Latina Mothers and Small-Town Racisms

Within the context of relatively new immigration and settlement in North Carolina, this ethnographic study highlights Latina mothers’ narratives and conversations about a moral family education. Their narratives involved the claiming of el hogar (the home space) in the midst of the English-speaking community’s attempts to define their families and childrearing practices as “problem.” With a race-based feminist perspective, this article examines the role of the mothers’ counternarratives in contesting their deficit framing, producing “educated” identities, and creating community in the rural South.