Women and children in a neighborhood advocacy group: engaging community and refashioning citizenship at the United States–Mexico border

Abstract

This article looks at the community participation of recent Latina immigrant mothers and their children in a neighborhood advocacy group near the US–Mexico border. It documents the work that women and children do as they struggle to become involved in their new community and improve their quality of life – despite legal, social, economic and cultural obstacles. Local context, family and ethnic networks, gendered patterns of women's experiences as immigrants and children participation in ‘adult’ decision-making are hugely important in understanding their community engagement. The article reflects on the advocacy work that women and children perform through a neighborhood group to argue for a difference-centered perspective on citizenship that is inspired by feminist thinking. Such a perspective makes sense in light of the ironic tensions within neo-liberal policies that, on the one hand, burden people with more responsibilities while, on the other hand, legislating against their freedom to pursue those responsibilities.

Con este artículo observamos la participación de la comunidad de madres latinas que inmigraron recientemente, y de sus niños y niñas, en un grupo de promoción barrial cerca de la frontera EE.UU.-México. Documentamos el trabajo de las mujeres, niñas y niños mientras intentan participar en su nueva comunidad y mejorar su calidad de vida – a pesar de los obstáculos legales, sociales, económicos y culturales. Encontramos que el contexto local, las redes familiares y étnicas, los patrones generizados de las experiencias de las mujeres como inmigrantes y la participación de los niños y niñas en la toma de decisiones ‘adultas’ son enormemente importantes para comprender su participación en la comunidad. Reflexionamos sobre el trabajo de promoción que las mujeres, niñas y niños llevan a cabo a través del grupo barrial, abogando por una perspectiva sobre la ciudadanía centrada en la diferencia, inspirada por el pensamiento feminista. Notamos que tal perspectiva tiene sentido a la luz de las irónicas tensiones existentes dentro de las políticas neoliberales, que por un lado cargan a la gente con más responsabilidades, mientras por el otro legislan contra sus libertades para ejercerlas.

Keywords:

• citizenship
• difference
• women
• children

Keywords:

• ciudadanía
• diferencia
• mujeres
• niños

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the women, children and families of the Neighborhood Advocacy Group in Chula Vista, CA for generously sharing their stories and helping us to understand how immigrant families navigate through legal and cultural systems. We would also like to thank Beverley Mullings and the anonymous reviewers who provided comments and suggestions in earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

1. We use the term Latino/a to talk about the many different people of Latin American ancestry currently living in the US who are forging new social, economic and political identities. The term Hispanic is used in the context of demographic and other data provided by the US census and other secondary data sources that adopt that US Census Bureau terminology. There is an ongoing debate regarding the use of the terms Latino/a and Hispanic, and we recognize the that either term is problematic in terms of recognizing variations in nationality, ethnicity, race and other differences (see for example, Suarez-Orozco and Paez 2002; Jennings 2008).

2. These are different from axes of difference as defined by feminist theorists such as Young (1990).

3. The focus groups were conducted in Spanish and later transcribed, translated and coded using qualitative analysis software to aid in the organization of the data.

4. The Family Resource Centers serve as a one-stop access points to locally available services and resources. The centers also work to build community connections for residents through adult education opportunities, community events and volunteerism. The CVOC's contact with the different neighborhoods is primarily facilitated through its operation of six school-based Family Resource Centers.

5. To date, intergenerational studies that document the relations between children and adults do not necessarily help answer these questions (see Secunda 1992, Faludi 1999, Aoyama 2007). For the most part these studies focus on the impact and dependencies of one group on another, or they relate the stories of struggle and transformations in relationships. However, they do not account for the contexts of dependencies and interdependencies as they relate to social and spatial structures of inequity.