| Summary: | While motherhood has sometimes inspired and guided women’s collective movements, particularly around children’s education and civil rights, the social and material pressures of mothering – including strains on time, budgets, and mobility – have more often circumscribed women’s participation in broader social movements, particularly those not oriented specifically toward children’s rights. Early childbearing and young motherhood, meanwhile, have been well-documented in the scholarly literature as delimiting young women’s social opportunities and civic participation. Yet in the southwestern U.S. city of Tucson, Arizona – a site quickly moving to the forefront of today’s battles over Mexican American rights and representation in the United States – a small and powerful contingent of “mother-activists” are charting new courses of collective self-determination, civic action, and social activism. This article, which derives from ethnography conducted across ten years, reveals the uniquely powerful form of mother-activist organizing and action that has characterized one vanguard of a broadly visible twenty-first century movement on the U.S.-Mexico border.
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