UC Santa Barbara

System-Impacted Motherwork examines Southern California’s child welfare system and the life course criminalization Latina mothers experience by situating their health and healing strategies as responses to punishment through System-Impacted Motherwork (SIM). Drawing on 27 photo-elicitation life history interviews with Latina (Central American, Mexican, Chicana) mothers from Southern California who have been involved with child protective services (CPS), and legal case analysis, this project offers System-Impacted Motherwork, a framework grounded in life course, intersectional feminist perspectives, for examining how mothers navigate mental health alongside child welfare system and various institutions of control. In this presentation, SIM is employed to examine how multi-institutional criminalization over the life course creates social conditions of threat that are detrimental to Latina mothers’ health and wellbeing. System-Impacted Motherwork excavates how mothers respond to criminalization and sheds new light on the maternal strategies system-involved Latina mothers enlist as they navigate the everyday processes of punishment through state-created categories, violence, and healing. This talk also examines how SIM illuminates the interconnections of systemic punishment, and constructions of “unfit” motherhood that manifest into strategies to navigate microcosms of U.S. medicalized carceral state by illustrating how Latinx families create 1. Safety 2. Material resources, and 3. Spiritual healing. Overall, this research contributes to the fields of Sociology, Criminology, Public Health, and Feminist Studies as it reveals how motherwork supports the longevity, healing, and quality of life for poor families by moving away from a punitive approach to violence, and into healing-centered intersectional responses grounded in collective care for intergenerational healing.