Urban Girls Revisited: Building Strengths

3. Makin’ Homes: An Urban Girl Thing

3 Makin’ Homes An Urban Girl Thing Jennifer Pastor, Jennifer McCormick, and Michelle Fine with Ruth Andolsen, Nora Friedman, Nikki Richardson, Tanzania Roach, and Marina Tavarez This chapter grows out of our collective work, which crosses the boundaries typically constructed by researchers. We actively cross generations , colors, classes, and ideologies by writing this chapter with the young women listed above.1 This work is driven by the belief that we and they are the best narrators of our lives. The title draws from the fact that home is a theme that constantly surfaces in the lives of adolescent girls, and throughout this chapter we rely upon an old-fashioned and rich metaphor—that of homemaking. If we stay loyal to the nostalgic notion of home (Martin & Mohanty, 1986) as a safe space, where one can weave whole cloth from the fragments of social critique and sweet dreams—a home few have known but most still search for—we can say that these young women are searching for such a place. We do not limit home to traditional definitions, because homeplaces can be defined broadly to include comforting, safe spaces in institutions such as schools or in social groups such as clubs, social movements, or gangs. Listening to young women’s critiques of schooling, domestic spaces, gender relations, racial hierarchies, and social violence, we have learned that homeplaces, so broadly defined, can also become constricting places from which they often try to break free. This can have profound and ironic consequences in young women’s lives and for their emerging identities as women. 75 All of us write together toward a four-part, shared argument: First, urban girls of many colors cannot simply pursue autonomy, freedom, and independence as Erikson (1968) theorizes. The challenges of racism, sexism, classism, and cultural hegemony profoundly interfere. Second, this interference does not necessarily result in deficits for many urban girls, as for the African American women bell hooks (1990) writes about, because these challenges help girls learn how to develop critical consciousness . We theorize that this development becomes part of a successful coping strategy. Third, this critical consciousness allows urban girls of color to know that there is much that is wrong with the world and that they cannot hide or “go underground” within white-dominated, classbased institutions as Gilligan (1991) has so aptly demonstrated white middle-class girls can do. Urban girls of color must learn how to assert themselves within white, often male-dominated institutions, because they know that these institutions are often not designed to protect them or promote their interests. We maintain as our fourth and last belief that this critical consciousness can manifest itself in various individual behaviors and styles, but within these behaviors a troubling theme emerges. Unfortunately, urban girls of many colors do not seek each other out for collective action, which might address the inequities of which they are so critically conscious. There are few experiences in their lives to prepare them to work collectively, especially given their legacy of growing up in the Reagan-Bush years, marked as they were by an affirmation of socialization through gender and traditional notions of feminine behavior, which do not include collective action. Yet urban girls are unstoppable in their desires to preserve and develop their personal integrity. We have found that they construct individualistic strategies for accommodating to the contradictory needs and desires of family, friends, and school, while resisting the offensive boundaries that are constructed against them because of their race, gender, class, or culture . We write with deep respect for the work that they do as they pursue their own identities. Methods Our collective work draws from the young women’s narratives, from girl’s and women’s group discussions, and from ethnographic observations of sites where the young women attended school. The work derives from two 76 c h a p t e r 3 qualitative research projects, an ethnographic documentation project at an alternative public middle school (Jennifer Pastor), and a poetry workshop conducted within a traditional comprehensive high school (Jennifer McCormick). The young women who took part in the girl’s and women’s discussion groups, and with whom we wrote this chapter, were recruited from these two sites. Description of Ethnographic Sites The middle school is located in a working-class neighborhood of New York City that has a large Latino immigrant population. It is a small school with about 120...