AfroBoriqua Mothering: Teaching/Learning Blackness in a Bay Area AfroPuerto Rican Community of Practice

Abstract

<jats:p>This article puts forth the notion of Afroboriqua mothering to understand the types of conditions that allow communal, proleptic practices of blackness to exist within AfroPuerto Rican communities. Afroboriqua mothering is an act that occurs within a community of practice that queers how we understand mothering through activism that always centers blackness and anti-colonial Puerto Ricanness. Through participant-observation and a series of interviews with members of one AfroPuerto Rican community in Northern California, Afroboriqua mothering surfaced as a way to describe teaching and learning (or teaching/learning) within AfroLatinx multi-generational communities that centers blackness as an ancestral, cooperative, and activist practice.</jats:p>

Collective parent action: A review of motivations, experiences, and social transformations

“…In their study of Chicana organizers, Ramirez et al (2011) find that because the lived experiences of marginalized women do not reflect the mainstream narrative of equality and fairness for all, their experiences often encourage them to make collective struggle a central part of their lives. Cortes (2020) argues against "deficit and individually-oriented explanations" of Afro Latinxs' practices, highlighting how the mothering and organizing of Black and Puerto Rican women is a communal process that always centers Blackness and anti-colonialism (p. 129). Similarly, Cossyleon (2019) suggests that for Black and Latina mothers, community organizing is a group process of contesting an individualistic ideology that disproportionately and unfairly blames economically marginalized women of color for not working hard enough to improve their social and economic circumstances.…”

“…As a long line of research suggests, community leadership and organizing are inseparable from everyday gendered and racialized experiences and are a practice of caregiving and thriving (Brown, 2021; Cortes, 2020; Cossyleon, 2021; Law & Martens, 2012; Love, 2019; Naples, 1998; Pardo, 1998; Tubbs, 2021). This review traces the work of mothers and other caregivers engaging in progressive community organizing campaigns, what we call collective parent action .…”