Vania Smith-Oka's 'Shaping the Motherhood of Indigenous Mexico' Vania Smith-Oka - WeNews
go to original May 22, 2013

Mexico - Education Indigenous Community (UNICEFbeKIDS)

Shaping the Motherhood of Indigenous Mexico by Vania Smith-Oka Check it out on Amazon.com

Most women in Amatlan consider themselves, their neighbors and their friends to be good mothers.

Almost all the women in the community labor in the domestic sphere - they cook the food, wash the clothes and generally look after the house and children. Making lonches - lunches for the men in the fields and for the school-age children - is an integral part of their mothering. A good mother frets about what she is feeding her children. Though the terms the women use to talk about each other's mothering are similar to the good-bad dichotomy used by the main­stream, their interpretations and the reasons behind their interpretations are more nuanced.

For the state, good mothers follow the rules, have few children and invest in them emotionally; they are also expected to live in a nuclear family. For the women I met, good motherhood entailed a significant amount of investment, but also drawing from one's extended-kin network to achieve a child's success; abuelas and ahuis (grandmothers and aunts) were frequently key to the socialization process of any child...

In Amatlan, many mothers suffer alongside, or because of, their children. While marianismo - the all-suffering, passive motherhood epitomized in the Virgin Mary - is very present in many corners of Latin America, it is not much in evidence in this region. The mothers who do struggle with their children neither view themselves as martyrs nor do they suffer in silence.

Read the rest at WeNews

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!