The editors of Frontera Madre(hood): Brown Mothers Challenging Oppression and Transborder Violence at the U.S.-Mexico border, Dr. Cynthia Bejarano and Dr. Maria Cristina Morales talk to Susan Morée about why they compiled the essays about mothering at the border together into a book and how the book challenges some perceptions. The book recently won the Border Regional Librarian Southwest Book Award. Here is a transcript of the conversation.
Susan Morée:
One thing that really struck me, one of the essays, “A Different Kind of Motherhood for Liberation,” I was really interested in her thesis that anti-detention work is a form of mothering. What did you all think about that?
Dr. Cynthia Bejarano:
The work of Dr. Margaret Brown-Vega, she's an anthropologist and a former faculty at New Mexico State University. Her chapter provided us with the opportunity to really deconstruct what mothering is in the most traditional sense of the word. And it really helps us to kind of explode and pull at the fabric of how we understand mothering, which is at the core of Frontera Motherhood and the concept that we devised. In our own experiences, professionally speaking, that, I mean, you find yourself as, and not to essentialize our experiences as women, but you find yourself really caring for and nurturing students. And that's also a theme of other faculty who have written in our collection.
Susan Morée:
The book Frontera Madrehood came out in 2024, but it seems really timely at the moment with all that's happening at the border right now. Why were you twoinspired to edit this book and pull together all these stories from different women about motherhood as it meant to them?
Dr. Maria Cristina Morales
Cindy and I have been collaborators for a number of years, and one of the things, collaborating professionally, but we also developed a friendship. And when we were taking our kids to the parade, we noticed a transition from how the parade used to be to the militarization that is evident in the parade today, right? Different units of Department of Homeland Security, Early Junior Explorer programs, and really putting us in a position where we need to have these very difficult conversations with our children at a young age at that time about what does it mean about the work that they do and why they do it, and realizing that when you are at the border, your motherhood has to take into consideration the context that is very harsh, all of these very difficult topics, and how is it that we have these conversations with our children and we're forced to have to mother in another way from those who are not in the region. And so that's where we began to think how it is important that we consider the voices of the mothers from the border to capture that from the entire distance of the US-Mexico border.
Susan Morée:
And that feels really important to me right now because we hear so much about the border and about the people who live in the border and people trying to cross the border from a certain perspective and from a very politicized lens. And what I found really amazing about the book is that these are the voices of the folks who are actually living on the border and trying to cross the border and allowing them to speak and share their stories.
Dr. Cynthia Bejarano:
I think when students have picked up this book or have read any of the chapters, the research-based chapters, or the testimonials, they see themselves in these stories. There are segments of these women's stories that really hit close to home, as one of the reviewers who read our book and issued the International Latinx Award to us said, quote, unquote, the book hits close to home. So, it's something of value. It has currency for people to pay attention to because the stories are so varied and they're stories of hope and resilience. It has significant resonance for our students, for our local communities that we come from. And that's really why we wanted to pull this work together, to honor community members in our lives. And of course, as I'd indicated earlier, to kind of like bust out of the idea of essentializing what parenting is or even mothering.
Susan Morée:
Another one of the stories that I found really interesting, they talked about the caravan of migrants who came in 2017, and again, that was very politicized, but they talked about it from being people who were involved in it, and it was a matter of safety.
Dr. Maria Cristina Morales
Well, what I would like to say about that is that a lot of the images and rhetoric on the US-Mexico border are not the voices that are represented in those discourses. They are not from the people on the ground, right? And the people who are involved in this movement are very aware, right? They're not naive to the political circumstances that have placed them there, but they're working through it. There are, there's solidarity in those movements. Cindy, do you want to add?
Dr. Cynthia Bejarano:
Yeah, yeah. I think a significant portion of the book is dedicated to these questions of really challenging in the United States around what migration is. And I think sometimes when we think about migration, we're thinking about other things like border security and framing migration as criminal threats or threats to institutions and ways of life. And there's nothing further from the truth. When you think about it, and if you really learn and allow yourself to learn and explore stories of migration. They are stories about hope and resilience. People are not moving through multiple nation states because it's an adventure. They're moving through multiple nation states out of necessity and out of survival. So many migrants are so, so young. What does it mean to be mothering at a young age or to be mothering, like traveling with small children as you're crossing multiple nation states? So, it really, what I love, there's so many things that I love and respect about the women who have written in this book. It forces people to think about it and it forces people to challenge their own constructs of being and those around them. Because nothing is easy. And so the writing of the women who contributed to this book bring these issues to life in a way that forces us as a society, as a reader. Even as a citizen of the borderlands, to really kind of chew and digest these stories and think about them. How do they impinge on my life? How do they kind of rub up against my own existence? Cristina and I have just poured through these stories along with the women who wrote these stories and represented other people. It's just like a long, a long human chain along the borderland where we're just trying to have people kind of to practice some humility, to be honest. You know, if you start peeling those layers apart, you start to see what we all have in common and that's our humanity and that's what we should be focusing on right now.