Frontera Madre(hood)

Brown Mothers Challenging Oppression and Transborder Violence at the U.S.-Mexico Border

Edited by Cynthia Bejarano and Maria Cristina Morales

SERIES: The Feminist Wire Books

The University of Arizona Press

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. Also central to this collection are questions on how migration and detention restructure forms of mothering. Overall, this collection encapsulates how mothering is shaped by the geopolitics of border zones, which also transcends biological, sociological, or cultural and gendered tropes regarding ideas of motherhood, who can mother, and what mothering personifies.

Contributors
Elva M. Arredondo
Cynthia Bejarano
Bertha A. Bermúdez Tapia
Margaret Brown Vega
Macrina Cárdenas Montaño
Claudia Yolanda Casillas
Luz Estela (Lucha) Castro
Marisa Elena Duarte
Taide Elena
Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla
Paula Flores Bonilla
Judith Flores Carmona
Sandra Gutiérrez
Ma. Eugenia Hernández Sánchez
Irene Lara
Leticia López Manzano
Mariana Martinez
Maria Cristina Morales
Paola Isabel Nava Gonzales
Olga Odgers-Ortiz
Priscilla Pérez
Silvia Quintanilla Moreno
Cirila Quintero Ramírez
Felicia Rangel-Samponaro
Coda Rayo-Garza
Shamma Rayo-Gutierrez
Marisol Rodríguez Sosa
Brenda Rubio
Ariana Saludares
Victoria M. Telles
Michelle Téllez
Marisa S. Torres
Edith Treviño Espinosa
Mariela Vásquez Tobon
Hilda Villegas

Reviews
Editor

This must-read collection of nonacademic and academic madre voices from both sides of the border captures the resistance, activism, love, and healing of Brown mothers. Through their words, readers bear witness to the everyday struggles, trauma, and resiliency of negotiating everyday life in the borderlands.’—Dolores Delgado Bernal, author of Transforming Educational Pathways for Chicana/o Students

‘From immigration and border enforcement to labor exploitation, militarization, and the social determinant of women’s health, Bejarano and Morales curated a dynamic collection of essays that advance feminist writing on motherwork and othermothering. Frontera madre(hood)’ as an analytic interrogates state-sanctioned oppression and violence, in its many public and private forms, against Chicanx, Latinx, and Indigenous women of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands through the lens of mothering practices as familial and communal.’—Mako Fitts Ward, Arizona State University

Cynthia Bejarano is a regents professor in the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and the College of Arts and Sciences Fulton Endowed Chair at New Mexico State University. Her scholarship centers on intersectionality and violence at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Maria Cristina Morales is a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at El Paso who studies the structural inequalities at the U.S.-Mexico border and those targeting Latinx people. She is the co-author of Latinos in the U.S.

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