Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI company.

This dissertation studies how immigrant-origins mother combine their mothering with their civic engagement. Framed from the theoretical lenses of critical motherhood studies, it zooms in into the everyday lives of four migrant mothers looking to get a better sense of how they create and share knowledge about their daily experiences, and of how they build senses of home and community for themselves, their children, and others in their communities. It aims to shed light on ways to be civically engaged that go beyond voting and protesting. While civic life is usually understood in dictionaries as having to do with the rights and duties of citizens, the civics and mothering praxis that emerges from this study is a praxis rooted in love and care. Methodologically, this study combines multimodal, participatory, and poetic tools with Latina and Chicana feminist approaches to testimonio, to co-narrate the portraits of motherhood that are at the heart of this dissertation. Through storytelling that is attentive to ways of knowing and being that are rooted in our communities, these portraits aim to theorize mothering as action and to open space for mothers to express their voices and agency. Therefore, taking the lead from the immigrant-origin mothers with whom I work, this study proposes that the ordinary ways in which they impact the civic life of their communities through their labor of love sets the ground for a conception of citizenship that links transnational communities and exists across borders. What they do also stresses a dialectical praxis of civics that happens between mothers and their children, who are active agents and political beings; a praxis with implications that has political and theoretical implications for how we conceive motherhood, and that can also directly impact early childhood education and research. Throughout, the aim of this dissertation is to make care a central principle of research by creating spaces for support and healing in which mother’s agency and creative is valued. Research as a form of civic engagement that opens spaces to nurture and include our body-mind-soul connection.

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Honors Project--Smith College, Northampton, Mass., 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 48-49)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2009. / Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 91-109). Issued in print and online. Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations.

This dissertation is a mixed methods analysis investigating postpartum depression as it is experienced by self-reported depressed Mexican American adolescent and adult mothers. The qualitative portion of this study explores pregnancy and motherhood to better understand meanings attached to depression. Six adolescent and six adult mothers, were recruited from the Dallas/Fort-Worth area. Each was interviewed twice, using semi-structured interview guides. The quantitative phase utilizes a national sample of self-reported depressed Hispanic mothers to identify breastfeeding behavior and mothers' perceptions of the physical health of their babies. Specifically, a secondary analysis of the National Survey of Children's Health, 2003 was used to supplement the qualitative data. This study provides a theoretical framework of fragmented identity to explain socio-cultural factors contributing to postpartum depression among Mexican American adolescent and adult mothers. Common themes leading to a fragmented identify were indentified. Contributors to postpartum depression include: unplanned pregnancy, internal struggle between cultures, body image and family conflict. Stigma associated with teen motherhood also contributed to depression among adolescent mothers while the medicalization of childbirth was a contributing factor of depression among the adult mothers. Additionally, the duration of breastfeeding and mothers' perceptions of their babies' physical health were impacted by depression, but breastfeeding initiation was not.

As early as 1954, families of children who had been segregated into separate spaces fought and succeeded in having their concerns heard in the landmark Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education. In 1975, P.L. 94-142, Education for the Handicapped Children Act (EAHCA) was important because it exposed the history of family-school relations, addressing the multiple forms of inequity, particularly the exclusion of children with dis/abilities from U.S. public schools (Valle & Connor, 2011). Although EAHCA legislation was created to provide solutions to the problems of special education, it appeared to have provided an unequal environment in which the families with the most economic resources could advocate for their children and obtain access to better educational opportunities (Ong-Dean, 2009). Goodwin, Cheruvu, and Genishi (2008) described these policies as based on the “culturally deprived paradigm that compares racially, culturally, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse peoples to a White, middle-class standard” (p. 4). In this manner, these educational legislative policies are problematic as they have defined parent involvement as meaning families of culturally and linguistically different backgrounds are expected to act or interact with school professionals in particular ways. Moreover, these conceptualizations of parent involvement continue to privilege and perpetuate professional viewpoints based on a Eurocentric middle-class standard (Sleeter, 2001). Bakhtinian theories of language are used to understand how families describe their experiences as they encounter the deficit discourse of parent involvement used by school professionals. This is important because professional jargon or “stratified language” presents a danger in that it is replete with value judgments and beliefs (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 293), assuming power that then comes to inform the ways families understand their experiences and their selves in school contexts. This tells us that it is imperative to know how families of children with dis/abilities experience their communication with school professionals as there is a danger that the discourse of parent involvement will continue to perpetuate particular definitions of family participation that disqualify family knowledge by silencing the potential strengths and contributions of minoritized families (Lareau & Munoz, 2012). Moreover, the way minoritized families experience school professionals and how this is connected to how they come to be involved in their child’s education is not clear. This study, conducted just before and during the coronavirus pandemic, drew from Disability Studies (DS), disability critical race studies (DisCrit), and Intersectionality theories. It examined family-school communication being fully inclusive of all the ways families engage in the education of their children with dis/abilities at the crossroads of race, ethnicity, dis/ability, class, language, and culture (Hernández-Saca et al., 2018; Annamma et al., 2013). To rethink traditional notions of what counts as knowledge, pláticas (personal exchanges) revealed critical raced-gendered epistemologies that allowed the experiential knowledge of Latinx mothers of children with dis/abilities to be viewed as a strength (Delgado Bernal, 2002).

Parenting self-efficacy refers to the ability of parents to have confidence in their abilities to effectively parent their children. Parenting self-efficacy can be divided into two types: (a) general parenting self-efficacy, which is defined as a parent’s overall sense of ability to effectively parent; and (b) task-specific parenting self-efficacy, which is defined as a parent’s confidence level to perform specific parenting tasks, such as teaching and nurturing (tested in this study). The study applied Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory to an analysis of (a) the effect of the HIPPY program in interaction with family and neighborhood variables on parenting self-efficacy and (b) the effect of the interaction of family and neighborhood variables on parenting self-efficacy. A group of 138 HIPPY mothers and a group of 76 comparison mothers who did not receive HIPPY services were surveyed. The sample was largely Hispanic. Results indicated HIPPY predicts task-specific parenting self-efficacy for teaching tasks, but not general parenting self-efficacy or task-specific efficacy for nurturance. Many family variables that reflected Hispanic family values were unique predictors of all three types of parenting self-efficacy, both in analyses involving interactions with HIPPY and with neighborhood variables. Neighborhood variables solely predicted general parenting self-efficacy. Moderation effects were found for the interaction between family conflict and neighborhoods in predicting general parenting self-efficacy, and the interactions between family control and all three types of parenting self-efficacy. Overall, the bioecological model was inapplicable to urban, Hispanic mothers in the surveyed population because of the lack of interaction effects found in the study.