Copyright by Nancy Rios 2013 The Dissertation Committee for Nancy Rios Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Sexuality and Schooling in the Borderlands: The Deconstruction of Latina/o Teenage Pregnancy as a Social Problem Committee: Martha Menchaca, Supervisor Pauline Strong Kamala Visweswaran Richard Valencia Angela Valenzuela Sexuality and Schooling in the Borderlands: The Deconstruction of Latina/o Teenage Pregnancy as a Social Problem by Nancy Rios, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2013 Dedication I dedicate this dissertation to Isaiah, Gabriela, Xavier, Victoria, and Camila. The world is yours. Acknowledgements This dissertation could not have been completed without the love and support of my family and friends. I have been blessed with the most nurturing support network that has provided both emotional and professional support throughout this process. First and foremost I thank my mother and father who left their homes and families in Zacatecas, Mexico for an opportunity to build something different in a foreign homeland. Mom, your strength and spirit leaves me in awe and thank you for reminding me that no sacrifice is too great for the ones you love. Dad, you are a trailblazer and your stories of life in Mexico City as a teenager and life in 1970s Chicago inspires me to never to be afraid to go after what I want. Thank you for providing me with that perfect balance of love and trust that allowed me to nurture my independence as a young woman. Thank you both for your incredible patience, your undying love and support, and for giving me the best little brothers I could have ever asked for. Luis, thank you for always keeping the situation light. Your spirit and humor brighten my day, every day. Jose, your strength and your compassion are unmatched. Thank you for being a great brother and father. You and Betty are the inspiration for this work so I am forever grateful and I thankful for allowing me to use your experiences to give birth to this dissertation. But most importantly, thank you for fighting the good fight and giving me the five most beautiful and most perfect nieces and nephews. Isaiah, Gabriela, Xavier, Victoria, and Camila, you are each so unique and different and I have loved every single minute of v getting to know you. Thank you for being patient with your Titi as she finishes school and I look forward to spending more fun times together. I also have the Rios’s, the Ramos’s, the Sandoval’s, and the Muñoz’s to thank for their patience and love. I especially wish to thank my primas Norma, Maria, Liz, and Ana. You were pioneers in our strange Chicago-area borderlands and thank you for continually being there for me. Finally, I wish to thank those who have left this world but have left a mark on my soul, including my grandfather, Santiago Muñoz, and my brother, Michael, en paz descansen. Gracias todos. Los quiero mucho. To my friends from home, Aleida, Kristin, Claudia, Amy, and Natalie. You have each blessed my life in so many different ways. Thank you for your patience, for your love, and for letting us pick up right where we last left off. To my UT-Austin friends and colleagues, Sonia, Mireya, Rosa Maria, Alma, Pablo, Jamahn, Bianca, Vero, Olga, and Cristina. You have each not only provided me with incredible emotional support throughout graduate school, but you have made graduate school more pleasant. Thank you for the wonderful memories. To our new community in the Springs for your support. We look forward to the years ahead. And to my homies, Natalia, Juan, Patricia, Teresa, Nicole, Stephanie, and Alberto. Natalia, you have been a great and dear friend throughout this process. Thank you for being an example of how to achieve a balance of intelligence and playfulness. Juan, you have supported in so many ways and I am grateful, but I am most thankful for your humor and intelligence. Patricia, you have given me so much emotional and professional support. Thank you for being truly one of a kind in this entire process. Teresa, you have made graduate school fun and you have been like a sister to vi me in this world. Thank you for your youthful spirit, for our walks, and for our talks. Nicole, thank you for your love and support this past year. Let’s sparkle. Stephanie (a.k.a. Amana), I am forever grateful for your friendship throughout this process. You provided my spirit with refuge when I needed it most and I cannot thank you enough. And finally to Alberto. Thank you for our laughs, four your kindness, and for your sharp reading of American pop culture. You have each made me laugh, made me cry, and most important of all you have each blessed and enriched my life. Thank you. I also extend boundless gratitude to the youth of North Meadows and Barlow High School, especially Laura, Hector, Brooke, Isaac, Isabella, and Sophia who trusted me with such intimate details of their lives. Your spirit for learning and your drive to succeed is inspiring. Thank you for letting me into your lives. I must also acknowledge and thank Barlow High School’s educators and A-Space’s caseworkers who candidly spoke of their experiences with me in order to produce the conclusions in this dissertation. Thank you. I extend my sincerest gratitude to all the members of my dissertation committee: Martha Menchaca, Pauline Strong, Kamala Visweswaran, Richard Valencia, Angela Valenzuela, and Doug Foley. Your scholarship is inspiring and I thank you for advising me through this dissertation process. I especially want to thank Dr. Foley who was a comforting soul early on in this process. Thank you all for your patience and your guidance. Most importantly, thank you Dr. Menchaca for your numerous readings of this work and your thoughtful feedback. The rigor exemplified in your work is the best example a young scholar could ask for. Thank you vii My greatest appreciation goes to my partner and my love, Santiago Ivan Guerra. The love and support that you have given me throughout this process is unparalleled. Your patience is supreme and your nurturance is admirable. You continually amaze me with your capacity to love, to find the humor in everything, your quick wit, and your intelligence. Graduate school has been quite the journey and meeting you has made it all the more sweet. I love you. You are my rock. I look forward to our next adventures. Thank you to the Guerra/Garza family for their acceptance, love, patience, and support. Finally this dissertation was generously funded through the financial support of the Ford Foundation, the Center for Mexican American Studies, the Department of Anthropology, and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. viii Sexuality and Schooling in the Borderlands: The Deconstruction of Latina/o Teenage Pregnancy as a Social Problem Nancy Rios, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2013 Supervisor: Martha Menchaca This dissertation is based on an ethnographic study of the lives of six student- parents (four young women and two young men) from Barlow High School in northwest Austin, Texas. The lived experiences of student-parents from a predominately Latina/o high school and my interactions with Barlow High School’s student body, staff, educators, administrators, and social workers from an on-campus organization called A- Space illustrate how the discursive construction of teenage pregnancy as a social problem intersects with the schooling process to (re)produce gendered, classed, and racialized notions of belonging in the American body politic. My analysis considers the development of an American cultural concern with teenage pregnancy through a history of reproductive and racial politics, and it examines the work of The National Campaign to Prevent Teenage and Unplanned Pregnancy, which, I argue, is a racializing campaign. An American cultural concern with teenage pregnancy has yielded a discourse of teenage pregnancy prevention that constructs the solution to teenage pregnancy around responsibility rather than access to contraception and information. The lives of Barlow High students and student-parents highlight the complexity of deterritorialized lived experiences, which sometimes include early family formation. While Barlow High School’s student body of color learned about belonging in the first decade of the new ix millennium, educators vacillated between understanding the intersecting hierarchies of power impeding socioeconomic mobility and academic achievement in the community and believing that they did the best they could in the given situation. Educators and social workers, as agents of the state, failed to recognize their role in creating community. In sum, this dissertation documents a borderlanding or the creation of a borderlands in the new millennium. x Table of Contents List of Tables ....................................................................................................... xiv List of Figures ........................................................................................................xv Chapter One: Introduction ......................................................................................1 Interpretive Frameworks .................................................................................7 Mexican/Mexican Americans and Culture in the United States - A Brief History..................................................................................................12