Please join us on Tuesday, April 18, 12-1pm for a "What I Am Thinking About Now" presentation from Andrea Flores, Assistant Professor of Education at Brown University. Her talk is titled, "The Descendant Bargain: Latina Youth Remaking Kinship and Generation through Sibling Caretaking in Nashville, Tennessee."

RSVP to [email protected]. Snacks and caffeine will be provided.

Drawing on fieldwork with Latinx youth in Nashville, Tennessee conducted in 2012-2013, I examine how young Latinas who practiced extensive care-taking of their siblings conceptualized the sibling relationship and its place in broader kinship networks. Sibling care-taking is common among Latinx immigrant families, with girls and young women more often bearing significant responsibilities. The young women I worked with framed their sibling relationships as intergenerational, calling their siblings “my kids” and themselves their siblings’ mothers. I will argue that they did so for two linked reasons. First, by positioning themselves as members of a different genealogical generation than their younger siblings, they claimed that their care-work was as important to the family’s future as that of their parents. Second, and relatedly, the elder sisters used the intergenerational framing to make sense of the unequal life chances between siblings stemming from the unevenly experienced processes of immigration and settlement. By marking themselves intergenerationally, care-taking Latina youth position themselves as a lynchpin in the story of their families’s hoped-for upward mobility, make sense of their often-parental role in siblings’ lives, and create new family obligations and potentially new genealogical generations.

"What I Am Thinking About Now" is an on-going informal workshop/seminar series to which faculty and graduate students are invited to present and discuss recently published work and work in progress. All are invited to attend and participate.