“There’s always racism”: Puerto Rican Mothers Naming Linguistic Inequities and Sharing Community Cultural Wealth Post-Displacement

Abstract

In the following study, displaced Puerto Rican mothers and I created and explored a learning space – culture circles – that engaged participants in a critical cycle of problem posing, dialogue, and problem solving in relation to their experiences in the receiving Pennsylvania community. Using a qualitative, ethnographic approach, the study drew from Critical Pedagogy (CP), raciolinguistics, and a Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) framework to inform data collection and analysis. Individual interviews, culture circle meeting recordings, field notes, and digital artefacts created by four focal participants help illustrate how these mothers navigate the US school system and the wider receiving community in southern Pennsylvania. Moreover, the data reflect how racism in this context is based predominantly on families’ language practices. Despite mothers facing significant challenges due to race/ethnicity, language, class, and gender, this study highlights the conversations that displaced Puerto Rican mothers engaged in regarding the impact racism had in their everyday lives. Furthermore, the space we created allowed participants to share and model their accumulated linguistic, social, and resistant capital for their children’s academic success.