Chandra Reyna, SOCY Ph.D. Candidate, Shares Her Dissertation’s Tie to Her Own Roots

Chandra Reyna’s dissertation is so much more than a mark of Ph.D. completion; it’s the culmination of a yearslong effort to learn more about herself.

Reyna, who is on track to graduate with a Ph.D. in Sociology in the summer of 2023, began wondering why research on Latinx families was so focused on those who had either just come to the United States, or who were children of those who immigrated to the United States, when she was 21. She had two children of her own at the time, and much of the research she was reading was funded by the Russell Sage Foundation—the same foundation that recently awarded Reyna $10,000 to study how subsequent generations of Latinx women approach motherhood.

“The books I was reading were super interesting, but I kept finding myself asking ‘Where are the stories about families like mine?’” Reyna said. “My family has been here for over 100 years and we no longer have an immigrant experience. We were ‘whitewashed’ in a lot of ways because our parents and grandparents, who never spoke Spanish to us, were trying to shield us from racism.” 

Through the 35 “life course history” interviews Reyna has conducted so far with Latinx mothers in the DMV, as well as other parts of the United States, she’s realized that she shares her childhood experience with many others whose predecessors’ parenting style was greatly shaped by the societal challenges they faced. She’s also realized that that parenting style isn’t one later-generation Latinx mothers intend to adopt.

“What I'm finding is that later-generation mothers, or mothers who are grandchildren of immigrants, are being really brave and challenging the preconceived notion about motherhood in the Latinx community,” she said. “They're saying look, things like traditional gender roles and being emotionally unavailable are not inherently part of being in a Latinx family; those are symptoms of structural disadvantages that our families were experiencing when trying to get papers or experiencing a lot of racism or classism, and we're going to remove those.”

Reyna said later-generation Latinx mothers are intending to keep certain cultural elements like the Spanish language, food, Catholic traditions, and values that include hard work and respect, but, “they're replacing parenting ideals, values or practices that they see as either outdated parenting, or that may be trauma responses, and instead entering ‘gentle’  or ‘conscious parenting.’” 

While the situational specifics can vary greatly, “gentle parenting” or “conscious parenting” are terms used to broadly describe an approach where a parents’ focus shifts from reacting to a child’s behavior, to responding to it with logic. As ScaryMommy highlights, there are TikTok creators whose entire account is dedicated to showcasing the trending approach. 

“Mothers seem to be creating their own modified version of gentle or conscious parenting that is specific to their cultural background and the values they believe they want to keep in their family,” Reyna said. “I’ve heard mothers say ‘I'm not practicing gentle parenting in a way that it's talked about on the internet because I still have a hierarchy in my house with parenting children.’ On the internet, some people don't do that.” 

Reyna plans to author and present a paper on these gentle parenting findings at the spring 2023 Pacific Sociological Association conference. However, she hopes that the entirety of her work will have a much broader impact on how Latinx motherhood is viewed by society.

“There is this stereotype or trope that Latinx families, particularly parents and especially mothers, are abusive; they call it ‘chancla culture,’ and the idea is that an emotionally unavailable and cold parent would hit you with a chancla, the Spanish word for a sandal,” she said. “I hope that by sharing these stories through my dissertation, I let the people see that this stereotype is false, that mothers are not that way, and that if you find individual, anecdotal examples of that, maybe there is a structural reason why people are not able to show up for their children in the way that they really would like to."

Published on Tue, Nov 29, 2022 - 10:25AM