Pláticas help Latino immigrants discover keys to U.S. culture, maintain own

They are questions that rouse us from sleep at unseemly hours of the morning: Who am I? Who are we, as a cultural entity? Who will our children be?

For bicultural people the issue usually has more nuances than it does for those of the mainstream. For example, “My mother immigrated to the United States from Japan when she was 23. She was a U.S.-born daughter of Japanese immigrants who got caught in Japan after Pearl Harbor was bombed. Japan shaped most of her own socialization, so when she had my two sisters and me she had to figure out how to parent in the U.S.,” and it wasn’t easy, says Lynet Uttal.

“Japanese culture said this, American society said that. As parent and child, we were constantly negotiating what I should or shouldn’t be allowed to do. We took nothing for granted. It was like we were inventing everything from scratch,” she says.

Today, Uttal is an associate professor of human development and family studies, women’s studies, Chican@ and Latin@ studies, and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her own upbringing has led her on a professional path working with immigrant Latino families faced with raising their children on the cusp of two cultures.

The Legislative Reference Bureau reports that Wisconsin’s Hispanic populations have more than doubled in the decade between 1990 and 2000. Although not all of those are new immigrants, of course, those that are continue to face significant challenges. With a collaborative team from UW–Madison and the community, Uttal has designed and implemented a combined research program and educational service for Latino immigrant families and Spanish-speaking child-care givers. She says that both parents and child-care providers welcome the support and insights into raising children in the U.S. Part of the program’s popularity, she says, is its approach, providing space for Spanish-speaking Latinos to talk on an equal footing about bicultural child-rearing practices — monthly get-togethers are less lectures and more sessions of give and take, Uttal says.

“We’ve held workshops on bicultural child-rearing, choosing a child-care provider, maintaining the culture and cultural pride, bringing men into the family and creating new communities here in Madison,” she says. “We’ve provided a place where immigrant families could articulate the importance of creating community and providing community-based education for healthier children and families. In these last three years we’ve shifted from a didactic, teaching model to a dialogical, co-mentoring model of education. In fact, we now call these workshops pláticas, which is a process to learn from one another. Experienced parents share their ideas about how to handle common transition stresses that new immigrant parents might be facing. Everyone discusses what she or he thinks of those ideas. The goal is for each person to take home with them new insights that help them better understand bicultural child-rearing, and then to develop their own approaches to the challenges of combining at least two sets of cultural messages.”

This fall, Uttal’s Formando Lazos (“Forming Ties”) Project has added a component for the children who are taking part in the bicultural child care. “The Club Cultural Herenicia encourages and enables children to maintain their Spanish language and learn about Latino cultures and customs so they can be proud of being Latinos in the United States,” Uttal says, adding that all pláticas are open to newcomers.

“We want to develop even more leadership among the women attending the pláticas. We have a consistent team of planners which includes bicultural community liaisons, graduate and undergraduate students, and the UW–Madison student group MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztalan) — members have adopted us as their community service project. It’s really important for Latino immigrant parents and children to see young Latino adults enrolled in college,” she says.

Uttal says that what this project underscores for her is the importance of incorporating the voices, wisdoms and experiences of racial and ethnic groups as an integral part in parent education programs.

“Too often, parent educators and university experts come from the mainstream cultural perspective. They don’t make room for different ways of looking at the world,” says Uttal. She says a good example is the plática itself.

“It’s very time-consuming and messy by the mainstream culture’s organizational standards. Instead of seeing this as an example of disorganization and poor planning, we have learned that very rich insights and new ways of doing things emerge when we don’t over-structure. The feedback we get from the community is that this style works because it validates their knowledge, doesn’t make them feel stupid and enables them to develop bicultural living processes of their own.”

Uttal says that she and her team are trying to strike a balance between, she says, “‘Hi, we’re the university and we’re here to organize you’ and “Hi, develop yourself.’

“Somewhere in between those two approaches is a partnership that honors both the local knowledge of the community as well as the academic knowledge of the university and the professional knowledge of the parent educators,” she says. “All three members are partners in a process that shares the common goal of understanding and improving the quality of life for Latino immigrant parents and their children.

“By working with Latino parents as they seek to understand the stresses of transition to U.S. society and how that society works, we help their children, many of whom are legal residents who will be in the country for the long term. This growing number of Latin children and their families will have a huge influence on the quality of life for us all in the U.S. In 50 years, I hope people live in a more ‘Star Trek’ society, where resources are more evenly shared, no one goes without basic health care and each person gets to pursue their individual dreams while being a contributing and caring member of a community.”

The project is funded by grants from the Oscar and Elsa Mayer Family Foundation, the Evjue Foundation, the Beckner Foundation and U.S. Cellular. Pláticas meet the third Saturday of each month from 9 a.m.-noon at St. Joseph Church, 1905 West Beltline. For more information on them, or on the project, contact Uttal at luttal@wisc.edu (in English) or Leticia Frausto, (608) 242-4546 (in Spanish).