The Broken Yellow Brick Road: A Narrative Exploration of the College-Going Decisions and Trajectory of a Low-Income Single Mother of Color

Communities frequently treated as ‘have-nots’ in higher education are a window into the condition of postsecondary education access, exclusion, inequities, and outcomes. This reality is no more evident than with the college-going trajectories of low-income single mothers of color. Evoking the possibilities of narrative inquiry in general, and life history method in particular, the author explores the college-going ecology, decisions, and trajectory of a 35-year-old low-income Filipina single mother. Through this empirical undertaking, particular attention is paid to the challenges present within the informant’s context of information, time, and opportunity—the three dimensions of the Iloh Model of College-Going Decisions and Trajectories. Findings of this narrative include prolonged and disjointed experiences; poor navigational structures and asymmetries of information; and institutional constraints, barriers, and disregard. In addition to insights that reflect decision-making challenges and buyer’s remorse of minoritized students; this study situates new directions for addressing concerning contexts of time, information, and opportunity for single mothers pursuing college.

"I Gotta Carry The Burden By Myself"

Despite prevalence estimates indicating that upwards to 38% of new mothers of color will experience perinatal depression, little research has been published that investigates how they cope with the stressors in their daily lives. This article presents the findings of semi-structured in-depth interviews with 30 low-income new mothers of color about parenting their children despite the burden of ongoing depression. Narrative analyses revealed three themes: feeling alone, isolated, and overwhelmed; feeling misunderstood, betrayed, and judged by others; and having to carry their burden alone. Despite having depression, the mothers spoke of ways they were able to persevere even with the enormous burden of raising their children while living in high-crime, low-income neighborhoods. Recommendations include the need for social workers to recognize low-income mothers’ inner strengths; recognize why mothers may not trust professionals to be of help; and take the time to build strong therapeutic relationships with mothers who perceive their families, friends, partners, and often social service professionals as being of little help.

Intervention Strategies and Lessons Learned From a Student-Led Initiative to Support Lactating Women in the University Setting

The benefits of breastfeeding for mother and baby are strongly supported by research. However, lactating parents who return to school or work soon after delivery face many barriers to continued breastfeeding. This article presents a student-led initiative to support lactation at a large public university that emerged from advocacy efforts of student mothers of color. The socioecological model was used as a framework to understand and address the multifaceted influences on breastfeeding practices. Project activities included providing breastfeeding education to lactating parents and their partners, measuring availability and accessibility of lactation spaces, improving lactation spaces, connecting university stakeholders, and strengthening university lactation policies. The project achieved the following outcomes: formation of a stakeholder group with members across campus departments, improvement in accessibility and appropriateness of lactation spaces, provision of breastfeeding services through workshops and one-on-one appointments with lactation educators, and creation and dissemination of an online toolkit outlining parents’ lactation rights and support available on campus. Comprehensive lactation support at universities is essential to enhance educational and professional equity for women and to promote postpartum and infant health. Throughout the project implementation, the team learned many lessons that can help guide similar university initiatives.

“Willing to Do Anything for My Kids”: Inventive Mothering, Diapers, and the Inequalities of Carework

Prior research highlights how mothers across social classes express similar beliefs that good parenting adheres to the tenets of intensive mothering by being child-centered, time-consuming, and self-sacrificing. Yet intensive mothering ideologies emphasize parenting tactics that assume children’s basic needs are met, while ignoring how mothers in poverty devise distinctive childrearing strategies and logics to perform carework demanded by deprivation, discrimination, and a meager social safety net. I theorize inventive mothering that instead highlights the complexity and agency of poor mothers’ innovative efforts to ensure children’s access to resources, protect children from the harms of poverty and racism, and present themselves as fit parents in the context of intersecting gender, class, and race stigma. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 70 mothers who experienced diaper need, I conceptualize diaper work as a case of inventive mothering that involves extensive physical, cognitive, and emotional labor. These findings show how focusing on childrearing practices experienced as “intense” from the point of view of more affluent, white mothers perpetuates inequalities by obscuring the complex labor poor mothers, especially poor mothers of color, perform when there is limited public support for fundamental aspects of childcare.

Queer in the “Heartland”

I explore the public marriage debate through an allegorical reading of “marriage equality” in Iowa in 2009. Drawing on participant observation with a multiracial group of lesbians organizing a queer community center in Des Moines, Iowa, I narrate the extraordinary moment when the state granted new rights and a new sense of family legitimacy to same-sex couples. Both sides in the political debate claimed the high ground of the civil rights movement as touchstone for legitimacy. I draw on voices of lesbian mothers of color in particular to challenge both sides of the dialogue. I consider, in particular, “colorblind” narratives of equality on both conservative and liberal sides of the public debate. I explore the ways that sociopolitical narratives about white motherhood as salvation for vulnerable “orphans” functioned as an avenue toward political redemption for white lesbian mothers who now have the “choice” to save their children from the stigma of illegitimacy.

Irreconciliable Differences

I consider debates about Proposition 8, a California initiative that proposed banning same-sex marriage in 2008 after it had been legalized earlier that year. I explore family-making narratives of mothers of color in particular, in relation to political debates in news reports and letters to the editor between June and November 2008. Vociferous debate about children as symbols for the future of the nation engaged nationalist language of rights, equality, and “true Americans” on both sides. Sociopolitical fears about how legalizing same-sex marriage would affect children’s education and moral development infused sociopolitical narratives about the dangers of same-sex marriage for the United States. When the state initiative was passed on election night in November 2008, same-sex marriages were declared unlawful in the state. The simultaneous election of Barack Obama raised racial tensions about whose votes tipped which scales. I explore sociopolitical narratives of racial blame in news discussions of the political outcome.

I Am Roha’s Emaye: A Critical Autoethnography of Mothering in Liminal Spaces

In this critical autoethnographic study, we examine how one woman, Roha’s emaye (Amharic for mother), developed necessary racialized subjectivities as mother of a child who codes as Black in contemporary U.S. society. While substantial research outlines how mothers of color must prepare children to live in a racist world; typically, this perspective focuses on the child. Often, it excludes how mothers—both Black and White—must ‘do’ identity work to make sense of this. Although race is a social and cultural construct, when women cross the color line to partner and have children, the challenges they face both as part of a couple and mother are real. Data are drawn from journals and memories, blending self-observation and reflexive investigation as fieldwork to intentionally comment on and critique cultural practices surrounding mothering and subjectivity. Data were analyzed using Foucauldian concepts of Genealogy, Power, and Subjectification. Findings indicate that this mother was constructed, regulated, normalized, and categorized and found to occupy multiple liminal spaces. This paper argues that tracing how particular subjectivities are given power and regulated in specific contexts of mothering contributes nuanced understandings of how race comes to matter, for whom, and when.

Deserving Immigrants and Good Advocate Mothers: Immigrant Mothers’ Negotiations of Special Education Systems for Children with Disabilities

Drawing on observational data and 30 in-depth interviews, we examine how immigrant mothers of color from diverse class, ethnic, and racial backgrounds negotiate public special education services for their children with severe intellectual disabilities. Special education systems in the United States emphasize parental involvement and oversight in the process of developing appropriate service packages for children. The intersection of these expectations with ideologies of intensive mothering generate an idealized vision of the mothers of children with disabilities as engaging in vigorous, selfless, and skillful advocacy in special education systems. The “Good Advocate Mother” becomes an ideational foil for “immigrant deservingness” by offering a yardstick of expectations against which to evaluate the commitment and merit of immigrant mothers raising children with disabilities. The Good Advocate Mother is a source of empowerment for immigrant mothers. The narrative legitimates their quest to obtain the best services for their children in the face of political currents that call immigrant entitlements to public services into question. The Good Advocate Mother is a constant source of challenge for immigrant mothers for whom the pressures of advocating well for their children intersect with those of establishing themselves as deserving immigrants.

Pathologizing Latinas

Scholars of the welfare system have explored the racialized criminalization of mothers of color who are punished by the foster care system, through control of their children, when they are unable to meet the ideals of middle-class motherhood but have yet to fully articulate a language to understand the ways in which this criminalization and punishment extends to youth once they are placed in the foster care system. Using ethnographic interviews with agents of the care system, I explore the ways in which the system pathologizes Latinas’ quotidian acts of resistance and survival like their use of silences through the behavioral diagnosis of Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD). I argue that California’s foster care system is an arm of the transcarceral continuum, marking girls of color and their strategies of resistance as pathological, thereby criminalizing them through the diagnosis of behavioral disorders.

"This Video Call May Be Monitored and Recorded"

This article argues that the implementation of video visitation in correctional facilities is a mechanism of control used to enact punitive measures for regulating mothers who act outside the dominant paradigms of motherhood. Because prisons were designed to surveil and mothers have historically been surveilled by institutions, incarcerated mothers are often overlooked when we discuss the surveillance methods used to keep institutionalized motherhood intact. This article builds on existing scholarship characterizing surveillance technology’s role in criminalizing poor mothers of color, and considers the ways in which surveillance technology is used to normalize these mothers during their incarceration. Applying a Foucauldian framework, this article explores how adapting Video Visitation (VV)—a Skype-like video chat program—enables correctional facilities to extend the role of “watcher” and expand the panoptic gaze, which prompts mother-to-mother surveillance and intensifies self-surveillance. The article concludes by drawing attention to VV’s structure and its ability to expand correctional facilities’ surveillance to the children of incarcerated mothers.