Gisselle wants to be a different kind of mom, but her gentle parenting choices sometimes rub up against how her Dominican parents interact with her two boys. And Leslie Priscilla, founder of Latinx Parenting, speaks with Juleyka about "Chancla Culture" and decolonizing our parenting without antagonizing those who raised us.
Featured Expert:
Leslie Priscilla is a first generation non-Black Xicana mother to three bicultural children and daughter of immigrant parents from Mexico. She is a descendant of Indigenous Tarahumara / Rarámuri lineage who has resided on occupied Tongva, Acjachemen & Kizh land, also known as Santa Ana in Orange County, CA, all of her life. She identifies as both Mexican-American and a Detribalized Indigenous mujer. Leslie shares her medicine by offering coaching, workshops, support, and advocacy for Latinx/Chicanx families as well as professionals via trainings locally, nationally, and internationally both in-person and online via the Latinx Parenting organization. She founded Latinx Parenting, a bilingual organization and movement intentionally rooted in children's rights, social and racial justice, the individual and collective practice of nonviolence and reparenting, intergenerational and ancestral healing, cultural sustenance, and the active decolonization of oppressive practices in our families. Leslie has facilitated in-person groups in both Spanish and English for thousands of parents, teachers, and professionals in schools, transitional homes, teen shelters, hospitals, Wraparound programs, drug rehabilitation centers, and family resource centers throughout Orange County, CA and now world-wide virtually.
If you loved this episode, be sure to listen to Not Your Mamí's Sex Ed. and How to Teach Consent in Our Families.
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Juleyka Lantigua:
Hi, everybody. I'm recording this episode under a blanket in a hotel room. So you'll notice that in my voice. Today, I'm speaking with Gisselle. Gisselle is raising two young boys, and she wants to do things differently than her Dominican parents. In fact, she's actively changing other aspects of her life to support how she wants to parent, which is creating friction in the family. Let's get into it.
Gisselle: I'm Gisselle and I'm from the Bronx. And I call my parents, dad and mamí. I'm a mother of two. I have a two year old and I have... Three year old, he just turned three. A three year old and a four year old. Who's about to be five next month. Now that I'm a mom, I see the way I'm raising my children. I understood a lot of all the things that I don't want to do, because of how I was raised. I thought I wasn't enough. I was never... I will say I was never celebrated the way I celebrate my children. I don't want that for my kids. And I always said that I want to decolonize me, and I want to decolonize my life. And last year I started to know my children more. When everything shut down and now we're here in this New York City apartment, and they started to grow more and develop a personality.
My four year old is autistic and my little one is very, very artistic. He's always dressed with something, he's always with a hat. I knew about autism, but I didn't know about it on a personal level and a social level. An autistic person told me, "Can you take your blackness away?" And that hit me, with Dominicans, we have something that's the ways we like. It's very complicated for us. So I was like, "No, I can not take my blackness away." He said, "I cannot take my autism away." So I saw that and I was like, "Okay, that's the skin that he'll live in." So my job is to make sure he gros to be proud of the skin that he lived in. That made me start thinking, wait, but out there, what am I doing?
I cannot tell this child: “be proud of your curly hair,: if must straighten mine, I cannot tell him to be proud of being very autistic, if I'm... don't dress the way I want to dress. Cause I will be thinking of what other people would think of me. What would my family think? My parents are Boomers, they were born in the late '50s. So they were raised in war. It was for the time of invasion. My father lost his father. My dad was raised by priests. My parents didn't know how to be parents. And now I'm not like that, I'm not raising my children to survive. We're not at war. We're not in invasions. We’re not that poor, we’re good. I don't care if you say that my children are not “obedientes.” I'm not raising children to be “obedientes.”
Gisselle: No. Why? I want them to express themselves to tell me, "No, mamí, I don't like that. I want this." I don't force my children to do things they don't want to. If they don't want to talk to you, I don't tell them to talk to nobody who wants to talk to them. And my parents were not with it. They’d be like, "Oh, tu lo vas a malcríar.” Gender was I think the biggest thing, my son, the small one, I bought him a kitchen set. My mother wasn't with it. She said, "Why are you buying him a kitchen set?" She said, "You going to make him gay." Like, you know? So, I jad to stop talking to them for a few months. I went nuclear. I was okay, "If you guys not with it." I felt like "que yo estaba contra la corriente." I was like against the current. And they feel the same way. They would like "Tu si eres rara" "Why are you doing this, you always against everything. Like why can you just, just follow whatever the rules are." They’re scared, they're still scared of raising their voice.
No matter how much taxes they paid, no matter what they do in their life. They feel thing that they have to be thankful for the things that they got. That's, that imposter syndrome that we grow up with. We still don't think that we deserve what we get. And no, I don't want to raise my kids like that, why?
And now my father just bought my son, some some new tea set, he comes in play tea. My mother, they by them costumes and she did say that she come around, now and also to respect my boundaries and my thing before, she will be like, “Arreglate ese pelo, esa greña, o lo que sea]" And now she's like, "Okay, you want to have your hair curly and do braids?" she said, "oh, you look beautiful." But it took... It was hard for me because you know, you're my parents, but I had to do it. I had to do it and we’re happy and the kids are happier now. And we’re working on it, it's a process. I don't know if I'm doing the right thing. I'm just not doing the same thing.
Lantigua: As a fellow Dominican mom of two boys, Gisselle's story and her efforts to raise confident and happy kids hit home. How can first gens like us, re-imagine our parenting? Even if some of us don't have the best blueprint from our own childhood. To help us figure it out I called in an expert.
Leslie Priscilla: My name is Leslie Priscilla. I am the founder of Latinx Parenting and Latinx Parenting is a bilingual organization that serves parents who identify as Latinx or Chicanx or having roots in Latinoamérica. And I run workshops, classes, different educational opportunities for parents who are wanting to break certain cycles of violence or harm that was done to them in their families. But we do it in a way that actually honors our ancestors and honors the ways and the intentions of our ancestors and those that came before us.
Lantigua: What did you hear in Gisselle's story?
Leslie: First of all, I loved her voice so much. I was just like, "I could listen to her all day long." And she talks about race in it and I'm so glad that she did. She talks about her unique experience of raising a child who has special needs. You know, I left with a lot of hope. Like she has so much hope in healing her lineage and in the ways that she wants to do things with her children, she talks about the pressures that she's experienced and how she's strongly confronting that. And being very confident. And so I'm like, "This is an ideal parent, right?" This, ideally you would have that reflection that would take into account all of those pressures, and then you would still boldly go forward and raise your child in ways that are connecting. And so that's what I really enjoyed about hearing Gisselle.
Lantigua: Were there themes that popped up for you that you also hear in your work?
Leslie: Yes, definitely. One of the things that she said that I hear very frequently is wanting him to express himself. So that comes up because so many of us were raised not being able to express ourselves. And that is a brave thing. I think for a parent to think about the ways that they were raised to know that a lot of times we were not allowed to say no to our parents. We were not allowed to state what our needs are. We were not allowed to express. And so when Gisselle says, "I want him to express himself, I want him to, be autonomous and be a sovereign being." I just found that very inspiring. And I hear that a lot. And that is really what carries this work forward.
Lantigua: So is that part of her notion of decolonizing her parenting? Can you expand on that thought?
Leslie: Yeah. And she says, she doesn't say she just wants to decolonize her parenting. She says she wants to decolonize her life. And I find that so valuable because a lot of times we think that our parenting is separate from the rest of our life. And parenting has everything to do with every other aspect of our life. It's where our values come up. It's where the things that we're wanting to change come up. And to me, decolonization is beyond giving our children that voice and that autonomy, it's also that reconnection to our needs as parents. It's also that reconnection to our bodies and she references, anti-blackness in the U.S. and she references the way that her son has been treated and his skin colors wanting him to be really proud of that. And so I think that that is a really big aspect of decolonization as well in identifying all of impacts and the effects that colonization has had on us and now rejecting that.
Lantigua: Okay, I still want to understand a little bit more about how being colonized or having come from a colonized heritage impacts how you develop a sense of yourself and how you help your children develop a sense of themselves.
Leslie: Yeah. So when colonization began, mind you, colonization is not something that stopped ever. There are still many ways that we are continuously being colonized, but once colonization began many of the indigenous peoples here practice what I call gentle or non-violent parenting. And so children collaborated with our elders, elders were valued, children were valued. And actually what ended up happening was that the people who came from Europe ended up bringing a lot of the practices that were oppressive to children. And so a lot of times when we think about, like “la chancla” or “el cinto” or ways that maybe we were parented in ways that were oppressive, we have to remember that this actually came from a history of colonization.
And so decolonizing our parenting means to understand that and to have an awareness of the fact that this is actually not our culture and to start treating children more, the ways that our ancestors did pre-conization, which was with respect, which was with honoring. And so if we're doing that, then we can't ignore the fact that we have to do it with ourselves too. So if we're trying to liberate our children from those oppressive thought patterns, oppressive ways of thinking about themselves or contingencies about whether they're valuable, then we have to begin doing that work with ourselves as well.
Lantigua: I'm glad you mentioned chanclas, because there's so many great meme's about chancla culture, but it's real. How do we identify it and then how do we remove it from the ways that we parent and the ways that we also interact with our parents who are now watching us parent?
Leslie: I think one of the greatest things that we can do is remember ourselves as children. And so a lot of times when we hear people say, "la chancla raised me.", or "This is good for our culture and children need to learn right from wrong in this way." And I want to ask people to just do the very vulnerable work that it takes to remember ourselves as children actually getting hit with la chancla. A lot of times our elders were trying to teach us respect through fear and so a lot of the conversations that have to happen are around whether we learn to actually respect our elders because they respected us or did we learn to fear them. And a lot of us who have grown up still have this very uncomfortable feeling when we are around our parents or when we are around our tíos and tías.
And so that uncomfortable feeling prevents us from really being able to express ourselves, to be ourselves fully. And so ending chancla culture is to be able to identify that those things actually did not serve us, that we are not able to, a lot of times advocate for what it is we need. Cycles that come from... they don't just come from la chancla,, they don't just come from this idea of corporal punishment, but la chancla really represents everything that is oppressive. The ways that we are in relationship to others, not just our children, the ways that we talk to ourselves, there's something I call like internalized chancletazos..
Leslie: The chancletazosI give myself when I'm calling myself like "a pendeja" or like something that is disparaging or I don't think that I can apply for this promotion because I'm not good enough. All of these messages around my worth that sometimes those messages did come from our parents. And those messages came from their parents. And when it comes to our elders rejecting that, because a lot of times they're going to be very uncomfortable.
Lantigua: Yeah.
Leslie: When we're telling them, "I want to parent in a different way than you parented me." They may take it personally. They may say like, "Tu dices que fui mala madre." You said, "I'm a bad mother." "You're saying I'm a bad father." That's not necessarily what we're saying. What we're saying is that, "Even though you did your best, I think remembering myself as a child and still wanting to honor that part of myself makes me want to parent differently."
Lantigua: All right. But let me ask you this, because I have tried that whole "Mamí, I respect my children." line with my mother. It did not go well. So how, without offending them without questioning their sacrifices and without getting them to laugh in our faces, do we get our parents to see that we do need to change our paradigm around our kids?
Leslie: Yeah. One of the things that I have done that's been a really powerful beginning point for having these conversations with them is to center their inner child. So I centered my mom's inner child, I asked her about her experiences. I say, "mamí, cuándo te pegaba tu mamá, ¿qué sentías?" and so if I'm connecting with that part of herself that still maybe is hurt, it's taken... It's been a process, really. It's been a process for her to do some of that reflection work and to kind of realize that a lot of her resistance to my parenting or the ways that I want to be a more gentle non-violent parent actually stem from her wounds that come from the way that she was raised.
And so the taking it personally, the feeling like when I am doing something different than she did that, that's a reflection on her and her value and her worth like that really has nothing to do with me. That has to do with how she feels about herself. And so when we're in those conversations, it's helpful for me to also not to take personally and to say like, "You're accusing me of offending you." And then it's just like big back and forth.
Lantigua: All right, I have two final questions for you. The first one is Gisselle really set up some boundaries, in very drastic ways. How can the rest of us who maybe are not as brave set up workable, realistic boundaries with our parents around how we parent?
Leslie: Yeah. I think that there are some things that should be non-negotiable. So I really also admire that confidence. And you're like, you’re not going to... for example, one of the boundaries I have is, you're not going to lay hands on my child. In our culture, it's normal or at least like in my mother's generation where aunts and uncles would be able to discipline you, the neighbor would be able to discipline you because adults had that right. And so I think there are ways that we can set gentle boundaries. These are my firm ones. These are my firm ones, but you have to also think about like, abuela’s really want to connect with children too. And so the strategies around that, although they may look very differently than our strategies, some of them we can have flexibility on.
Leslie: So my kids might eat more sugar with my mom that may do with me. And I just have to realize, "okay, if they're going to have sugar with my mom, then that means that when they're back home with me, I can't give them that lollipop or whatever that I would normally give them." And so just thinking about having limits that are more flexible, because we're all kind of interacting as inner children with inner children, like how would I treat my mom? How would I treat my dad as if, todavía fuera un niño].
As if they were still a child, how can I approach it in a gentle way? And then checking in with them. Not necessarily saying like, "these are my firm limits, " but "does that work for you?" And I think this is an issue of communication a lot of times. How are we communicating with them? Are we communicating our needs in a way that they're able to receive them? And if they're not able to receive any kind of limits, then at that point, we need to figure out whether it's even worth trying to have that flexibility.
Lantigua: Where it can people read more about ending chancla culture.
Leslie: Go to Latinx Parenting's Instagram page, sign up for our newsletter via our website, Latinexparenting.org. We have a workshop coming up called “A Mí Manera: How to Set Respectful Boundaries with Other Adults in Your Parenting”, which is going to talk about some of what we've talked about. So by visiting our website or by going to our Instagram or our Facebook page and following us there.
Lantigua: Wonderful. Oh my goodness. Leslie. Thank you so much.
Leslie: Thank you Juleyka this was such a treat.
Lantigua: All right. Let's recap. What we learned from Leslie:
Work on yourself to dismantle chancla culture. Begin by reflecting on your childhood experience and reconnect with your own needs as a parent.
Center the inner child, yours, your parents, everyone's. Communicate your needs in a gentle way and be aware of your loved one's past wounds, emotions, and childhood experiences.
And remember, create gentle boundaries. Set flexible limits that align with your values, but also let other family members participate in your children's lives in their own way.
Lantigua: Thank you for listening and thank you for sharing us. How to Talk to [Mamí and Papí] About Anything is an original production of LWC Studios. Virginia Lora is the show's producer. Kojin Tashiro is our mixer. Manuela Bedoya is our social media editor. I'm the creator Juleyka Lantigua. On Twitter and Instagram we're @talktomamipapi please follow us and rate us on Apple podcasts, Amazon music, Pandora, Spotify, anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts. Bye everybody, same place next week.
CITATION:
Lantigua, Juleyka, host. “This Mom Is Decolonizing Her Parenting.”
How to Talk to [Mamí & Papí] About Anything,
LWC Studios., October 4, 2021. TalkToMamiPapi.com.