Mexican Mothers Retelling the City: stories from the 'parents as writers' workshop

Abstract

This article explores the ways a group of Mexican immigrant mothers living in Chicago's Little Village reconfigure their relation to local and transnational spaces they occupy, through their participation in a parent writing and publishing workshop. By conceptualizing the writers' storytelling activity as “spatial practices,” I consider how writing and reading stories in the group, and circulating their stories through publication and public readings, have allowed participating mothers to occupy and identify with their neighborhood, the city, and their homeland in novel terms that defy the official gendered and racial/ethnic structuring of urban spaces.