Life on the U.S./Mexico border is like no place else. It’s nuanced, colorful and often misunderstood by people in other parts of the country. It’s a vibrant place that is home to many families on both sides of the border.
A new book examines the role and experience of motherhood on the border through research, lived experience and community work.
“Frontera Madre(hood): Brown Mothers Challenging Oppression and Transborder Violence at the U.S.-Mexico Border” is a collection of essays edited by Cynthia Bejarano and Maria Cristina Morales. They spoke with the Standard on their contributions to the book as well as their inspiration for gathering these stories. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Well, it’s not often that motherhood is looked at through such a geographical lens here in the U.S. Tell us about the idea behind this. Cynthia, why don’t you start?
Cynthia Bejarano: Sure. So Cristina and I have been working together as collaborators for at least two decades now as part of a budding relationship, academically speaking. But then also personally.
We have taken our children to the local parade, the Thanksgiving parade in El Paso, Texas. We started taking them in 2014 when our kids were quite young. And from year to year we started to notice the parade route itself was still the same, but the participants had changed.
There seemed to be an overwhelming presence of policing units, of the military, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Border Patrol and several junior exploration programs where we saw young young kids – the adolescent age and even younger – who were kind of marching in unison as they were wearing whatever uniform they were representing. And so that kind of it caught our attention.
And we noticed that this was no longer the parade of yesteryear when we were children – that our children were now exposed to the militarization of the border that we’ve seen creep up over decades and decades in places along the entire U.S.-Mexico border.
So I think we would both say that this is the impetus for the book. And we started to think about this and the role that children have in bearing witness to some of the changes that have taken place along the border, the questions that our children have asked us about and really longing ourselves for the matachineses, for instance, that we would see coming from Ciudad Juárez., the high school bands that were quite prevalent back in our younger years that we no longer saw as much of… And so that was a bit disconcerting for us.
Yeah, of course the matachines, for those who don’t know, are the dancers that celebrate at many events here along the border in El Paso, Juárez and Las Cruces. So, Cristina, the book is a collection of essays. How did you go about compiling all of the contributors and selecting what would make it into the final product?
Maria Cristina Morales: One of the things that we really wanted to represent was mothering on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. So we consciously looked at the work of both organic intellectuals in the community and activist mothers on both sides of the border.
It was really important for us to not just speak about this issue from the U.S. side, but to also represent the northern Mexican border and the experiences of those mothers and how mothering is very much different in the border region. Like even like what Cynthia mentioned, the militarization – that’s one layer. And there is several layers of structural violence related to immigration, drug wars, but also injustices in the health care system.
So there’s a lot of contentious situations on the border, and mothers here in this area have to parent in a different way than they would in other areas. And we wanted to make sure that this collection would give a voice in this space to those who are not normally given that space to talk about how they have to be almost like super moms – to navigate these structures to provide a healthy living environment for their children.
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Well, you both also contribute to the book. Can you talk about that and your experience with motherhood? Cristina, do you want to go first?
Maria Cristina Morales: Sure. So as Cynthia was saying, we both grew up in the U.S.-Mexico border. I grew up in El Paso, she grew up in Anthony, New Mexico. So we have experienced what it’s like being in the margins – not only the geographical margins, but the margins in terms of social class immigration status.
I am a second generation Mexican, so my parents came from Juárez and then my upbringing was really on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. I was born in the El Paso side, but I very much had relatives and social events and activities on the Mexican side of the border. And so I grew up with this very rich, bicultural experience, and it’s something that really shaped the way that I look at the world.
How about you, Cynthia?
Cynthia Bejarano: So in the kind of work that both Cristina and I have done as border scholars, I think we have a keen eye in thinking about not only as mothers, but also as feminist scholars.
Two individuals that are from the border region, who work at border universities, that cross borders all the time for our own research, for our own advocacy work, to visit chosen family or biological families… And we’ve been exposed to many, many walks of life – all sorts of people who do migrant advocacy work, to fighting gender-based violence work, like the femicides, and a whole host of other social justice and human rights injustices.
We’ve been touched by the lives of so many women and men who have done this tireless, tireless work. And I mention it in my formation as a border scholar, as a border individual, and also as a mom who is raising a child at the U.S.-Mexico border.
In this collection, we also work to challenge who can mother and how one can mother. So it isn’t strictly about looking at biological parenting, but it’s also all the challenges that come with child rearing or advocacy work where you take on mothering responsibilities. And some of our contributors – an amazing, amazing host of women that have worked and contributed their testimonials and life stories to this collection – talk about how they mother without being biological mothers. So I wanted to be sure to to mention that.
And of course, mothering is shaped by the geopolitics of border zones. So some women talk about mothering – not themselves being biological mothers – but they talk about mothering as an advocate or as an activist, while others talk about mothering and their daily survival and the exposure to violence that their own children have experienced. And unfortunately, that also has resulted in the untimely deaths of young people.
So many, many of these stories are encapsulated in our collection.
