Liminal cultural work in family childcare
Latino immigrant family childcare providers and bicultural childrearing in the United States, 2002-2004
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5816243 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lynet Uttal (0000-0002-7542-8437, University of Wisconsin–Madison, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 46 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 729-740 |
| Publication date | 2010-12-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Paedagogica Historica (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0030-9230 • E-ISSN: 1477-674X |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/00309230.2010.526333 |
| PMID | 21280397 |
| OpenAlex | W2042158790 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
Immigrants find themselves in a liminal state of limbo between two societies. In this zone, competing cultural ideas coexist. This essay examines how Latino immigrant family childcare providers in the United States questioned US norms of childrearing and how they engaged in liminal cultural work to produce a bicultural childrearing. They are exposed to US norms through family childcare certification programmes that they were legally required to participate in, in order to receive the accreditation required to care for young children in their homes. They were simultaneously critical and embracing of US mainstream ideas of childrearing. Two contested areas for them are the emphasis on individual child development and the levelling of authority relations between adults and children. Their traditional values are absent from the training programmes, yet they develop a process of selective adaptation which both maintains and discards traditional ideas of childrearing and integrates them with some of the new ideas they learn in the US. The liminal cultural work that immigrant family childcare workers do is both for themselves and for the children and the families for whom they provide care. The providers experience a process of ongoing liminal cultural work. Keywords: assimilationbiculturalismchildcareLatinoliminalityliminal cultural work Notes 1Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, NY, 1969). 2Cecilia Menjívar, "Liminal Legality: Salvadoran and Guatemalan Immigrants' Lives in the United States," American Journal of Sociology 111 (2006): 999-1037. 3Menjívar, "Liminal Legality: Salvadoran and Guatemalan Immigrants' Lives in the United States," 1006. 5Papastergiadis, "The Limits of Cultural Translation," 136. 4Nikos Papastergiadis, "The Limits of Cultural Translation," in The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization, and Hybridity, ed. Nikos Papastergiadis (Cambridge, UK, 2000), 122-277. 6Papastergiadis, "The Limits of Cultural Translation," 125. 7See the discussion of the dual meaning and innovation of meaning of the hijab in an unrelated example of liminal cultural work in Rhys H. Williams and Gira Vashi, "Hijab and American Muslim Women: Creating the Space for Autonomous Selves," Sociology of Religion 68 (2007): 269-87. 8Margaret K. Nelson, Negotiated Care: The Experience of Family Day Care Providers (Philadelphia, PA, 1990); Lynet Uttal and Mary Tuominen, "Tenuous Relationships: Exploitation, Emotion, and Racial Ethnic Significance in Paid Childcare Work," Gender & Society 13 (1999): 755-77. 9Nelson, Negotiated Care. 10Lynet Uttal, Making Care Work: Employed Mothers in the New Childcare Market (New Brunswick, NJ, 2002). 11Lynet Uttal, Making Care Work: Employed Mothers in the New Childcare Market (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002). 12Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut, Immigrant America: A Portrait (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). 13Ellen Diaz McConnell, "Latinos in the Rural Midwest: The Twentieth-Century Historical Context Leading to Contemporary Challenges," in Apple Pie and Enchildadas: Latino Newcomers in the Rural Midwest, ed. Ann V. Millard & Jorge Chapa (Austin, TX, 2004), 26-40. 15Chen, "From Filial Piety to Religious Piety," 580. 14Carolyn Chen, "From Filial Piety to Religious Piety: Evangelical Christianity Reconstructing Taiwanese Immigrant Families in the United States." International Migration Review 40 (2006): 593. 16Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Berkeley, CA, 2003); Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (New Haven, CT, 1996). 17In southern parts of the US, a similar practice occurs where children are expected to call childcare providers "Miss Lisa" rather than just "Lisa
Mainstream · Principle of legality · Child Welfare and Adoption
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2014 - 2026 (13) |
| Highly cited | No |