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A Mamá No la Vas a Llevar en la Maleta: Undocumented Mothers Crossing and Contesting Borders for Their Children’s Education
Author(s) -
Alexander Rebecca
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
anthropology and education quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.531
H-Index - 46
eISSN - 1548-1492
pISSN - 0161-7761
DOI - 10.1111/aeq.12268
Subject(s) - contest , sociology , poverty , embodied cognition , gender studies , border crossing , criminology , immigration , political science , epistemology , law , philosophy
This paper illuminates the border‐crossing and border‐contesting work of undocumented mothers seeking opportunities for their children. Mothers navigate dual threats of deportability and poverty‐induced mobility, preparing children for, and utilizing schools to stave off, these possibilities. Examining border crossing as parent involvement, I introduce “bordermothering” to elucidate the paradoxical ways in which mothers defy gendered norms of embodied parenting to provide for their children and invoke these norms to contest the conditions that compel their defiance.