Aspirational Mexican American Parenting in the Rural South: Multilingualism, Hard Work, and the Middle Class

This study examined the parenting choices of Mexican-heritage former child migrant farmworkers who are now financially stable and raising their own children in the rural South. The study yielded multiple significant findings using data collected during semi-structured, bilingual focus groups and analyzed through grounded theory coding. The participants spoke of painful childhood memories of how their poverty and biculturalism left them isolated. Now, as adults, they have sought middle-class belonging for themselves and their children. They described their “pedagogies of the home” as seeking to preserve their linguistic heritage, teach the value of hard work, and facilitate their children’s upward mobility into the middle class. However, Southern rural contexts do not allow for a Latino-identified “minority culture of mobility.” Therefore, as parents, our participants have often, consciously or unconsciously, chosen fast-track assimilation into the local, predominantly White middle class. For example, most participants have not raised fluently bilingual children. Our participants have emphasized and intentionally encouraged Southern White middle-class-compatible values and behaviors among their children, such as industriousness, respeto, and playing soccer. Many deploy the racially loaded rhetoric of prosperity theology to validate their personal narratives of hard childhood labor. Our participants expressed enthusiasm regarding how their children have been better able, compared to their childhood selves, to fit into the local community and schools. However, they were also aware that this success had come at a cost. They had doubts about what had been lost via sometimes disquieting compromises with the culture of the rural South.