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83 Q Early on in the data collection process I met Carla, a middle-­ aged Dominican woman, and her partner, Dolores, at a small gathering that took place at the home of a mutual acquaintance.1 Carla and Dolores had been in a relationship for more than ten years and lived in a small immigrant community just outside New York City. Carla had never had any relationships with men, but Dolores had two children from a previous relationship with a man in Puerto Rico, her place of birth. The children were now teenagers and had lived with Carla and Dolores for more than ten years. The oldest was about to begin her last year in high school: Carla: We are very happy together, Dolores, the kids, and I. We have one room and the kids have another. Our relationship is stable but the kids don’t know about it. Katie: What do you mean they don’t know? Carla: We never told them anything. Katie: Really? Carla: When they were younger we didn’t want to confuse them, and we didn’t want problems with their father. And when they got older we left it like that. Carla’s family represents a common family form for sexually nonconforming women with children. Same-­ sex families raising children from previous heterosexual relationships must often find ways to negotiate the biological fathers of the children in their lives, considering the potential legal implications that their sexualities can have on their families. These concerns can affect their level of openness about their relationships with their children and families of origin . Sometimes, these families prefer to minimize the visibility of their sexual nonconformity and present to the larger world as amigas, or “friends.” The term c h a p t e r 4 Parenting among Families of Choice 84 Amigas y Amantes “amigas” can provide protection and much-­ needed anonymity. These families raise many questions about the challenges of coparenting under such circumstances , most of which the existing scholarship is only just beginning to uncover. Carlos Decena’s (2011) concept of sujecto tacito (tacit subject) is most useful here as it names the unspoken understandings that families like Carla’s negotiate. As sixteen-­and eighteen-­ year-­ old young women who share a home with this couple, one would imagine that Dolores’s daughters must have some understanding that they are more than friends. When Carla says, “They don’t know about our relationship ,”she means that the children have never directly been told. Still, while the nature of their relationship has never been discussed, these women do see themselves as a family, and they see Dolores’s children as a part of that family. Very little research exists that explicitly focuses on sexually nonconforming women who bring children from previous heterosexual relationships with them into new families of choice with other women.2 This absence in research is interesting given that the majority of sexually nonconforming women who are mothers became so through previous heterosexual relationships and/or marriages or by becoming “stepmothers” to their partners’ children from previous heterosexual relationships (Lewin 1993; Moore 2011). In particular, lesbians who are also racial or ethnic minorities are more likely to have entered relationships with other women after having had children in previous heterosexual relationships (van Dam 2004). Lesbian stepfamilies, as these unions are often called, are more likely to earn less money than do lesbian mothers who had children within a same-­ sex relationship and receive less support from their families of origin (van Dam 2004, 457). While research on stepparent households among sexually nonconforming women is sparse, the existing research on lesbian mothers is less so. This work has focused on women who choose to have children through assisted reproductive technologies or adoption within the context of their same-­ sex relationships (Reimann 1997; Ryan and Berkowitz 2009; Sullivan 2004).3 Although it is undeniably important that scholars bring this type of information to light in academia , research on women who start their families using these means tends to emphasize the experiences of lesbian coparents who are predominantly white and middle class. These studies are limited in that they are only one of many types of comother family forms. The experiences of sexually nonconforming mothers who are also racial minorities, single, poor, and/or undocumented look very different from those described in previous works. The parenting experiences of the participants highlighted in this chapter provide a glimpse into the unique realities that LBQ Latinas face raising...

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