Book Review
Valdés, G. (1996). Con respeto: Bridging the distances between culturally  diverse families and schools. Teachers College Press, pp.

Reviewed By:
M. Cristina González, El Paso Community College &

|Return to top |

 Gloria Anzaldúa, the well known poet and author, depicts the people of the borderlands as a people struggling to live between two worlds, constantly facing the forces of assimilation and losing their identity in the process. In her poem, "To live in the Borderlands Means . . .," she writes:

To live in the Borderlands means the mill with the razor white teeth wants to shred you of your olive-red skin, crush out the kernel, your heart pound you pinch you roll you out smelling like white bread but dead. To survive in the Borderlands you must live sin fronteras be a crossroads. (1994, p. 402)

        This poem mirrors the plight of the thousands of immigrants who live in the United States, including those portrayed in Valdésâ new book, Con Respeto: Bridging the Distance Between Culturally Diverse Families and Schools. Con Respeto is an ethnographic study of ten newly arrived, Mexico-born immigrant families living in the Southwest. These families inhabited the borderlands between New Mexico and Texas, which is in close proximity to Mexico. This project followed ten children in selected families over a three year period with the dual purpose of 1) discovering how these children developed literacy skills outside the school setting; and 2) examining how the family environment prepared children to survive and succeed both within the family structures and in the community. The author approaches this task by presenting portraits of families depicted from a perspective of ordinary¹day-to-day existence of lives lived in a border community with Mexico. Her work includes a detailed description and history of the ten women who were her main subjects for the study, as well as a series of discussions and experiences, processes, and issues which the families faced as they made the decision to leave Mexico and proceeded to live in the United States. Valdés deftly frames these discussions using the underlying themes of home, school, and work. Through these frames, she portrays the realities of these families and the conflicts and struggles they confront daily. She presents important accounts of the ways in which these adults were able to negotiate meanings about what it means to live in a new country and adapt to an American way of life.

        Throughout the study she takes the position that we, as educators, administrators and policy makers, although well-intentioned, are tampering with the lives of these Mexican and other immigrant families without a solid understanding of the issues and complexities of their lives. She writes that the parent involvement programs that are designed to help these families succeed in this country are attempts ". . . to find small solutions to what are extremely complex problems&middot," and adds that because they are not based on sound knowledge about the characteristics of the families they also ". . . fail to take into account the impact of such programs on the families themselves·" (p. 31)

        A case in point is the issue of parental involvement, as defined by the school system, in their childrenâs literacy development within the home. The families she studied, according to Valdés, tended to believe that children were not to be disruptive of their motherâs time because she had more than enough work to do with the cooking, running errands, housework, and other chores. Thus, doing "enriching" types of activities as prescribed by the school with their children - such as reading to them--was not done because it was seen as demanding extra attention and time from the parent and was, therefore, "disruptive" of the familyâs functioning. Valdés concludes that "...the rhythm of the family would change entirely if the adults were to become involved in family intervention programs that resulted in changing the way they lived their lives . . ." (p. 202). Reading and writing stories with their children, for instance, would force parents to replace "educación" in the Mexican sense (which entails teaching respect for elders, for parental authority, and for the family as a unit; good manners, a strong work ethic, etc.) with an American middle-class focus on schooling and learning. To do this would mean that the Mexican mother would have to give up childrearing practices important to the Mexican culture to make way for the new middle class, white ones. This would represent a radical departure of her role in the family, which ultimately would create in her a sense of failure in the Mexican tradition of mother.

        Segments of speech transcripts and other data throughout her book describe the perspectives, values, and traditions which these families hold regarding issues such as work, housing, health, parental responsibilities, teaching children, schooling, discipline, English language learning, and parental involvement in school and in their childrens' schoolwork. She generously suggests that the adults in these families are competent and "good" parents, albeit from a different cultural and social orientation. These portraits are quite helpful in providing educators with a new way of seeing families as cultural mediators in the world of their children and the importance these mediations have on their learning. Her research on immigrant families also helps us reach a greater level of understanding of marginalized lives in ways similar to Health's (1983) and Taylor, et.al.'s (1988) studies. These studies moved us one step away from the pathologizing effects of "at-risk" labels in mainstream literature. Yet, however impactful these studies are to the field of education, they nonetheless leave important issues and questions untouched.

        There is a growing body of literature that addresses the problematic nature of "at-risk" children and families. Much of this literature is missing from Valdesâ discussion as she presents her theoretical analysis of the constituted lives of these "ordinary" Mexican families. In addition, the cited works in Valdésâ study on family are social constructions of Euro-centric models based on research that was done in the fifties and the sixties. Her analysis does not reflect the current critical literature which problematizes long held conceptions of non-mainstream people. There are references from emerging critical work which flatly challenge mainstream white middle-class constructions of raced and gendered people. Important in feminist and critical work is the notion that there are varying perspectives with regard to what we conceptualize as literacy. In Valdésâ representations of the parentsâ lack of attention to "schoolwork," there is no discussion of other "learning" that is taking place in the home and the literacies that the children are exposed to as members of a particular family and community.

        Valdés fails in her attempt to offer theoretical perspectives for educators and other social scientists that may genuinely lead towards real change in our schools. To begin to extricate images of "broken, fractured, and incompetent lives," depicted in many mainstream writings of poor and racially different families and children, we need to reflect on the way that these social constructions were created in the first place. Research on families and children from minority and poor populations need to be problematized and politicized. This entails a radical challenge to the "normalization" movement in this country at all levels of education. It means a deliberate move away from the stranglehold of Positivism that locks so many of us out of what it means to be "normal." Can we create a research community that can begin to see difference as difference in children and family constellations, and address the critical need to revise our strategies for working with teachers and schools?

        Valdés' representation of the teachers as "well-meaning" but ignorant of the material and socio-cultural conditions of these families does little to shake the foundations of the teachers themselves and certainly does nothing to change the conditions in teacher education. There is no quarrel with Valdésâ point that schools cannot be everything for everyone, nor can they change the inextricably unequal conditions within our social structures. We must not remain silent, however, and tolerate the ignorance in the people that work with poor and racially different children. Delgado-Gaitán(1993) eloquently discusses a redefined, advocacy-oriented role for the researcher where s/he is committed to the tenets of critical theory and as such promotes the emancipation of groups which have been socially, economically, and/or politically disenfranchised in society. She writes that this Ethnography for Empowerment framework, ". . . calls for the construction of knowledge through the social interaction between researcher and researched, with the fundamental purpose of improving the living conditions of the communities being researched" (pp. 391-392).

        Valdés fails to expose the specific intent and bias integrally attached to her role as researcher. Ethically, as has been noted in recent critical ethnographic work, it is especially vital for the researcher to lay bare those cultural lenses s/he carries when working with other people, especially people different from our own cultural, social and political persona. Villenas (1996) writes "As ethnographers, we are also like colonizers when we fail to question our own identities and privileged positions, and in the ways in which our writings perpetuate Îotheringâ" (p. 713). While the author at one point makes the reference to the differences between herself (a middle class academic) and one of the adults in the study (poor), she does not at any point extend this connection to an examination of her own personal and political subjectivities as a participant observer coming from a position of power, privilege, and class. She writes "In this conversation [with Rosario Castro] my own middle-class Mexican views, coupled with many years of living and raising children in this country, contrasted dramatically with those held by Rosario" (p. 184). Rather than examining her own subjectivities, she infers from the discussion between herself and the parent that the parent pities her. The conversation centered on the discussion of the differences in their two sons. Rosario shared that her son works and contributes to the household income. Valdés fails to note the class distinctions in these differences, and rather trivializes Rosarioâs curiosity about the way that Valdés was raising her child. Valdés analyzes the encounter as "Rosario [viewing] success as a mother involved teaching a young male how to be responsible. She could not conceive of the fact that a 24-year-old man was still in school and not working. In her book, I was either not a great success or I had been unlucky in having a son who only cared about himself" (p. 185). This representation rings vacuous, since Valdés has done little to try to engage the woman in a critical encounter where they can both reflect on each otherâs values, which are constituted realities for each, based on class, regionality, culture and the many other contexts in which they both find themselves. Furthering the discussion through an engagement with Rosario, Valdés could have assisted Rosario in making sense of the differences.

        Throughout her discourse on how she views the families, she makes no attempt to try to analyze and reflect on the way in which she provided the constructions of the different adults in her study. In other words, she uses theoretical perspectives of research reminiscent of a Eurocentric and normalizing tradition in the social sciences. She uses these perspectives as the lens to analyze and explain the socio-cultural behaviors of the families in her study without problematizing these theories as they apply to the families in her study. The author has not made the attempt to further the dialogue on family research to include the important work of critical theorists who challenge the traditional paradigm of what Mexican families are like, especially immigrant and working poor Mexican families.

        In addition, Valdés did not attempt to intervene and create dialogic conditions in which the participants could begin to gain a deeper understanding of their existence which may lead to a critical consciousness, a precondition to oneâs liberation. On the contrary, she makes a cynical remark regarding the participantsâ ability to reflect at all: "It is important to emphasize, however, that very few individuals in the study would have been able to articulate their position about the possible conflict between education and their traditional values even if I had asked the question directly" (p.173). This is a sad commentary. It represents the arrogance endemic in the field of research when we can say that our participants have little thinking ability as to why they are where they are, or their ability to be able to make leaps in thinking about what material, social, political, and cultural conditions exist that create their oppressed status.

        Valdés ends the book with an optimistic note that these immigrant families will find a way of succeeding in their new world without giving up the old.
 

I am convinced that, like the immigrants that came before them, Mexican-people will travel the distances between where they have been, what origin they are, and where they must go... they will do so most effectively if they are allowed to become American at their own pace and in their own way. (p. 205)

        There is, thus, no sense of advocacy or giving back to the community; on the contrary, the authorâs position is that we step back and leave these families on their own to overcome the many struggles which they must face. Yet, is this not what we have done for so many decades, and has that not also perpetuated the very existence of oppression and marginalization in this society? Giving back presupposes an ethical posture that values and respects the lives of those we engage. It assumes a process of critical encounters where our participants have an opportunity to also gain from this engagement. Our role should be one where we can provide the kind of insight and learning into the dynamics of power and oppression in our society and assist our participants towards their awakening to liberation. 

        Lastly, while it is not our intent to destroy the important work that Valdés has presented to our field, it is our intent to challenge our thinking with regards to what role/roles we must take when working with oppressed people. It must be pedagogical and advocacy-oriented. We must give back to the people whom we intrude upon to gain valuable information for our field. The work these immigrants have had to do in their adult lives is a common story for many of us who are immigrants. The healing comes when we reach that level of awareness that nothing was actually wrong with us. What a relief! That process of coming into consciousness creates in many of us a desire to redress the punitive effects of racism and intolerance. However, to reach this awareness and not formulate a new praxis makes us accomplices to further injustice, and we continue in the reproduction of oppressive systems. 

|Return to top |
 

¹The term "ordinary" is used by Valdés to describe these Mexican families, borrowed from Selby, Murphy and Lorenzen (1990).

|Return to top |
  Anzaldúa, G. (1994). To live in the borderlands means you. In D.L. Daly Heyck (Ed.), Barrios and borderlands: Cultures of Latinos and Latinas in the United States (pp. 401-402). NY: Routledge. [Return]

Delgado-Gaitán, C. (1993). Researching change and changing the researcher. Harvard Educational Review, 63(4), 389-411. [Return]

Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life and work in communities and classrooms. New York: Cambridge University Press. [Return]

Selby, H. A., Murphy, A.D., & Lorenzen, S.A. (1990). The Mexican urban household. Austin: University of Texas Press. [Return]
 

Taylor, D., & Dorsey-Gaines, C. (1988). Growing up literate: Learning from inner-city families. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. [Return]
 

Villenas, S. (1996, Winter). The colonizer/colonized Chicana ethnographer: Identify, marginalization, and co-optation in the field. Harvard Educational Review, 66(4). 711-731. [Return]