<p> Instead of accepting the adage that adolescent motherhood had a negative effect in young women's lives, this researcher used a portraiture methodology to illuminate the goodness of adolescent motherhood for two <i>Mexicana </i> women in a southern New Mexico mountain town (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997; Pillow, 2004). I examined how the ideological conditions of the hierarchy of gender that femininity and motherhood contextualize the conditions in which two first-generation Mexican American women became pregnant while still in high school. I framed that result within the historical structuring of the education of adolescent mothers to understand how the participants were able to experience a campus-based daycare, parenting program, and health center when they most needed it in order to graduate from high school. This research followed how the participants contended over the years with issues of legal work status, culture, healthcare, romance, language, resiliency, agency, discipline, contraceptives, and sexuality. From 24 hours of audio transcriptions, the experiences of the two participants were presented chronologically from 2004-2013 in order to show how context informed the decisions the women made at the intersection of woman, mother, worker, and student identities. Through a feminist standpoint, I examined the portraits to reveal important insight into the experience of adolescent motherhood to illuminate possibilities for social justice (Bowman, 2011). My findings are based upon the themes that emerged from the data and the critical consciousness I gained from researching their experiences.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:3582403 |
| Date | 26 June 2015 |
| Creators | Miletic, Renee Marie |
| Publisher | New Mexico State University |
| Source Sets | ProQuest.com |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
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