UC Berkeley

The purpose of this dissertation was to explore how AfroPuerto Rican mothers engage in Blackness as a sociocultural-historical practice. An analysis of ethnographic data, including participant-observations and life history interviews with six AfroPuerto Rican women in California, were the means used to describe the teaching and learning (or teaching/learning) practices within AfroPuerto Rican multigenerational communities that focus on Blackness as an ancestral, cooperative, and activist practice. This study documents how the participating AfroPuerto Rican women’s enactments of blackness-as-practice reflected communal, proleptic understandings of blackness within AfroPuerto Rican communities. Through the use of Black and AfroLatinx feminist lenses and sociocultural understandings of human activity, I suggest how researchers andpractitioners can learn from AfroPurto Rican mother-designers to design educational environments for the teaching of blackness-as-practice.