The University of Arizona Press
September 23, 2024
Texas Standard Radio’s Kristen Cabrera interviewed the editors of Frontera Madre(hood): Brown Mothers Challenging Oppression and Transborder Violence at the U.S.-Mexico Border last week. The book has thirty contributors who all write about the experience of being a mother and care-taking on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Editors Cynthia Bejarano and Maria Cristina Morales spoke about how their own family experience led to the collection of essays on mothering. Bejarano explained the new and disturbing vibe at El Paso’s Thanksgiving parade:
We started taking our families in 2014 when our kids were quite young. And from year to year we started to notice the parade route itself was still the same, but the participants had changed. There seemed to be an overwhelming presence of policing units, of the military, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Border Patrol and several junior exploration programs where we saw young young kids—the adolescent age and even younger—who were kind of marching in unison as they were wearing whatever uniform they were representing. And so that kind of it caught our attention.
Morales expanded on her life in the borderlands:
I grew up in El Paso, she grew up in Anthony, New Mexico. So we have experienced what it’s like being in the margins—not only the geographical margins, but the margins in terms of social class immigration status. I am a second generation Mexican, so my parents came from Juárez and then my upbringing was really on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. I was born in the El Paso side, but I very much had relatives and social events and activities on the Mexican side of the border. And so I grew up with this very rich, bicultural experience, and it’s something that really shaped the way that I look at the world.
Listen to the Texas Standard Radio interview here or read the transcript.
About the book:
The topic of mothers and mothering transcends all spaces, from popular culture to intellectual thought and critique. This collection of essays bridges both methodological and theoretical frameworks to explore forms of mothering that challenge hegemonic understandings of parenting and traditional notions of Latinx womxnhood. It articulates the collective experiences of Latinx, Black, and Indigenous mothering from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Thirty contributors discuss their lived experiences, research, or community work challenging multiple layers of oppression, including militarization of the border, border security propaganda, feminicides, drug war and colonial violence, grieving and loss of a child, challenges and forms of resistance by Indigenous mothers, working mothers in maquiladoras, queer mothering, academia and motherhood, and institutional barriers by government systems to access affordable health care and environmental justice.
