Episode 015 – Talking Sh*t: Can We Be a Desmadre and Honor our Madres?

[0:00:02 Speaker 0] Yeah, yeah. Mhm. Mhm. You’re listening to latin experts. A podcast of latino studies at the University of texas at Austin. Latin experts, features the voices of faculty staff and students, as well as friends and alumni of the department of mexican american and Latina latino Studies, the latino Research Institute and the Center for Mexican american Studies join us for this episode of latin experts. Mhm. Okay. Yeah. So welcome everyone. I’m joined, I guess virtually in the studio with my amazing colleague and friend, Dr Rachel Gonzalez martin. Yeah, I guess this is our second episode of our talking shit. Are you talking shit series? Yes. And today we’re going to be talking about madres, There’s madres and maybe because they’re Nuestras madres only above balham, All the above. Um so yeah, totally. Today we’re talking about our mothers but understanding that uh via the las madres is upon us soon. So anyone listening to this podcast, you haven’t figured out what you’re getting your wonderful mother or mother figure for Mother’s Day. This is a reminder to go find something good and not just from like Walgreens with like a card and like cheap flowers. So we’re talking, although sometimes those can be good. Those can be good. But you better be going out to some kind of cool dinner too because we know mothers do a lot, which is actually kind of what we wanted to talk about today. Right? Like images, cultural, images of our mothers and how that fits in or doesn’t fit into thinking about maybe not bad language, but yeah, different kinds of language. The different types of language continuing our ongoing discussion and analysis of beetles and well these most yes, absolutely. So I want to start by tearing about your mom and also I want my mom. Yeah. So I talk about my mom a lot, but we won’t get into friday and reasons any point today. But yeah, my mom is the youngest of 10 and look at the end of the Chiquita Latina there, Benita. Uh but she’s she’s this very strong woman who I think in the time and age in which she grew up, she’s, I don’t know how to say this. Um She tells it how it is. You know, she’s very tough, like just because we’re her Children doesn’t mean that she’s going to let you get away with anything. Um And she also, you know, she has these looks that if you do something that upsets her and she looks at you a particular way, you’re like, oh dear God, I am so sorry that I even, you know, didn’t clean the bathroom the way you clean the bathroom. I’m so sorry, let me go do it over. But she’s yeah, she’s tough but she’s super loving. She’s a woman who definitely wanted to have multiple kids. Um She’s funny, she loves juan Gabriel’s aerie. Um Yeah she’s from juarez, so that’s you know that’s what it is and yeah, I’ll leave it at that because we’re going to bring her up and she knows I always use her as like in a camp Lo. And she’s got to love it. She’s got to tell her tell her friends that Mika Professor right is going to be talking about me today. Uh Well your mom sounds like definitely like sort of a more classic what people might consider sort of a tough mexican mother, right, tells it like it is um has really strong roots. Is a matriarch, right? She’s tough. Um Probably been through a lot and you know could go through a lot more. My mom is us born. So my mom was born in L. A. In California. My mom is very soft spoken. Her name is jane. We talk a lot about how she, she was always self conscious about being jane and not wanna and her her cousins in L. A. Cell color like Juanita, which I think is really interesting because it didn’t kind of carry over to her adult life. My mom is sweet and kind. You know, if you say, oh mom, I like your scarf, she will just give it to you owe me to take it. You know, I don’t need it and like a little bit you’re wearing it. No, no, no, you should have it. I’m like thank you. Um so I learned really wonderful generosity from my mom and my mom is a tough lady in her own way. She’s fantastic. So even now thinking about but she would never really be considered sort of a really demanding mexican mom. I know I have a lot of friends whose again moms that are kind of tell it like it is my mom’s a little like, well you could do that or she’s definitely a little more judicious with criticism because she grew up with a really tough mexican mom. And so she kind of feels um like she doesn’t like she kind of wants to balance that out. But my mom is awesome. And so I’m really excited that we’re getting to talk about moms and motherhood and particularly the perceptions right? Of of madras right in our in our largest sort of cultural sphere, right? Because it’s kind of unique and it’s as we think about it with language, right? It’s going to have a very particular character and some of it very contradictory. Yeah. And you know, I love that we’re talking about our moms and we’ve actually met each other’s mom. Yes. And they are both lovely. They are. And they’re different by the way you said, juan Gabriel, my mom is a total Beatles fan. That was what I grew up with. So, again, very different sort of like cultural narratives. But again, I think at the at the core, right? You know, both really loving mothers and they’re both steeped in a lot of um, I would say a lot of expectations of women in particularly mexican and mexican american communities. I think that sort of huge right, that there might be actually more that binds our mothers in terms of the history and expectations based on gender based on our cultural experiences than that separates them. So, I think, um, I think it’s super interesting. Yeah. Especially thinking about the sort of gender norms in which they were socialized in and maybe reproduced in raising us. Absolutely. Um, so maybe we can get started and analyzing a little bit about why we were going to talk about mothers today and how we came about it. Let’s just say it, it’s right today. What does this matter? Yeah. Like yeah. So I’m going to ask you Rachel, can you tell us like, can you define this modern day or like what it means to you? Sure. So, honestly, because I’m not a native spanish speaker, so I struggle with a lot of terms that don’t necessarily have a solid D notation meaning. You can’t just google translate them and find how they’re they’re always used, especially if they sound like cognitive, like what does this have to do with mothers. But I understand the term the asthma that I really as a sort of being a mm, what a mess or sort of a totally kind of over the top screwed up situation, sort of this moderate to me is something that maybe you should be ashamed of, right? When I think of this madre, I think of people accusing you accusing someone of being a this madre or causing a dis madre or characterizing something that’s definitely negative. That’s how that’s the concept that I have, at least in terms of like growing up, you didn’t want to be of his mother, You don’t wanna be a part of his mother. You didn’t want to have anyone’s mom or grandmother. Tell you you’re this mother. What about you yet? Oh, there’s moderate. You know, referring back to la Lupe anytime there was a this moderate would be like, your room is messy, you haven’t cleaned up after like, you know, the dishes or you haven’t done your chores. But also this idea that it’s kind of chaos, right? Like, so I said when this mother, like I’m thinking of phrases and how we use it. Absolutely, but that’s saying like it’s going to be a mess or it’s going to be like chaotic, there’s a disruption of some sort. Absolutely. And already we get the sense that, like, you know, our communities have valued order over chaos, right? There’s this sense of chaos or even like, um like a complicated tangled social situation is just something we don’t want, right? It’s not simple, it’s not clean, it’s not direct. So this madre is definitely like, I feel like on a lot of levels and maybe we’ll get to this later, it sort of shakes things up. It’s a disruption, right? In a world that you don’t want disruption. Yeah, totally. So I wonder if then we can kind of take a step back and really think about the other day when we’re brainstorming this episode, we were talking about like the idea of bringing these connections with the word, that’s my letter to like respectability. Absolutely. And how that’s tied to gender. Yes. So thinking about, I know for sure we shared this and this is what I was getting at. When I started to think about, I bet our mothers have a lot more uncommon when we think about what values they were raised with and what guide them to be or have guided them to be sort of the woman, the women that they either want to be or they felt they needed to be. And that is this question of gender and respectability, particularly in latin X communities and as a folklorist, I I understand and when I teach folklore and traditions it’s always really apparent that students understand that questions of morality or faith or um honor fall on the women in their family to enforce, to teach, to emulate. So the idea that there is a standard of living, the standard of being in the world that in latin X communities that specifically is divided between men and women, right? And so where you have cultural communities that are steeped in things like Catholicism right from the moment of colonial contact and thinking about the morals and values that were imposed on communities, indigenous communities right to, you know, fast forward and become the um independent Republics across latin America that we now know right steeped in those histories and traditions, right? Are these ideas about honor and shame and how women become the focal point of expressing honor and shame and their families? Right? And I think this is really a huge pressure um either on our mothers, but it’s not to say that it hasn’t carried over to, you know, next, the continuing generations of women, right? In terms of how, how should you behave, how should you act, how should you speak or not speak? Yeah. And especially thinking about how this and then bringing it back to this word, right? Like if you say something as it is moderate, it’s like you’re messing up, you know, I’m trying to think of ways to translate it literally like you’re messing up the mother and we, you know, we hold our mothers our umbrellas, the women in our family on this sort of like paris or at least that’s how I was raised. Like my mom is a direct, I would say replica of my abuela diplomacy and I told my mom sometimes I’m like, man, you’re being sold on Yamase. But that’s because we hold my the women in my family or at least yeah, on this like high, like higher on the hierarchy I should share. But like then we use terms like those moderate and I’m wondering if we can think about like what is that actually producing, right? When you’re absolutely right. We have this narrative that says like the women are strong and tough and honorable and faithful and pure or whatever sort of, you know, loaded affirmation that we think we’re giving people. But we also relies on the other side of that. If we, let’s say we think about heterosexual married couple, right? A man and a woman. And we’ve talked about this before, right? The idea of the wife and mother as this honourable figure that takes care of the family or leads sort of the family by example and morality, but husband might step out on his wife and somehow in particular cultural circles this is seen as acceptable, right? Or this is just seen as well. You know, women have a different moral standing than men. And so this is somehow this is the way we are, quote unquote, right? This becomes the way we are, but it doesn’t mean that we have now a term like this madre where it’s like wait a minute, what is theirs, what we say and what we expect, let’s say of women. And then there’s how we use their idea or the metaphor to sort of, I don’t know, even to serve in sort of a contradictory purpose, right? Because there’s lots of different phrases right that use bothering that for, you know, to hear it wouldn’t make a lot of sense, right? Yeah. Like we use things like naval Armada valleys madre madre, but I want to bring it to this point. You said about how we’re, you know, we hold women or like in a particular in a particular light, but then we say these things that are quite contradictory to what our beliefs are. Absolutely. And and it really makes me think of cognitive dissonance. Like we’re demonstrating some sort of cognitive dissonance. Absolutely. You know, our states and our states of thought or belief are quite different than what our actions. And I’m saying actions here, like the language that we use. Absolutely. Because when you think about it right? We we think of language as a choice, right, picking and choosing our words, right? The words this madre madre, right? These are terms that when I think of you and I talked and teach students about folklore, right? They stick because people, they resonate with people, right? People use them and continue to use them. Um they gain popularity if if if someone had you know the first use of the term this madre uh scolded the person who used it or walked him on the head of the newspaper and said don’t disrespect, you know the idea of motherhood then the board wouldn’t have caught on. So somehow thinking about like how these words became part of the everyday particularly the informal lexicon right of of either spanish speaking, you know spanish speaking or latino descent communities right across the U. S. Right? But it’s some connection went to the spanish language but not necessarily to like literal understandings but figurative language. Right? Which I know you study extensively, right? So this idea of cognitive dissonance, like what does it mean to speak things into reality versus to do actions? Right. And how do these work together? Right. Yeah. And also I think it kind of challenges or so it kind of subverts these ideologies about gender, about gender. I think when we use this sort of language, because I keep coming back to like, well, you know, I highly value and respect my Madonia, lupin, Madonia Massey. But I will definitely say I know Somali Madre, but I’m like, oh right, you have to sort of cause and think like wait a minute why wise is used, why would a woman use that? You know, what are the circumstances under which this become normalized? But I think you’re right. I think as we consider, I think it’s important to to begin to understand how words and terms and ideologies transform and move through communities. And so even when we’re using them, um we’re using them in such a way that maybe subverts like you were saying these clean lines between gender expectations and gender performance, right? So on some level, maybe especially I know in the US and talking, I’ve had graduate students and undergraduates who are really subverting some of the negativity around the term this moderate right? Especially when it’s connected to something that’s seen as shameful and totally like diving in and claiming this moderate, like any other sort of pejorative um as really being anti anti respectability politics. Like to be able to openly say is moderate, right? Maybe your life’s chaos or you’re dating is nuts or whatever, whatever lack of quote unquote kind of like social success that maybe you’re dealing with, but to lay claim to it and saying, you know, that’s that’s important to that’s a real perspective. Yeah, and I really like this idea of reclaiming this. We talked about this in the previous episode as well, like these words and you know, these most are in our lexicon, they’re probably going to stay in our lexicon may take on they may take on different meaning and form as the years progress. But I think this I think reclaiming these terms and I don’t know like the history of this mother either. But yeah, I like this idea of like I always liked the idea of reclaiming and kind of Yeah, just reclaiming. Well, I think claiming this term, I think it’s important, right? Because we’re thinking about the ways in which um I forget which socio linguists I heard said this or I read about in graduate school, but definitely thinking about, you know, the language is our is our lens for the world, right? We can’t talk about things that we don’t have vocabulary for, right? So the moment I see people manipulating vocabulary in different ways, right? And realizing the ripple effect, right? Because we’re kind of talking about this idea if this is anti respectability, right? We’re also talking about putting things that are kind of really messy into sort of a public view, right? Because I think that’s something when we think about gender ideologies, it’s not just like women and men have different moral expectations, but I grew up definitely from my grandmother, really understanding that you keep anything that seems a little bit dishonorable or messy or just not admirable to yourself, right? And this leads to things like, oh, we don’t talk about mental health, we don’t talk about sexuality, anything that could be seen as like a knock to your character for just having questions, Right? And so for me, this madre is also about this idea of it absolutely falls in line with some of the ideas of like excess. They talked about like latino aesthetics of excess. Um The new, there’s a new book by Jillian Hernandez and some of the work that I do with incendiaries right? This idea of putting it kind of all out there and then saying this is who I am, right and this is okay, I can have flaws, I can be, I can make mistakes and come back from that. That doesn’t make me, in this case, it doesn’t make me a bad woman, right? Or it doesn’t that that idea of bad versus good um isn’t tied to let’s say, you know, a life being imperfect, right? Because we are all imperfect, but you know, and I know we’re reaching the end of time, but I just love what you said. So I wonder if you have any last minute um things about, you know the way we use those madras and our mothers well one I think we do need to come back and really think about all that our mothers have done for us, you know, Absolutely, especially sort of as they’re held in high esteem mothers that keep families together on their own mothers, um, who are separated from fathers by labor conditions or borders right understanding. And I think also understanding that sometimes particularly for our mothers, right? Depending on our era’s our levels of economic or social capital, right? That being a Latina woman in the United States in public was that this mother, Right? Just the idea that we cannot hide, you know, and we really like this this week. It’s really been a discussion in national news of right. What does it mean to be a person of color? Black brown, facing, facing, implicit and explicit judgment by authority figures and having that be the end of your life, Right? The idea of um, and so thinking about, you know, how we understand respectability. How do we understand how these things are coded in our everyday language, Right? That we almost can’t anticipate. So I think I think everyone needs to go have a call with our mother if they can, or their grandmother or their motherly figure and tell them you love them and respect them. Even if you use the word this modern it every day. Absolutely. I’m going to call the loop after this and remind her how much I love her and awesome. Well, thanks for chatting with me today. Absolutely super excited. Yeah, thank you. And we should tell everyone to go out and embrace their this mother, right? Because yeah, we won’t notice the change until we all start disrupting a little bit every day. Yeah. So embracing this monday, I guess, is our Yeah, Thanks again, Rachel. Absolutely. Thanks for having a high All this is actually novel Otero’s the communications associate Latino studies. Thank you for listening to this week’s episode. Make sure to check out the latino studies instagram page. Follow us at Latino Studies you t to keep the conversation going