A testimonio of critical race feminista parenting: snapshots from my childhood and my parenting

Abstract

The author employs a testimonio to partake in the instructive and cathartic tradition of sharing experiences, mistakes, and (mis)understandings of parenting children of color. In doing so, she draws from her experiences growing up in a Mexican American family and her experiences of mothering three Brown sons as a Chicana activist-scholar. She grounds her parenting in a critical race feminista praxis and subsequently addresses testimonio as her methodology and pedagogy. She then shares brief snapshots of how she was parented and how she has parented looking for the transformative ruptures and healing possibilities in the experiences.

Keywords:

• Critical race feminista
• pedagogies of the home
• transformative ruptures
• critical race parenting

Notes

1. I still have both of my Raggedy Ann dolls. Without a request from me, my grandma later made my sons Raggedy Andy dolls in mariachi suits with brown hair and brown skin. A few years ago at Grandma’s funeral, we surrounded her casket with many of the beloved dolls she made for her daughters, granddaughters, and great-grandsons.

2. While the reflections and analysis in this paper are mine alone, I am fortunate that my critical race feminista parenting has always been a team effort in collaboration with my life-partner, Dr Octavio Villalpando. Therefore, when talking about my parenting and children, I go back in forth between the singular ‘I/my’ and the plural ‘we/our’.

3. After living in that working-class Latinx community for 11 years, we now live in a middle-class urban community in Los Angeles County. Our boys go to ‘good schools’ with predominately Latinx (47%) and white students (37%), yet whiteness continues to permeate their schools and the curriculum.

4. I wrote these reflections about skin color in 2013 while living in Mexico for six months and the boys were going to school there. Early in the semester Izel came home from school excited about making friends and playing soccer at school. All the boys wanted him on their team because he was so good, and they wanted to give him a nickname. Negrito was the name they wanted to give him, however, that name was already given to the only boy in class who was darker than Izel. While the use and meaning of negrito is different in Mexico than in the US, it is important to note that the politics and hierarchies of skin color cross borders and are always shaped by colonialism, white supremacy, and structures of power.

5. After the killer of Trayvon Martin, was acquitted of the murder and manslaughter charges, Olin posted on Facebook, ‘George Zimmerman not guilty, wtf?’.