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Abstract
This paper brings together ethnographic data and testimonies from a group of Latina mother activists with critical race theories, to challenge dominant views of home-school relations and re-envision the ‘homeplace’ as a site of radical resistance (Hooks (Citation1990) Yearning: race, gender and cultural politics (Boston, MA, South End Press)). Madres Unidas (Mothers United) is a participatory research team made up of immigrant mothers who helped start a new small school for their children. Over the course of a year, Madres Unidas met weekly around a kitchen table in one of the mother's homes. This paper analyzes the educational space created by Madres Unidas in contrast to the spaces for parent participation provided by the school. For the mothers in Madres Unidas, the home became a place to restore their sense of self and a place from which to critique, engage, and take action against school practices that silenced them.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge The James Irvine Foundation, in collaboration with The Center for Popular Education and Participatory Research (CPEPR) at UC Berkeley and the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools (BayCES), for providing financial support that made the work of Madres Unidas possible.
Notes
1. Gregory uses these terms to describe the managing of citizen participation in an urban development project by the Port Authority of New York. See Apple (Citation1996) for a discussion of similar processes in education.
2. See Villenas (Citation1996), Lareau and Harvat (Citation1999), Crozier (Citation2001) and Murillo (Citation2002) for other examples of this.
3. See Valdés (1996) and López (Citation2001) for a discussion of this stereotype applied to Latino parents.
4. I have written in more detail about my decision to engage in a participatory research project, and the risks and conflicts that entailed, elsewhere (Dyrness, Citation2004, Citation2006).
5. I am a racially White, bilingual/bicultural Central American Latina.
6. Fieldnotes, 30 November 2001.
7. Fieldnotes, 11 February 2001.
8. My translation from the Spanish; emphasis added.