Underlying a Critical Ideology of Motherhood: Communal Agency in Immigrant Mothers’ Narratives

Abstract

Underlying a Critical Ideology of Motherhood: Communal Agency in Immigrant Mothers’ Narratives Adriana Goenaga Ruiz de Zuazu Cibils, Lilian. Immigration, Motherhood and Parental Involvement: Narratives of Communal Agency in the Face of Power Asymmetry. Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2017. pp. 295. ISBN 978-1-4331-3088-5. Lilian Cibils’s book skillfully guides the reader through an analysis of seven women’s narratives to promote a critical approach to the dominant ideology of motherhood. In this book, Cibils makes a strong statement by transcending aspects of immigration and vulnerability in motherhood to show a need for understanding social processes and agency in women’s stories. With attention to social processes, the author refers to the production and reproduction of domination and oppression exercised by social institutions such as schools. A transformative agency is exemplified in seven women’s narratives, characterized by master and counter narratives. The illustrated counternarratives appear at the heart of the women’s stories as spaces for thought around “mother-work,” a critical ideology of motherhood. Divided into five parts, the first part of the book is about the study, its contexts, and the study participants’ seven stories. The introductory chapter presents the theoretical framework that informs the study and a descriptive outline of book chapters. In chapter one, Cibils provides a close look of the immigration phenomenon as a social result of neoliberal globalization and discusses how social institutions like schools perpetuate structural racism and structural linguicism through “symbolic violence,” or covert forms of domination. They affect foreign-born populations, with a higher price of domination on women. Seven Mexican-born women are interviewed in this qualitative study, whose children attend public schools in the Southwest of the United States. At the end, the focus shifts to the significance of the resourcefulness and the development of agency of the women in situations of vulnerability. Within chapter two, Cibils illustrates a “contextualized and situated” (19) concept of justice, with considerations of analyses of social institutions and processes of inequity and recognizes a “matrix of domination” of race, class, gender, and [End Page 175] invisibility of immigrant women, manifested in a political, racial, and social exclusion. The author makes a call for participation parity as the norm. In schools, she presumes imposed expectations for parents through an operation of symbolic violence, explained by asymmetrical relationships of school agents and processes of “normalization” of behavior through disciplinary systems. Cibils establishes her positionality, noting her privileges and ways to empathize and identify herself with participants. The author, in chapter three, briefly introduces Norma, Sandra, Luisa, Patricia, Silvia, Susana, and Brenda through her narratives, attending to official discourses, common threads, and differences. The second part of the book is about two contrasting ideologies on parent involvement and master and counter narratives embedded in women’s stories. Within chapter four, Cibils invokes a relevant discussion about parental involvement and ideologies of motherhood, looking at the interconnectedness of power and language in discourse and repercussions of the official discourse of parental involvement on multicultural parents, working-class immigrant mothers in particular. The official discourse includes “the myth of a good mother” (57), ingrained in “the ideal parent norm in social policy” (60) and societal expectations for mothers. The book offers an alternative to revert from the blame-the-victim of poverty into mother-work, centered on aspects of intersectionality of race, gender, class, national origin, and citizenship status and diverse cultural stories of motherhood, as shown in women’s descriptive examples of individual and group survival, empowerment, and identity. Chapter five sheds light on the transformational power of counternarratives coexisting with presumed master narratives in historically marginalized communities. It is on “a narrative counterpoint or polyphony” (81) that Cibils bases women stories’ analysis, characterized by “instances of alignment with the official discourse” (81), in cases impersonating the ones in power in a phenomenon called “ventriloquizing,” and “instances of resistance and countering” (81), exercising transformative agency. The third part of the book shows the fine line drawn between formal and informal exclusion of immigration mothers in study findings. Cibils, in chapter six, changes the discourse about immigrant populations to acknowledge the notion of displacement, the dynamic nature of belonging, and much needed development of...