayor, Torruellas, and Juarbe 1997; Benmayor 1991). For Carmen, it was a chance to reflect on how far she had come since she left her hometown in El Salvador and to realize how strong the pull of “home” still was. She wrote: “I am 34 years old, I have two children, one thirteen and the other four, and I have my husband who has always supported me, and I feel fulfilled as a mother, wife, and woman. Only, I feel a lot of nostalgia and melancholy for my country.”6
Carmen was born in a small town in the department of Cuscatlán, El Salvador, the fourth of five children (Ofelia was the fifth). Her autobiography is a story of interrupted schooling and sacrifices to support her family, who struggled to survive in the absence of a father. The lines of gender are deeply drawn in Carmen’s story: after being abandoned by their father, the girls of the family had to work at an early age to support their mother and allow their brothers to go to school. Carmen left school after fifth grade so that her older brother could finish school. When she later had the opportunity to return to school, this same brother opposed it. “Everyone at home agreed that I should go back to school, except my brother,” she writes. “He said that to be a housewife I didn’t need to go to school, and that women are only good for having kids, washing and ironing.” However, Carmen did return to school and completed ninth grade in El Salvador.
When Carmen was nineteen she emigrated to the United States “against my will,” to join her older sister, Alicia, who was already working in Oakland. The family depended on Alicia’s remittances, and their mother decided Carmen needed to help take care of Alicia’s daughter. Once again, the needs of the family came before her own dreams. Carmen writes, “I always thought I wanted to be a teacher or a nurse, I never wanted to travel.” Once in the United States, she met her husband, took care of her niece, and had two children of her own. She tried to learn English, but this was difficult. “I went to three different schools,” she writes, “but all I could think about was returning to my country, so I think that’s why I didn’t learn very much.”
Education figures prominently in Carmen’s story. First, she remembers that it was denied her in El Salvador because she was a girl, and she had to struggle to achieve it through the ninth grade. Once in the United States, she volunteered in her niece’s classroom, and later in her son’s, every day for a total of eleven years. Presumably, she enjoyed working in the classroom because she had wanted to be a teacher as a child. When she came to Madres Unidas, then, Carmen brought vast educational experience, although her own formal schooling was limited. She also tried to return to school when her first son was nine—“I thought I could finally do something for myself”—when she was surprised by her second pregnancy. “This time I felt trapped by my own children.”
What emerges from her story is a hunger for learning and for opportunities to develop herself personally and professionally. Carmen often mentioned the importance of schooling in our Friday meetings, as something she felt she had missed out on. She greatly admired Baudelia’s eloquence and writing skills and often said this was where she could tell that Baudelia “had studied.” In the beginning, Carmen would use her lack of schooling as a disclaimer, claiming not to be able to do some things. When we prepared for our first conference presentation, extremely apprehensive and unsure of her ability to speak in public, she said to me apologetically, “Nosotras somos amas de casa, eso es lo que hacemos. Lo único que yo sé hacer sin nadie que me diga es cuidar a mi hijo” (We are housewives, that’s what we do. The only thing I know how to do without anyone telling me how is to take care of my son). At these times, Carmen seemed to revert to notions of womanhood her brother in El Salvador had upheld. But gradually, she transformed her limited educational experience from a personal liability into an opportunity for growth and change. When presented with new tasks that challenged her abilities, she would say, “I’m learning,” and “I’m going to learn.”
Carmen incorporated new skills with the enthusiasm of one who has waited her whole life to learn, and capitalized on her experience with Madres Unidas to expand in all areas of her life. When she went to El Salvador in April, she decided she wanted to interview the principal of her son’s school there, and the principal of the rural school she had attended as a girl. She asked me to go over her interview questions with her before she left. Her research skills were clearly valuable to her beyond the scope of our study at UCS. The year after our research, she and Ofelia were elected to serve as parent representatives on the hiring committee to select three new teachers for the following year. They received a special training at the district on how to interview candidates. Afterwards, Carmen told me that her experience with Madres Unidas had prepared her for this. When they instructed her on interview techniques, such as making eye contact with the interviewee, she felt proud because, she said, “I already knew that!”
For Carmen, Madres Unidas helped her realize “it’s never too late to learn,” and she could still achieve her girlhood dream of going back to school and getting a job she loved. For most of the year we met, Carmen worked as a housecleaner. Then, in the spring, she enrolled in a nursing program and was certified as a nurse’s assistant, and obtained a full-time job at a convalescent home. She found the courage, confidence, and perseverance to finally go after her dream, and she told me she directly attributed this career change to Madres Unidas:
Al estar viniendo a las juntas [de Madres Unidas] y saber de que uno todavía puede luchar, puede estudiar, este siempre yo quise ser una maestra o una enfermera, pero uno siempre quiere pero no hace nada. Entonces cuando yo empecé a venir a las juntas, volví otra vez a sentarme donde uno tiene que estar leyendo, y después vino la oportunidad de que yo fuera a la escuela, y entonces otra vez vino el temor de que las clases eran en inglés y que no iba a poder, y me acordé de lo que tú dijiste, que ¡uno sí puede si uno lucha! Entonces por eso es que yo siento también que esto me sirvió para yo ir a la escuela y ahora soy asistente de enfermería.
Coming to the meetings [with Madres Unidas] and realizing that you can still struggle, you can study, I always wanted to be a teacher or a nurse, but one always wants to and doesn’t do anything. So, then when I started coming to the meetings, I was once again in a setting where you had to be reading, and then the opportunity came for me to go back to school, and again came the fear that the classes were in English and I wasn’t going to be able to, [but] I remembered what you said, that you can if you try! So that’s why I feel that this helped me to go back to school and now I am a nurse’s assistant.
Once timid and afraid of talking to other parents, by the end of the year Carmen was a recognized parent leader. When Madres Unidas opened the parent center, Carmen was one of its key advocates. Carmen and Amelia organized the center’s first parent workshop series, on domestic violence prevention, in collaboration with a community health clinic. As a member of the parent committee overseeing the center, Carmen reported back to the staff and to other parents in general meetings on the affairs of the center. Carmen was also elected vice president of the school’s English Language Advisory Committee (ELAC), finally convened a year after the Madres discovered Samuel’s disheartening story.7 (Her sister, Ofelia, was elected secretary.)
In many ways, Carmen’s experience with Madres Unidas challenged her image of herself as a “normal mother” (“una madre normal”) and housewife (“ama de casa”). As she reflected, “I have gotten more courage, I’m not so afraid of people anymore! [Laughs] Because, before I could barely stand up from my seat to talk! … I used to think I would never be able to do many of the things that I’ve done now [in this research], I felt that I would never be able to do them” (taped interview, June 14, 2002). But her achievements must also be seen as part of her lifelong struggle to educate herself, and to reconcile the needs of her family with her own need for personal development and fulfillment. Being involved at UCS, through the parent center and Madres Unidas, enabled Carmen to support her son’s education at the same time that she educated herself: bringing in parent workshops that allowed other parents (and herself) the kind of learning she craved.
Amelia
Like Carmen, Amelia began the year with Madres Unidas unsure of her ability to contribute or do “research.” One of the oldest members of the group, Amelia had been in the United States for sixteen years when we started our research, and later told us she had not developed a single friendship. Often incredibly homesick, she spent the years cleaning houses, raising her children, but not, she said, participating in her children’s school: “A mí me invitaban a juntas en [Whitman Elementary School], yo no iba a las juntas. No me llamaban la atención, porque se habla de lo mismo y de lo mismo … Mejor me quedaba en la casa con mis hijos, ayudándoles con la tarea” (They invited me to the meetings at Whitman, I didn’t go. I wasn’t interested, because they talk about the same things over and over … I’d rather stay home with my children and help them with their homework). Amelia was one of the mothers whose transformation through Madres Unidas was the most dramatic, in the sense that it was most visibly apparent to everyone, including herself.
Amelia grew up in a small town in the western part of Guatemala, and, like Carmen and Ofelia, had nostalgic memories of a close-knit community: “Allí vivíamos, en un pueblito muy bonito, muy tranquilo, todos nos conocíamos, todos los vecinos. Y estábamos muy contentos” (We lived there, in a pretty little town [that was] very peaceful, we all knew each other, all the neighbors. And we were very happy). Her father was absent most of her childhood: first serving prison time for public drunkenness, and later away in the United States. As a result, Amelia started working at a young age to help her mother out: “Toda mi vida he trabajado” (All my life I have worked). “Mi mamá nos hacía arroz en leche, hacía tortillas a mano para salirlas a vender, y [yo] salía a vender con mis canastos de bananas, tamales, pan, todo” (My mom made us rice pudding, she made tortillas by hand for us to sell, and I went out to sell with my baskets of bananas, tamales, bread, everything).
The theme of sacrificing for the family, so prominent in Carmen’s story, was also central in Amelia’s life. Amelia pitched in to allow her two older brothers to go to school in the capital. But Amelia also went to school. As she announced proudly at the beginning of our interview, “Antes de venir a los Estados Unidos, yo en Guatemala estudiaba” (Before coming to the United States, I studied in Guatemala). Amelia completed secondary school and one year of Magisterio (the course of study for a teacher’s certificate in Guatemala after high school) to become a teacher, before dropping out to work full-time in her hometown. Then, at the age of twenty, she was enlisted by her family to emigrate to the United States. It was not her choice to go, but the family had already paid the coyote (smuggler of undocumented immigrants). Her sister was to have gone, and at the last minute ran away with her boyfriend. In order not to lose the money, Amelia was sent in her place.
Amelia now lives in an apartment in Fruitvale with her husband, from the same town in Guatemala, and their two children. She sends money—the money that she makes cleaning houses in Orinda—home to her mother every month. “Por eso yo sigo trabajando para seguirla ayudando a ella. Porque la necesidad que ella ha pasado, y no quiero que siga pasando la necesidad” (That’s why I keep working, to keep helping her. Because of the need she has experienced, and I don’t want her to keep facing need).
Amelia stepped into the role of researcher with some anxiety, but her reflections after her first research activities show how she embraced each opportunity to learn new skills: “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 being 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). A year later, Amelia was a recognized parent leader at her son’s school. Ofelia was amazed at the transformation she saw in Amelia and her sister through their work at the parent center:
Lo que más me impresiona a mí en lo personal es que ellas dos eran las mas calladas del grupo, las que menos opiniones o ideas tenían, decían que no podían … y ahora yo he visto que increíblemente ellas dos son las que han formado los talleres, han buscado la información, han hecho las llamadas a los padres, y ahora ellas son bien famosas, ya las reconocen en toda la escuela, siempre andan preguntando por ellas … y me siento bien orgullosa de ellas.
What most impresses me personally is that the two of them were the most quiet in the group, the ones who had the fewest opinions and ideas, they would say that they couldn’t … And now I have seen that, incredibly, the two of them are the ones who have organized the workshops, have sought the information, have made the phone calls to the parents. And now they are really famous, and they are recognized throughout the school, people always ask for them … I feel very proud of them.
As Amelia explains it, she has found new friends and new motivation through her work in Madres Unidas:
La verdad, yo no tenía amigas. Yo sólo miraba las personas, “Buenos días, Adiós,” nada más. No eran mis amigas, eran unas personas que miraba en la escuela diario. En cambio, con esta junta de Madres Unidas, tengo amigas que de veras no pensaba tenerlas. Si no hubiera participado, hubiera seguida lo mismo. Pero sí, por eso le doy gracias a Dios y al grupo que me dio la oportunidad, porque tengo amigas y tengo ahora como comunicarme con los demás padres.
The truth is, I didn’t have friends. I just looked at people—“Good morning, Good-bye,” nothing more. They weren’t my friends, they were people I saw at school every day. In contrast, with this group Madres Unidas, I have friends I never thought I would have. If I hadn’t participated, I would have continued as I was. But yes, for that I give thanks to God and to the group that gave me this opportunity, because I have friends and now I have a way to communicate with the other parents.
For Amelia, organizing the parent workshops was a way to take what she had gained from Madres Unidas to other parents: new friends, a community, a chance to learn, and motivation to participate in the school. As she said, the workshops are making a big difference, because more parents attend the workshops than the parent meetings. When I asked why, she said it was because they learn useful things and they get a chance to talk about issues that are important to them. That doesn’t happen at the school’s parent meetings, she said:
[Los padres] quieren sacar lo que está pasando con su niño o con algún miembro del personal de la escuela y no pueden. Tienen que poner su queja en una caja y no decirla frente de todo el público, y yo creo que un padre debe dar su opinión allí, ¡no meterla en una caja sin saber si la van a leer o la van a tirar a la basura!
[Parents] want to express what is happening with their child or with some member of the staff at the school and they can’t [at the meetings]. They have to put their complaint in a box, and not say it in front of everyone. And I think that a parent should give their opinion there, not stick it in a box without knowing if it will be read or thrown in the trash!
In contrast, the parent workshops gave parents the opportunity to share very personal stories, and through this, to build confianza. Amelia said:
Cuando hacen testimonios, porque ha habido muchos testimonios de las madres que están aquí, nos están dando su confianza, ellas, y lo que se dice en el grupo de nosotros en el taller, no sale para afuera. Porque ella nos está dando la confianza en decirnos lo que ha pasado, con su esposo o con sus familiares, entonces por eso es un ambiente muy personal, y estamos como en familia. Digamos nos estamos abriendo, nos estamos diciendo lo que hemos pasado, y estamos confiando uno al otro.
When they give testimonies, because a lot of mothers there have given their testimonies, they’re giving us their confianza, and what is said in that group in the workshop doesn’t leave the room. Because she is giving us her confianza by telling us what she’s been through, with her husband or her family, so it’s a very personal atmosphere, and we’re like a family. We’re opening up, we’re telling each other what we’ve been through, and we’re trusting each other.
Confianza, and a sense of community, was something Amelia felt had been missing from the school for too long. During our research, she expressed frustration with teachers who did not return her greeting when they saw her on the schoolyard. Although she said relationships had improved with some teachers after the Madres’ presentation, there was still much work to be done: “Hay maestros que no lo saludan a uno, lo ven, y yo creo que si estamos en una escuela pequeña, es para dar los buenos días, buenas tardes, adiós, que le vaya bien, ¿cómo está? Y eso no pasa con algunas maestras. Son muy poquitas las que de veras saludan a los padres” (There are [still] teachers who don’t greet you, they see you, and I think if we’re in a small school, it’s to exchange “Good morning,” “Good afternoon,” “Good-bye,” “How are you?” And that doesn’t happen with some teachers. There are very few who really greet parents). For Amelia, a small school should have the sense of community she enjoyed in her small town growing up, where “you get home and you go around to your neighbors.” With the parent workshops, that was starting to happen, at least among the parents. “Nos estamos conociendo mejor, y ya nos saludamos con alegría, no como antes” (We’re getting to know each other better, and now we greet each other with joy, not like before).
Amelia discovered that it was possible to create community at the school, and she enjoyed being one of the people who could make this change happen. Her sense of her own transformation motivated her to encourage other parents: if she could do it, anyone could. “Ya no me da temor hablar” (I’m not afraid to talk anymore). She used her role in the workshops to invite parents to come to the other meetings: “Aprovecho y les digo, ‘Vengan a la junta, va a estar muy interesante,’ los motivo para que vengan. Ya que yo no tenía esa motivación antes, ahora sí la tengo y se las digo a los padres que asistan a los talleres” (I take advantage and I tell them, “Come to the meeting, it’s going to be really interesting”; I motivate them to come. Since I didn’t have that motivation before, and now I do have it, I pass it on to the parents who come to the workshops).
Making Space for Change
Even before the parent center moved into its own designated classroom in the school’s spacious new building, its existence had a visible impact on the school. As Rachel, a teacher, testified a few months after it opened, “I see a lot of parents, not only the parents that are involved in the parent center, but a lot more parents becoming involved, and I think a lot of that can be attributed to the fact that there’s a space and a place for that to happen.” Critical to its impact, however, was the kind of space the Madres created, unlike any other at the school. Based on their experience in Ofelia’s kitchen, the mothers created in the parent center a mujerista-inspired counterspace where parents who struggled with the multiple indignities of life at the interstices of racism, sexism, classism, and xenophobia could support each other in naming their experiences and interrogating the structures that worked to marginalize them.
In one workshop I observed, the sixth in the series organized by Amelia and Carmen on domestic violence prevention, more than twenty mothers engaged in intense discussion about gender roles in the media, in children’s toys, and in marriage. The facilitator from the People’s Clinic raised questions that encouraged the mothers to think critically, and they jumped at the chance. Later, a twenty-seven-year-old mother of four shared how she had developed the courage to confront her abusive, alcoholic husband. Forty minutes after the workshop was scheduled to end, no mother wanted to leave. The workshop series had achieved what the school’s parent meetings had been unable to: allowing parents to make present their entire selves.
Central to the function of counterspaces is the ability to collectively dissect controlling images of one’s group and fashion alternative selves (López and Lechuga 2007; Solorzano, Ceja, and Yosso 2000). In the workshop series on domestic violence, the women were not just supporting each other in sharing their experiences; they were critically analyzing controlling images of Latina women that keep them in subordinate roles. This is a key step in the process of conscientization (Freire 1970) or politicization (hooks 1989), where coming to critical consciousness involves connecting one’s personal experience to larger social structures—especially structures of domination—that shape that experience. Through the planning of the parent center, Carmen, Amelia, and Ofelia, along with the three teachers who supported them, opened a space where these kinds of conversations could flourish. The following conversation I recorded during a parent center planning meeting shows the mothers connecting their situation at the school with a statewide anti-immigrant discourse. The discussion began with a teacher, Linda, explaining that she was going to a school-board meeting that night to protest proposed budget cuts:
Linda: Cada vez están recortando más y más, y luego el estado también ha cortado dinero.
Ofelia: El Gray Davis, ¿verdad? Dijo que iba a cortar.
Linda: Entonces el distrito tiene deficit.
Ofelia: Yo digo, ¿cómo es posible que el estado, el gobierno o quien sea, corte dinero al educación, a lo más importante para los niños? ¡Y tenga dinero para cosas como armas, bombas atómicas, las cárceles!
Carmen: ¡Y mantener tantos en la cárcel!
Ofelia: Yo digo eso es como no me cabe en mi cabeza, no sé cómo entenderlos a ellos, digo yo, ¿por qué será así? Tal vez habrá una razón que yo no entienda, ¿verdad? Digo yo. No sé, porque yo no entiendo.
Dyrness: Es una buena pregunta.
Linda: Bueno, para los que tienen el poder es más conveniente tener la gente sin educación.
Ofelia: ¿Verdad? Sin saber.
Carmen: Oh, sí.
Dyrness: Ellos sólo quieren sus ganancias.
Ofelia: Es todo, ¿verdad? ¡No les interesa la educación de nuestros hijos, pues! ¡Y eso es triste!
Carmen: Y también yo oyo porque California también sólo hay inmigrantes y que por eso también ya no quieren como, que ya parece que sólo hay centroamericanos y por eso también a la gente no le importa que uno se educa.
Ofelia: Siempre dicen que California es uno de los estados que tiene más inmigrantes que cualquier otro estado. Pero también eso no les da derecho a quitarlos la educación a los hijos, ¿verdad? ¡Los niños son los más, el futuro de este mismo país!
Amelia: Pero los inmigrantes somos los que pagamos taxes, y eso no se da cuenta.
Ofelia: Regresan dinero. [Voz de Laurie]: Hacen un trabajo duro.
Ofelia: Y son los que hacen los trabajos que nadie quiere hacer, como a los inmigrantes no le ven al trabajo, ¿verdad? Lo hacen.
Linda: They keep cutting more and more, and then the state is also cutting funds.
Ofelia: [Governor] Gray Davis, right? He said he was going to make cuts. Linda: So the district has a deficit.
Ofelia: I ask, how is it possible that the state, or the government or whoever, could cut money for education, the most important thing for the children? And have money for things like weapons, atom bombs, and jails! Carmen: And keep so many in jail!
Ofelia: I say that is like something that doesn’t fit in my head, I don’t know how to understand them, I ask, how come it’s this way? There must be a reason that I don’t get, right? That’s what I say. I don’t know, because I don’t understand.
Dyrness [from behind camera]: It’s a good question.
Linda: Well, for those who have the power it’s more convenient to keep the people uneducated.
Ofelia: Right? [To keep people] not knowing.
Carmen: Oh, yes.
Dyrness: They just want their profits.
Ofelia: That’s it, right? They’re not interested in the education of our children! And that is sad!
Carmen: And I have also heard that because in California there are only immigrants they don’t want to, that because it seems like there are only Central Americans [here], that’s why people don’t care if we’re educated. Ofelia: They always say that California is one of the states that has the most immigrants. But that doesn’t give them the right to take away the education of our children, does it? The children are the most, the future of this very country!
Amelia: But we immigrants are the ones who pay taxes, and that is not noticed.
Ofelia: They return money [to the economy].
[Voice of Laurie, another teacher]: They do a tough job.
Ofelia: And they are the ones who do the jobs that nobody else wants to do, you know, immigrants aren’t afraid of work, right? They do it.
When Ofelia questioned how the state could be cutting funds for education, Carmen suggested that it was because “there are only immigrants” in the public schools. The mothers were very aware of the rising fear and hostility toward California’s growing immigrant population. Although immigrants did not, in fact, make up a majority of public school students in 2002, their numbers had already provoked several anti-immigrant measures, including most notably Proposition 187, passed in 1994, which sought to deny public schooling and other benefits to undocumented immigrant children. New census figures released in 2002 heralded a future of a Latino majority, showing that Latinos accounted for a majority of births in the state and would be the majority of children entering kindergarten in 2006.8 In this conversation, while Ofelia defended their children’s right to an education because they “are the future of this very country,” Amelia also pointed out that immigrants pay taxes, which nobody recognizes. Together with the teachers, they rejected the image of immigrants as a burden on the economy and social services and affirmed them as hard workers who add to the economy and fill needed roles. This conversation, in the casual setting of the parent center, brought together the teachers’ activism with the parents’ life experiences, engaging both groups as equals in a shared critique of California politics.
Another function of the parent center, then, was to build confianza between parents and teachers, at least among the teachers who participated in the center. In the spring of the center’s first year, the mothers organized a teacher appreciation luncheon. Using some of their grant money, they staged a formal affair complete with flowers and speeches for the teachers. Amelia, with Ofelia translating, offered her thanks to the teachers: “For the patience and dedication that you have had with the children, not only the children who are doing well academically, but also those who are below grade level. And for the parents who have had problems here in the school and you have been here to support them. We are proud to have teachers like you.” Ofelia said, “Today I want to thank you because I can go to work and enjoy peace of mind [knowing my children are well cared for].” As I watched the teachers come forward to receive their flowers and hug the mothers, parents and teachers beaming, I thought about what a long way they had come from the tostada meeting some two years earlier. As Rachel, a bilingual teacher, said of the parent center, “It’s a huge milestone in our growth as a school and our communication with parents.”
Like all communities, the parent center was socially constructed, its meaning and boundaries continually negotiated by all those who had a stake in it. Arguments arose even among the Madres about what should be the center’s primary focus. Baudelia, one of the center’s earliest proponents, was full of ideas and ambitions, and typed out endless work plans and vision statements using the vocabulary of a seasoned social worker. At times she grew frustrated with the slow pace of change, arguing that giving away clothes would do nothing to change parents’ roles in the school. She was concerned that the parent center would become primarily a service center, doling out handouts, and wanted to make sure it would be a venue for parents’ organizing and training. In the end, Baudelia took her skills elsewhere, accepting a full-time job as a social worker for a local federally funded family-service agency. The job was a major step forward in her career, allowing her some of the professional autonomy she had enjoyed in Mexico. Although it left her no time to volunteer at the school, the parent center and Madres Unidas benefited greatly from Baudelia’s ideas and suggestions. Baudelia’s imprint was clearly visible in the work that the other Madres took forward.
It was fitting that the parent center did not have one primary purpose or predefined set of tasks, for, as an expression of the Madres’ transformation, its value was in protecting a space for change, a place to enact new ways of being parents in the school. As a second home for parents, the parent center was a site of becoming and belonging whose outcomes could never be predicted or controlled. The testimonies of Carmen and Amelia, and of all the mothers, suggest some important lessons for professional educators and reformers. First, parents, like teachers and students, deserve to be seen as people in progress, capable of being something tomorrow that they weren’t today. If some parents have grave doubts about their ability to contribute, as Carmen and Amelia did initially, their doubts must be understood in the context of their life experience as people who have been denied educational opportunities, or scarred by their interactions with educational institutions, not as a sign of their “culture” or innate passive nature. What is clear from the stories of all of the mothers is the yearning for opportunities to grow and develop themselves personally, intellectually, emotionally—the quest for wholeness—and the desire to use their skills meaningfully for the benefit of others. To change and to make change, as Freire saw it, is the ultimate vocation of all human beings, and in this light the mothers are no different from human beings everywhere. But as women whose quests for fulfillment have been so long denied, they must also contend with the internalized notion—ingrained in their girlhood and reinforced in everyday interactions with more powerful others—that they do not deserve wholeness. For this reason, Carmen said, as a “normal mother,” “I used to think I would never be able to do many of the things that I’ve done now.” For these mothers, the journey toward self-realization and social change involves unlearning many of the lessons they have been taught about their roles, and critically analyzing the structures that have unjustly limited their development and participation in society. Schools could provide spaces for this to happen. But the vast majority of parent involvement programs and parent education programs—teaching parents to participate in the school in scripted ways according to the school’s agenda—miss the mark (see Hurtig and Dyrness, forthcoming).
Educators as Allies or Gatekeepers?
Educators who care about the development and participation of immigrant parents should support spaces where parents can meet their own goals of self-realization and transformation. This involves a second important lesson for professionals, which is that they sometimes may need to get out of the way. The experience of Madres Unidas shows that a significant barrier, if not the most significant barrier, to the participation of immigrant parents in school reform is the stubborn, trained inability of professionals to recognize these parents as change agents. First, educators err when they make assumptions or generalizations about parents’ inability or unwillingness to participate based on observed patterns of behavior that are actually co-constructed, produced in hostile institutional contexts. Second, professionals stand in the way when their commitment to institutional interests, credentials, and norms blinds them to other ways of achieving change or silences the experiences of those whom they most mean to serve. This is as true for community organizers as it is for school administrators and teachers. Professionals stand in the way when they refuse to hear parent critique or when they condemn parents who voice critique as “too angry.” They stand in the way when they attempt to set the terms of parent participation in limiting ways—requiring parents to divert their concerns to a “complaint box,” or limiting parents to three questions to a meeting. There is no need to repeat the numerous examples here.
It is equally clear that professionals can play a supportive role in parents’ transformative process. Each time professionals provided a respectful audience for the mothers—whether at conferences, in the presentation to the school staff, or in small parent center meetings—parents were affirmed in their critique and in the development of their identities as experts, advocates, and change agents. The three bilingual teachers who approached the mothers after their presentation asking, “How can we work with you? What can we do?” opened the way to a fruitful collaboration that resulted in the creation of the parent center. These teachers listened to the mothers, let them take the lead in the plans they proposed, and offered their support however they could. When professionals offered coaching and advice that answered the parents’ own questions—as opposed to steering them toward a predefined institutional vision—or provided the opportunity for parents to explore their own questions, parents were strengthened in their development as effective actors. The lesson for professionals is simple: listen, learn, support, and follow. Professionals need not only to listen to parents’ perspectives and critique of their children’s schooling, but also to learn from parents’ ways of being in community.
In striving to create the conditions necessary for growth and change at the school, Madres Unidas modeled the forms of community that nurtured them outside the school: relationships based on confianza (trust) that allowed each person to bring her whole self, and the sharing of personal stories. Trusting relationships were at the heart of everything we did as a group, and made possible each new leap of faith. Without confianza, there was no change. When presenting their research, the mothers invited the teachers into their confianza, saying, “We trust you enough to tell you what we’ve learned, and how you’ve hurt us. You have to trust us enough to listen.” The mothers trusted the power of their stories to convey what everyday interactions in the school could not.
In seeking to create schools that dynamize community change, educators should ask how they can provide safe spaces for parents to be with their stories (Villenas 2005). They should acknowledge that parents come to them scarred and wounded, but not defeated. How can schools foster the conditions that support immigrant parents’ own processes of growth, healing, and self-determination? How can they provide the space for parents to redefine their identities and develop their skills as agents of change? I am aware that these questions may sound utopian in the current climate of standards, regulation, and high-stakes testing. Some will ask, How can schools already overburdened be expected to also meet parents’ needs for self-realization? But I am convinced that the lessons of Madres Unidas call not for an expansion of schools’ work, but for a redefinition of this work. When teachers at UCS interpreted the call for greater collaboration with parents as “more meetings,” the mothers countered that they didn’t want more meetings, only a different kind of meeting. Perhaps part of the reason educators are so exhausted is that their professional template for working with parents precludes the kind of authentic conversations and relationships that would nourish their work for change; so that urban educators are, in effect, trying to combat the effects of large-scale processes of economic disinvestment and decline, dislocation, social exclusion, and inequality on their own with the limited resources of their profession.9 To the extent that new relationships with immigrant parents and other urban parents unleash a creative resource for change, inviting parents to share their struggles and their dreams for themselves and their children could offer solutions to the failure of purpose in education. As immigrant parents bring their journeys into the school, and use the school’s resources to understand and overcome the structural barriers that limit their and their children’s lives, they lead the way for teachers to connect education to purposes of social renewal and social justice. Madres Unidas, through their research, their presentation to the staff, and the parent center, struggled to see themselves differently and to be seen differently by school staff. In the process of contesting the controlling images that sought to exclude them, they discovered that they were capable of more than even they expected.
Extranjera por Carmen
En resumen, yo soy una extranjera
Más de tantos que habemos aquí
En este gran país.
Salí de mi pueblo un día hace tiempo
Ya pensando volver.
Llevaba una maleta vieja y en el corazón
Toda mi niñez.
Igual que un ave viajera yo tuve que emigrar
Buscando una vida nueva.
Llegué a un país lejano que me dio calor y porvenir.
Me enamoré de un muchacho que me dio su amor
Y soy feliz.
Pero al pensar en mi tierra
Tengo ganas de llorar, y quiero volver a allá.
¡Extranjera! Aún me grita el corazón
Cuando suena una guitarra o alguien
Canta una canción de mi país
Y no lo puedo evitar.
Después llegaron los hijos
Tuve que luchar y hacerlos crecer
Y así pasaron los años sin dejarme ya
Poder volver.
Pero el alma aunque calle vuelve a recordar,
Cuando era niña en mi tierra.
¡Extranjera! Te sientes en la piel
Cuando me hablan de la tierra
Que una vez me vio nacer
Lejos de aquí.
Foreigner by Carmen
Like many in this great country.
I left my hometown long ago
Thinking I would be back.
I carried an old suitcase
And my childhood in my heart.
Like a migrating bird, I had to fly away
In search of a new life.
I arrived in a faraway country that gave me warmth and a future.
I fell in love with a boy who gave me his love
And I’m happy!
But when I think of my country
I want to cry, and I want to go back there.
Foreigner! My heart still cries to me
When I hear a guitar or someone
Singing a song from my country
And I can’t help it.
Then came the children
I had to struggle to raise them
And in this way the years passed
Without letting me go back.
But the soul, though it falls quiet
It remembers again
When I was a girl in my country.
Foreigner! You feel it in your skin
When they talk to me about the land
That one day saw me born