Professors Dr. Cynthia Bejarano and Dr. Maria Cristina Morales read a chapter of their book, Frontera Madre(hood) followed by a discussion and audience Q& A. October 21 at 5:30 PM, free and open to the public.

Thirty contributors discuss their lived experiences, research, or community work challenging multiple layers of oppression, including militarization of the border, border security propaganda, feminicides, drug war and colonial violence, grieving and loss of a child, challenges and forms of resistance by Indigenous mothers, working mothers in maquiladoras, queer mothering, academia and motherhood, and institutional barriers by government systems to access affordable health care and environmental justice. Fronter Madre(hood) encapsulates how mothering is shaped by the geopolitics of border zones, which also transcends biological, sociological, or cultural and gendered tropes regarding ideas of motherhood, who can mother, and what mothering personifies.

Cynthia Bejarano is a Regents Professor in gender and sexuality studies and the College of Arts and Sciences Stan Fulton Chair at New Mexico State University. Her scholarship and advocacy center on the U.S.-Mexico border. She authored Qué Onda: Urban Youth Culture and Border Identity (2005), and co-edited with Rosa Linda Fregoso, Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Américas (2010), Frontera Madre(hood): Brown Mothers Challenging Transborder Violence and Oppression at the U.S.-Mexico Border with Cristina Morales (2024), and recently co-edited with Margo Tamez and Jeffrey Shepherd as second editor, Gathering Together, We Decide Archives of Dispossession, Resistance, and Memory in Ndé Homelands (2025). Since 2002, Bejarano has served as the founding principal investigator for the NMSU College Assistance Migrant Program, where 675 farm working students have been recruited to study at NMSU.

Maria Cristina Morales is a native of the El Paso del Norte region and a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her work focuses on structural violence and inequalities of Latina/o/x/e people and the U.S.-Mexico border. She is the co-author of the first and second editions of Latina/os in the U.S.: Diversity and Change (with Rogelio Sáenz and Coda Rayo-Garza) and Frontera Madre(hood): Brown Mothers Challenging Transborder Violence and Oppression at the U.S.-Mexico Border, co-authored with Cynthia Bejarano. She is currently examining patterns of structural violence at the U.S.-Mexico border.