Raising Chicanos in the Great White North: A White Mother’s Muse
Qualitative Inquiry
Volume 15, Number 7, (July 2009)
pages 1155-1177
DOI: 10.1177/1077800409338033
Traci Fordham-Hernández, Assistant Professor of Performance and Communication Arts
St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY
This article explores paradoxes in being the White mother of Mexican American children and discusses how some of its attendant issues contrast one another. The author, an American scholar, believes she is taught to think and to write, not from the heart, but from a detached and “objective,” cerebral cortex, and she sees the places, the prism through which the world is seen, are constantly shifting. The author writes of liminality and simultaneity, “I’m ‘swimming in the sea’ as both the swimmer, struggling, and part of the sea, itself, pulling myself under, drowning in between-ness . . .” The headings, “From the Shore,” provide a detached, theoretical reflection upon the author’s experiences as a White mother of mixed-race children: “I’m standing on the banks, looking into my experiences and speaking from my ’head’,” and the headings, “In the Sea,” provide stories: “I’m immersed in the depths of my experiences and reflecting from my ‘heart’.”
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