Urban Girls Revisited: Building Strengths

4. “They Are Like a Friend”: Othermothers Creating Empowering, School-Based Community Living Rooms in Latina and Latino Middle Schools

4 “They Are Like a Friend” Othermothers Creating Empowering, School-Based Community Living Rooms in Latina and Latino Middle Schools Nancy López and Chalane E. Lechuga How does school context shape the resilience of racially stigmatized youth, Latinas in particular? How can parental involvement be conceptualized to specifically support the education of Latina and Latino communities? This chapter examines the experiences of Latina middle school youth and mothers who participated in school-based, parent-run community living rooms (salas comunitarias). Drawing from resiliency theory, we underscore the importance of school context in the education of Latinas and Latinos. We found that community living rooms provide a culturally empowering safe space, particularly for Latina girls, who described them as their second home. Latina middle school students spoke about the parent volunteers, mostly mothers, as friends and confidants with whom they enjoyed mutual trust and respect. In this chapter we describe three school-based, parent-run community living rooms that served different purposes and grew and thrived in different school contexts. The community living rooms each aimed to be an empowering homespace that nurtured the resilience of Latina and Latino students and their families. Clinton Middle School, the most overcrowded school, presented the most difficult school context for Latina students and their parents who attempted to create the salas comunitarias. The sala comunitaria at Irving Middle School provided individualized tutoring, counseling, and mentoring. Huerta Middle School was the school context that was most receptive to refashioning parental involvement and Latina 97 and Latino education. Each of these school case studies illustrates the importance of creating empowering homespaces for Latinas and Latinos in any school context. Before providing snapshots of each school, we give a brief review of our anchoring theoretical frameworks, as well as the larger socioeconomic and political backdrop for the study. We then provide portraits of the schools, highlighting the experiences of the women and girls who participated in the community living rooms. Finally, we end with a discussion of how schools can begin to create homespaces as a way of nurturing resilience of Latina and Latino students, families, and their communities. Contextualizing Resilience and Empowerment Resilience theory calls attention to the need to understand how youth from racially stigmatized communities succeed against the backdrop of multiple intersecting adversities that include oppression vis-à-vis race, class, gender, and ethnic discrimination (Taylor, 1994; Garza, Reyes, & Trueba, 2004). While resilience has been seen traditionally as an individual -level trait that depends on a nurturing family and individual agency, the concept has been expanded to include other social supports that foster resilience, including teachers, peers, and schools (Leadbeater & Way, 1996; Pastor, McCormick, & Fine, 1996; Freiberg, 1994; Rigsby, 1994). Here we are interested in how school contexts can support young women in their struggle against poverty, discrimination, stereotypes, and urban violence. How can we operationalize race? Racial formation theory, which is at the foundation of this research, defines race as an ubiquitous socially constructed and historically variable process that represents social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies. Although the concept of race invokes biologically-based human characteristics (so-called “phenotypes”), selection of these particular human features for purposes of human signification is always and necessarily a social and historical process. . . . there is no biological basis for distinguishing among human groups along the lines of race (Omi & Winant, 1994, p. 54). Race can be understood as sociohistorical processes that have created, circulated, represented, and enacted racial categories in social structures 98 c h a p t e r 4 and racial meaning systems. These processes occur both at the microlevel of individual lived experience, identity, cognition, and face-to-face interactions and at the macrolevel of collective identities, public discourses, representation in the mass media, social movements, state regulations, rules, social relations and organization, and state institutions, such as schools. Racial formation is the synthesis of multiple racial projects— definitions, interpretations, and representations of racial dynamics and attempts to redistribute resources along racial lines. This social constructionist understanding of race contrasts sharply with essentialist approaches, which assume that race is an innate biological trait (Murray & Hernstein, 1994). According to genetic essentialists, all people placed in a racial category are assumed to possess some innate and unchanging biological trait. We join theoretical perspectives on racial formation with descriptions of the empowering roles of other mothers (Collins, 2000) and the need for “homespace” (Pastor et al., 1996) to understand the function...