Sexual Identities of Young Puerto Rican Mothers
Caridad Souza
"The quality of light by which we scrutinize our
lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the
changes which we hope to bring about through those lives."
-Audre Lore, "Poetry Is Not A Luxury"
In today's society, sex is no longer simply a matter of marriage and
having children. Sexuality has become integrated into social relations
to such an extent that it boasts its own niche in the economy, its own
subcultural expressions, and its own lifestyle segment in contemporary
life.1 It has also become central to the controversy over early
childbearing and parenting that during the decade of the nineties became
known as the "problem" of teenage pregnancy. Despite all the
attention about sexuality among youth as a consequence of these heated
debates, we still know very little about why they become sexually active
and what it means to them.2 More specifically, what does it
mean for young women today to engage in sexual activity that results in
early childbearing? What meanings and interpretations do they attach to
sexual activity? As a generation of women who have inherited changes in
gender and sexual relations initiated before they were born, young women
today must carve out sexual identities in a hostile climate of adult authoritarianism
and public and cultural patriarchies. The quest to explore and experience
desire and bodily pleasure has a particular resonance for young women,
especially if they are also poor and from socially stigmatized groups.
For young Puerto Rican women who mother, decisions about engaging in sexual
activity always come at a high personal cost since it also involves attempts
to seek pleasure through intimate relationships in a context of social
and economic marginality. Their sexual desires immediately become "outlaw"
and "suspect" in a society that stigmatizes their bodies as
nonproductive, their sexuality as excessive, and their fertility as pathological.
Listening to young Puerto Rican mothers talk about their reproductive
and sexual experiences makes it possible to offer more complex views about
the political economic and cultural forces that enable and constrain their
sexual identities than those offered by public discussions, and may even
help explain the resulting early childbearing.3
By the mid-nineties legislators successfully targeted teenage mothers
as a significant threat to moral and family values, blaming them for various
social ills including rising rates of crime and incarceration, persistent
poverty, and the welfare dependency of the "urban underclass."4
In response, national policy reasserted control and regulation over the
sexuality of young people through legislation like the Personal Responsibility
and Work Reorganization Act (1996), which narrowly casts their sexuality
within a discourse of admonition, danger, and fear.5 Instead
of addressing their needs along with the concerns of parents, young mothers
get talked about, talked for, and talked at. Both the media and policy
arenas label young mothers as "children having children" and
sexually active young women as a "reproductive underclass,"
whose out-of-control sexuality leads to welfare dependency and costs taxpayers
money.6 These kinds of images about young women highlight racial
and class anxieties in U.S. society regarding early sexual activity and
childbearing, especially that of poor, minority women of color.7
Instead of critically examining the assumptions we hold about their sexuality,
we fall prey to views about them as either active manipulators of "the
system" to avoid personal responsibility for their pathological fertility
or as victims of male exploitation and lust.8,9 Attempts by
the state to discourage early sexual activity and encourage abstinence
seem to have little affect on sexual activity of our young. The images
produced through these public discussions help demonstrate how the state
has a political stake in controlling the bodies and sexuality of women
of color.10 Feminist research challenges these popular views
about early childbearing and sexual activity among young women but their
efforts do not necessarily allow us to understand how gender and sexual
relations have changed over time, nor the connection between sexual relations
and the economic changes of the last thirty years.11 Most perspectives
on early childbearing also sever working class and poor women from the
social and material conditions in which their lives are embedded. Disconnecting
young mothers from their political economic and cultural contexts encourages
stereotypes of teenage motherhood as irrational and irresponsible to the
casual observer. Such approaches render early sexuality and childbearing
as pathological or deviant by denying the complexity of the social worlds
in which young women make decisions to become sexually active.
Changes in how we think about gender and sexual relations in the last
thirty years help provide an important but overlooked context for contemporary
early sexuality and childbearing. One important change has been the effects
of the sexual revolution, which began as a cultural movement during the
sixties that involved a loosening of sexual and social restrictions for
heterosexual males. The image of the single "playboy," whose
masculinity was tied to numerous sexual partners, replaced the "breadwinner"
role of father and husband. This changing role exempted heterosexual males
from responsibility for the consequences of their sexual behavior. In
contrast, women were required to agree to sex outside marriage with multiple
partners in ways that still left them without much control over their
bodies and sexuality.12 Along with sexual availability, women
were still expected to be primary caretakers of children and to conform
to male ideas about feminine attractiveness and sexual desirability. Whereas
heterosexual masculinity became equated with sexual aggressiveness and
prowess, heterosexual femininity still remained marked as passive, sexual
attractiveness.13 Although heterosexual males experienced a
loosening of sexual mores favoring them, U.S. society still maintains
sexually repressive, gendered ideals about female sexuality. The legacy
of these changing sexual relations still determines how we understand
sexual identity and sexual desirability today. For example, women still
have to deal with the virgin/whore dichotomy, still get judged by their
sexual decorum, still get treated with suspicion when expressing sexual
desires, and can still be personally and socially assaulted based on the
verdict. As a result of these changing expectations about gender and sexuality,
young women today must enact sexual identities through a sexual double
standard that influences how they behave sexually.
In a separate but related vein, adult stereotypes about young people
as hedonistic, irresponsible, and unprepared for making appropriate decisions
regarding sexuality leave young people alone with their concerns about
intimacy and relationships. On the one hand, adults assert that only their
guidance and knowledge can provide the skills necessary for making appropriate
sexual and reproductive decisions.14 A refusal to acknowledge
the sexuality of our young masks adult discomfort in discussing sexual
matters with them. Instead of a mutual exploration of sexual knowledge
and concerns, adults either deny the sexuality of young people or strive
to control it since they assume that informing young people about sex
encourages it. Sexuality education often focuses on the mechanics of intercourse
rather than on "confidence, selfesteem, nonsexual ways of showing
affection, and the pleasurable, emotional, and complex aspects of sexuality."
Rarely do young people's desire for connection, "the pleasures of
sexuality, about love, family, [or] intimacy" get addressed.15
More often than not young people hear biological explanations about "raging
hormones" that place responsibility for sexuality on individuals
without acknowledging that sexual behavior occurs in a social context
that is also historically defined. Messages about their sexuality occur
within a narrow range of risk and danger, or alternately through advocating
abstinence. In contrast, the larger cultural context promotes sex as an
acceptable social activity supported by the marketing of sexuality as
a lifestyle option, especially to young people. It is here that media,
through advertising campaigns, and youth culture, through music and music
videos, play a decisive role in selling sex. Sexual intimacy becomes focused
on expressions of desire and bodily pleasures.16 In this maze of contemporary
sexual relations, young women from socially stigmatized groups that are
also economically marginal must sort through various, competing meanings
of contemporary sexuality. Their sexual activity becomes compounded by
political perspectives that render their femininity excessive and their
fertility unruly. It is within this changing cultural milieu of contemporary
gender and sexual relations that young Puerto Rican mothers live out economic
and cultural inequalities as they carve out social spaces where they can
explore their sexual identities.
One of the more publicly troubling aspects of the sexuality of poor women
of color is the growing relationship between early childbearing and dependency
on the state. The emphasis by public discourses on the link between poverty
and young motherhood minimizes how young women of color often come from
groups whose extreme levels of concentrated poverty limit their opportunities
for social mobility or economic success. Among Puerto Rican women, increased
poverty since the eighties means that an early pregnancy will condemn
both the mother and her child to economic hardship. Yet the poverty of
Puerto Ricans is rooted in historical and political economic forces that
go largely unnoticed in public discussions about teenage pregnancy. Since
the seventies, changes in the economy through the expansion of capital
into global markets and the changing nature of accumulation have impoverished
Puerto Ricans living in the Northeast. As the economy changed, Puerto
Rican women were squeezed out of one area of the economy (light manufacturing)
because their skills were no longer in demand and their low levels of
human capital (ie. educational attainment) left them unprepared for entry
into new jobs that required a knowledge orientation (information services).17
Economic recovery in the service sector occurred mostly in unstable, low-waged,
and part-time jobs that did not compensate for the jobs lost.18
As their labor force participation declined so did their family incomes,
which directly contributed to their current impoverishment and sharp increases
in families headed by women dependent on the state.19 This
situation is compounded by the fact that although Puerto Rican men in
general have more stable rates of employment than do Puerto Rican women,
they remain at the bottom of the wage scale structure in New York City.
High rates of unemployment and underemployment, malnutrition and health
problems, and high educational attrition combine with low educational
attainment, increased rates of welfare dependency, and concentration in
residential areas of extreme poverty in New York City means Puerto Ricans
fulfill all known indexes of social and economic disadvantage. They also
have high rates of teenage pregnancy.
Working class youth have historically played a vital role in the survival
of their households20 and Puerto Rican youth are no different
in this respect. However, shifts in the economy of New York City affects
the kinds of jobs available to young women and they mostly work in the
secondary service sector of food service, cashiers, or low-waged clerical
jobs. As a result of their youth and gender, the jobs they secure make
economic contributions to their households unreliable. Their most sustained
contributions occur through the reproductive work they perform that supports
the work of adult kin. Among working class Puerto Ricans, households engage
in economic strategies that use a communal ethos for interacting based
on a system of mutual obligation and reciprocity to pool resources and
barter, and where the exchange of goods and services is common. These
households also rely on the multiple roles and obligations of women.21
An ideology of family helps cement this economic strategy where emphasis
on the group overrides individual needs, but where women play a central
role. This family ideology defines a good woman as someone one who willingly
sacrifices for her loved ones and who is selfless.22 Children
do not contribute directly to households needs, and have the relative
freedom to play and interact with others. As soon as daughters reach the
ages of ten to twelve, however, they become recruited into reproductive
labor within the household. Thereafter the household becomes their primary
responsibility. Isabel Santos, a twenty-one year old mother of three children,
explains: "I had to do everything in the house. I would have to come
home to cook, clean, water plants." As girls become more restricted
to the household through reproductive work, adult women move out of the
household to labor across the various households in the kinship network
or to work in the formal and informal economies. From a very early age,
daughters become accustomed to responsibility and decision-making power
through their contributions to the household.23 This level
of responsibility has an important symbolic impact on the sexual identities
they forge during their adolescent years. As young women gain competence
through the completion of reproductive work, they graft a cultural script
of womanhood onto their lives outside the household.24 As they
enter adolescence they expect to make similar decisions and take on the
responsibility in the forging of their sexual identities. Various social
and cultural contradictions face them as they begin to both accommodate
and contest both family and youth culture sexuality socialization.
Family sexuality socialization among working class Puerto Rican households
draws on a cultural template of a repressive/creative sexual ideology
common among Mediterranean cultures where womanhood operates within a
patriarchal logic about female desire and pleasure.25 Sexual
identities develop against a sexual double standard where the household
becomes designated as the appropriate space for females. This culturally-defined
gender ideology of the virgin/whore, which Puerto Rican girls experience
as the good girl/bad girl dichotomy, encourages a spatial politics that
determines the bounds of acceptable behavior for men and women. Restriction
of women's mobility means they become cloistered into female spaces inside
the household as a natural extension of gender responsibility. Inside
the household (en la casa) corresponds to being within the family. In
contrast, being outside (en la calle) means being in that chaotic, risky,
and dangerous domain of males and "bad" people.26
Women remain within the household as a spatial status of virtuous femininity.
Those women defined as being en la calle become designated as outside
the family, thus outside the bounds of respectability. In cultures that
value virginity as a mark of femininity, family honor and shame rests
on the chastity of unmarried daughters.27 The very presence
of women outside the household implicates them in promiscuity and/or sexual
misconduct. Puerto Rican girls learn this good girl/bad girl dichotomy
most clearly through their recruitment into reproductive labor, where
to be a muchacha de la casa (a girl from the home) means to be a good
girl. A good girl cleans, cooks, takes care of younger siblings, and helps
her parents. In contrast, una muchacha de la calle (a girl from the street)
is a transgressive woman, someone who has gone beyond patriarchal control,
whose sexuality is considered unbounded and therefore dangerous.28
Women who go beyond the criteria of sexual passivity and repression,
or who refuse to conform to cultural norms of women's appropriate role
are considered shameful, and their virtuousness is doubted.29
Jasmine Garcia remarks on how culturally informed ideologies about appropriate
female behavior that shaped her relationship with her mother: "Me
and my mom wasn't that close. I got in trouble with her because I used
to come home late. Because I was high, you know. Things like that she
used to get upset. I used to hang out with a bunch of guys outside."
Growing up with this good girl/bad girl dichotomy along with an inside
(casa)/outside (calle) spatial politics generates a cloud of secrecy around
sexual activity, especially because families refuse to acknowledge the
possibility that young women may be sexually active before marriage.30
The equivalent of a fallen woman for working class Puerto Ricans is one
who mistakenly slips from virtuousness and chastity, which they refer
to as Meter Las Patas (slip up). Such a mistake can and does result in
unwanted pregnancy through premarital sex, although it can be rectified
through marriage or consensual union with the male partner. There is a
range of acceptable sexual behavior among Puerto Ricans in the U.S. where
many idealized cultural values change with class location. In adapting
to their material realities, working class Puerto Rican women in this
community adjust cultural expectations since their economic marginality
does not allow them to completely conform to appropriate gender or sexual
ideals because economic necessity often finds them engaged in activity
outside the home. This repressive/creative matrix combines with dominant
societal messages about gender and sexuality to produce competing ideas
available to young women as they elaborate their sexual identities. Young
women are initiated into the politics of sexuality and notions of femininity
within their ethnic group and households. Yet it is among their peers
that they learn about negotiating the sexual politics of womanhood informed
by dominant ideologies about femininity and sexual desire.
Peer relationships become increasingly important in adolescence and result
in a movement by young women away from their household obligations. Sexuality
socialization among peers becomes a central aspect of defining their identities.
Working class youth often become economically and sexually autonomous
at younger ages than middle-class youth because their economic positions
expose them to more and sooner. They experience the adult world and act
adult-like much sooner.31 Peers thus introduce young women
to local youth cultures that impart values shaping their emerging notions
of sexual identity. These alternate notions of sexuality make it important
to be part of the "slick" group or "in crowd" who
are fast and knowledgeable because they have tried everything at an early
age. Since young women become responsible and contributing members of
their households at a young age, they learn to make important reproductive
decisions in relation to the household. They come to expect that they
will also make decisions about their sexual identities in the same way
that adults do. Marissa points out the way that young people experience
the movement toward peer-oriented youth cultures: "As you get older
you want to experience things, you know. Like you want to go out dancing,
go to clubs, and stay out 'til past a normal curfew. You want to do things.
A lot of kids want to experience drinking and see what it feels like.
Others get into drugs. You want to do things."
When daughters express a desire to go out with friends, wear makeup,
and date, there is a quick censorship and silencing about sexuality in
their families. Both parents and the culture caution, "no habra las
pata" (don't open your legs), holding up examples of women who transgress
the bounds of acceptable gender and sexual behavior. The request for freedom
to participate in peer group activities by daughters increases tension
with parents because parents interpret the request through the cultural
notion of libertad, which translates literally to mean liberty, but which
contextually connotes sexual license. Daughters often hear the charge
that tu lo que quieres es hacer lo que te da la gana (you just want to
do whatever you want). Since "doing what you want" is a male
prerogative that infers sexual license and freedom, the sexual double
standard of Puerto Rican culture interprets a daughter's request for increased
autonomy as a desire to have unsanctioned, numerous sexual relations simply
by wanting to go outside. Parents assert their control by confining daughters
to the household.
Young women resent the sexual double standard imposed by parents, especially
in lieu of all the reproductive labor they perform for their households.
As they assert themselves through claims for autonomy from the kin network,
the conflicts between parents and daughters increase. It is at this point
of intense familial conflict where the contradictions of their social
and economic marginality surface, and where many pregnancies occur. Parents
confine daughters to the household like children needing supervision,
yet treat them like adults when it comes to reproductive matters within
the household. This contradiction is not lost on the young women who quickly
use it to assert their demands for autonomy. Many young women express
a desire to move away from a girlhood filled with the pressures of household
responsibilities to the perceived freedom of womanhood. Their participation
in local youth cultures through involvement with peers emphasizes romance
and sexuality. In their attempts to become "grown" as soon as
possible, bodily pleasures through sexual activity become an easy, clear,
and quick route to womanhood, especially for working class and impoverished
young women. In the two brief sketches that follow it becomes clear how
the young women negotiate family sexuality and peer group socialization
regarding sexual intimacy and reproductive matters in their elaborations
on becoming sexually active.
Clarissa is the oldest of two daughters in a solidly working class Puerto
Rican family in Far Rockaway, Queens. Both her parents work and her extended
family migrated from Puerto Rico during the sixties to work in the landscaping
business on Long Island.32 By family and community standards
Clarissa was considered a "good girl," una muchacha de la casa.
She never went out unaccompanied by an adult during her teenage years,
and was a top student at school. As a daughter she was obedient, helped
her parents, and rarely challenged their authority. Yet at the age of
sixteen Clarissa found herself caring for her first child. Her life began
in the cloistered and confined manner of so many other Puerto Rican girls.
She says: "They watched me a lot, kept me in the house." Despite
an upbringing that attempted to protect her from the external world, and
that warned her about the consequences of early childbearing, she became
pregnant at the age of fifteen. Her first sexual encounter was not with
the young man who would become the father of her child but would occur
as a way of testing her emerging sense of sexuality: "The first time
I tried it [sex], when I lost my virginity, it was out of curiosity [because]
I just wanted to know what it felt like. And after that it was my daughter's
father, my true love." She explains that her parents did not talk
about sexuality: "That was taboo in my family." Instead, she
learned about sexuality by reading about it at school and through friends.
While Clarissa expressed no emotional conflict about becoming sexually
active and seemed comfortable with her sexual behavior, she did fear its
discovery by her parents. Meeting her daughter's father, and the excitement
of falling in love, however, lessened her concerns about her parents:
"Seriously, seriously, my first love was my daughter's father. He
was my first love. I just thought he was very different from everybody
else I had dated. He had a good job. At that point he was working at a
travel agency. He was working pretty good. He looked like he came from
a good family. You know, his mother worked and everything. His sister
was going to college upstate. It was a nice family. He was good looking.
So, you know, what the hell. He was the second [sexual partner]. I went
to the Museum of Modern Art. I had to do a term paper on Van Gogh. And
he went with me. And then I went back to his house. And one thing led
to another. And it was like I never thought about until afterwards. That's
the moment I got pregnant. [Was that the first time you had sex?] That
wasn't the first time. No we had sex before. And the thing is that we
have always used protection. But that one time that we didn't, you know.
Just that one time that we didn't." When Clarissa found out she was
pregnant it made her feel ashamed and like a failure: "When I found
out I was very exasperated. I was like 'oh my god, what am I gonna do,
what am I gonna do. I can't do this'." Her first concern was the
disappointment she had caused her parents because of the intense stigma
of early pregnancy among her extended kin. While she considered an abortion,
her lack of economic resources independent of her parents prohibited her
from obtaining one within the first trimester. Although she was a "good
girl," she had sex regularly before she got pregnant. Her lack of
economic resources outside those of her parent's, combined with cultural
and social sanctions against sexual intercourse among minors hindered
her ability to negotiate her sexuality in a beneficial way.
Everyone considers Maria una muchacha de la calle (a street girl). By
her own admission Maria says she loves being on the street: "Half
the time I'm basically wanting to be out in the street." Her mother
was much more permissive than other mothers and was very open with her
daughter about sexuality and reproductive issues, preparing her to take
control of her body and her sexuality by providing her with information.
Maria, however, was no better equipped to make informed sexual and reproductive
decisions and choices: "I didn't use birth control. I didn't believe
in it." Maria had her first sexual encounter at a younger age than
many other women. She was curious about sex, and like Clarissa, wanted
to know what it was like: "The first guy I was with was this guy
named Paul from Florida when I was fourteen years old, because I was curious,
because of my friends." She admits that she became "very sexually
active" soon after that experience. At sixteen she met the father
of her children and fell in love, but after four years the relationship
ended. She describes their relationship in the following way: "But
I really hit my sexual peak after my kids' father, which wasn't that long
ago. I loved the sex. He was one of my favorite lovers. He had no shame.
He was my ninth guy. He did everything, wasn't disgusted by it. We used
to have fun together when we first started. We used to do a lot of things
together. We used to go out to the park and run around like kids. Roll
in the grass. We used to go to the beach together, to the pool. Ride bikes.
Do stupid things. It was a cute relationship. I was with him for a month
before I got pregnant." When Maria found out she was pregnant she
had mixed feelings and felt confused. After her partner demonstrated his
delight about the news she became more amenable to the idea: "I wounded
up getting pregnant. I did not want to get pregnant at all. It just happened.
I was just shocked." Her partner's willingness to establish a permanent
relationship with her made her feel secure about having the baby. She
recalls his reaction: "He said 'I knew it.' He was pretty excited
for the first one." Her brother's reaction, on the other hand, hurt
her feelings and encouraged her own ambivalence about being pregnant.
Her early childbearing has placed her in an economically vulnerable position,
a situation she readily acknowledges. It never crossed her mind that she
would be a single adolescent mother on welfare. When she began her relationship
with the father of her children she expected love, support, and commitment.
Instead, her partner became addicted to crack and the life she had envisioned
for herself quickly disappeared. After four years with their father, she
finds herself alone with her two children.
Considerations about early sexuality childbearing among poor Puerto Rican
women must take into account those factors that enable and constrain their
sexual activities and that shape their sexual identity. In an economic
context of globalization, deindustrialization, and the expansion of the
service economy where their households are increasingly impoverished,
young Puerto Rican women shoulder the bulk of reproductive work. New York
City's restructured economy positions young women as surplus labor. Young
women themselves do not to expect that they, nor their male partners,
will be able to support themselves or their children.33 Living
in impoverished communities determines access to and availability of waged
work, educational opportunities, and other measures of social well-being
that influences gender and sexual relations among Puerto Ricans. Their
declining economic position means male authority with limited economic
potential and female subordination with increased exploitative, productive
and reproductive labor creates tensions that explode around sexually-defined
gender roles and expectations within their households. In a context where
there is little material advancement, control of young women's bodies
may translate into a tightening grip on the behavior of young, unmarried
women. Public discussions about the sexuality of young people use descriptive
terms such as "children having children" and "reproductive
underclass" in conjunction with early childbearing that hint at racial
and class ideologies regarding the fertility of young women of color.
These terms resonate loudly for young Puerto Rican mothers given the rise
of female-headship, poverty, and increased dependency on the state among
them.
Yet these young women do not necessarily want to become mothers. What
concerns them most are romantic notions of love, establishing committed
relationship, and exploring sexuality and pleasure in their bodies. Multiple,
competing gender and sexual ideologies along with sanctions against their
sexuality may influence whether and how they guard against unwanted pregnancy.
The cultural templates like muchachas de la casa and muchachas de la calle
help emphasize how young Puerto Rican women today combine and move beyond
the cultural dictates of female desire and sexuality they inherit. Both
Clarissa and Maria provide alternate perspectives about what sexual activity
means in their lives not captured by the public discussions on sexuality
among youth. Their sense of entitlement about pleasure and desire coincide
with shifting notions of gender and sexual relations in U.S. society.
These brief sketches about their lives show how young women interpret
sexual activity as exploratory and pleasurable yet they also risk becoming
pregnant and bearing children in the process of exploring the sexual identities.
Despite important differences in the lives of each woman they must still
negotiate multiple messages that instruct them about appropriate standards
of femininity and sexual desire that have profound material consequences
for their lives.
The promotion of sexuality in the media and the entertainment industry
makes images of sex easily available to young people that reinforce the
desirability of sexual freedom and expression. Television, music, and
other media bombard young people with messages about the glamour and desirability
of sex.34 In contrast, messages from parents and other authority
figures instill fear and admonitions that do not deter sexual activity.
In the Puerto Rican context I worked in, young women were perceived as
promiscous often even when they were not. One young woman's mother commented
after hearing her daughter ask me to explain the types of contraceptives
available beyond the pill and condoms that her daughter needed to "keep
[her] legs closed, just don't have it[sex]." You don't need to be
asking that 'cause you shouldn't be having it anyway." Parents often
waited until their daughters went to school to check their personal spaces
and belongings searching for evidence of sexual activity and drug use
things, and maintained a vigilant eye towards any discrepancies in behavior
and affect. Such tactics just make young people more secretive and less
communicative about sexual matters.
The contradictory messages they receive compel young women to learn about
love, romance, and sexuality from their friends. Enshrouded in a repressive/creative
matrix, pleasure and desire become articulated through an ideology of
romantic love that opens up a space for young women to explore sexuality
in culturally sanctioned ways. Note, for example, how eighteen year old
Marissa Montalvo uses the discourse of romantic love to explain why she
got pregnant when she was seventeen: I thought I was in love with Eddie.
I didn't plan my pregnancy. I didn't mean for it to happen, you know.
I never thought I would get pregnant. That's how I thought. I wouldn't
get pregnant. [Why is that?] Why? I just wasn't thinking about pregnancy
at the time I did what I did. I was young when I started with him. I was
only fifteen years old. So at that time I thought I was really in love
with him. So that's all I thought about was him, him, him. I didn't stop
to think about 'well if I do this with him I'm gonna wind up pregnant,'
or I could get a disease 'cause I was in love with him. So that wasn't
going through my mind at the time. All I was thinking about was how I
was gonna be happy with him. How we was gonna be together. Day by Day.
Like what me and Eddie are gonna do tomorrow. Or how he's gonna take me
out. And how good it feels to have somebody to care for you. That's all
I was thinking about. I wasn't thinking about getting pregnant, about
no disease, about using birth control. Nothing. None of that was in my
head until I got pregnant. That's when I decided to sit and think. When
it was already too late."
Love becomes entwined with pleasure and desire in ways that maintain
the bounds of appropriate femininity as they engage in emotional and sexual
attachments with their peers. It also simultaneously constrains a critical
sense about the multiple layers of the public and cultural patriarchies
through which they must construct sexual identities. The broader political
economic and cultural context of their lives, however, determines whether
one slip from virtuousness will organize the rest of their lives.
Sexual activity that results in early childbearing occurs in a society
that is already extremely ambivalent about adult female sexuality. The
sexual double standard and ideology of male sexual needs among working
class Puerto Ricans relegates female sexuality to a subordinate position
that dominant capitalist, patriarchal norms bolsters. The multiple constraints
on female sexual desire makes sexual activity among poor, young women
of color seem almost an assertion of womanhood, a way of practicing womanhood
in a similar way that they practice being wives and mothers within their
households through their reproduction. Young women themselves understand
their behavior as part of the process of growing up and experiencing life.
The way they engage in romantic entanglements, however, does not demonstrate
a consciousness about how sexual and gender relations, among Puerto Ricans
and in the larger society, still get structured in unequal ways where
male social power predominates and places women at a disadvantage. The
added issue of economic and racialized ethnic social stigma creates an
even more complicated context for constructing sexual identities among
them. The irony here is that the manner in which young women establish
social spaces separate from their parent's expectations-through sexual
activity-has specific consequences that place them right back into the
domain of la casa they want to escape. Instead of the perceived freedom
from parental control and authority, they risk becoming scripted into
the very context they want to move away from through the event of early
childbearing. They also ensure their own and their children's impoverishment.
Most approaches to early childbearing rarely question how labeling all
young women who mother as "children having children" and all
sexually active poor women as a "reproductive underclass" and
obscure the social and material conditions under which they labor, where
they take on adult responsibilities sooner than their middle-class, often
white and suburban, counterparts. The narratives of young Puerto Rican
mothers help nuance these debates by reconnecting them to the political
economic and cultural contexts in which they become sexually active. Sexual
activity, and the resulting pregnancies, does not occur in a vacuum but
in relation to specific historical and material forces shaping their lives
and sexual activity. Early childbearing has everything to do with how
their age, their class, their racialized ethnicity, and their gender combine
to promote unfavorable outcomes for them. The invisibility and erasure
of their extensive reproductive labor within households allows distorted
images of them to circulate unchallenged in public discussions, where
they bear the brunt of changing economic structures and shifting understandings
of femininity and sexual relations they have inherited. Attempts by young
women to carve out spaces for sexual exploration and pleasure within such
a context means they must both accommodate and contest the norms of femininity
and sexuality available to them within the limited cultural and economic
scope.
NOTES
1. Lowe, Donald. 1995. The Body in Late Capitalism.
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
2. Bernstein, Neil. 1995. "Learning to Love."
Mother Jones, Jan-Feb, 20(1):44-50.
3. The narratives in this essay are based on ethnographic research among
Puerto Rican mothers in Queens during the nineties. All names used in
this essay are pseudonyms and all locational identifiers have been changed
to protect the privacy of the study participants. Cognizant of usage and
grammatical differences in their narratives, I nonetheless quote each
speaker verbatim to preserve the integrity of both the syntax and rhythm
of regional speech and code switching among working class, urban Puerto
Rican residents.
4. Contract with America, 1994; Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The
Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, The Underclass, and Public Policy,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
5. Rhodes (1993, 312) points out that: "Most liberal begin with
the premise that teenagers should not have babies [while most] conservatives
begin with the premise that single teenagers should not have sex. For
conservatives, the problem involves primarily moral and fiscal concerns:
premarital sexuality is not objectionable itself, it promotes other objectionable
practices, such as abortion and the destruction of fetal 'life,' or non-marital
childbearing and the erosion of traditional values and financial self-sufficiency.
For liberals, the problem involves primarily health and socioeconomic
status: single parenthood is linked with disrupted education, reduced
employment opportunities, and an increased likelihood of poverty for mothers,
as well as heightened medical risks and developmental difficulties for
their children. Rhodes, Deborah L. "Adolescent Pregnancy and Public
Policy" in The Politics of Pregnancy: Adolescent
Sexuality and Public Policy, ed. By Annette Lawson and Deborah
L. Rhodes, New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press; See also Children's
Defense Fund and Joffe, Carole. 1993. "Sexual Politics and the Teenage
Pregnancy Prevention Worker in the United States,"
In The Politics of Pregnancy: Adolescent Sexuality and Public Policy.
6. Dash, Leon. 1989. When Children Want Children:
The Urban Crisis of Teenage Childbearing. New York: William Morrow.
Grosfoguel, Ramon. 1996. "The Racialization of Latino Caribbean Migrants
in the New York Metropolitan Area, Centro de Estudios
Puertorriqueños: Special Issue on Race and Identity, 8(1-2):
190-201.
7. See Phoenix, Ann. 1993. "The Social Construction of Motherhood:
A Black and White Issue," The Politics of Pregnancy:
Adolescent Sexuality and Public Policy, ed. by Annette Lawson and
Deborah L. Rhodes, New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, pp. 74-100.
(Dash, 1989; Jencks, 1990) and also McRobbie, Angela. 1991. Feminism
and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just Seventeen, London: Zed.
8. See Mead, Lawrence M. 1985. Beyond Entitlement:
The Social Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Free Press, and
Murray, Charles. 1984. Losing Ground: American Social
Policy, 1950-1980. New York: Basic Books. Anderson, Elijah. 1990.
Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, respectively for these views.
9. Anderson, Elijah. 1990. Streetwise: Race, Class,
and Change in an Urban Community, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. (Anderson, 1990)
10. Eisentein, Zillah. 1994. The Color of Gender:
Re-imagining Democracy. Berkeley: University of California Press.
11. Annette Lawson and Rhodes, Deborah L. 1993. "Introduction,"
In The Politics of Pregnancy: Adolescent Sexuality
and Public Policy, New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press.
12. di Leonardo, Micaela and Roger Lancaster. 1997. "Introduction."
In The Gender/Sexuality Reader: culture, history,
political economy, ed. By Roger Lancaster and Micaela di Leonardo.
New York: Routledge, 1-10.
13. Health Education Authority. (1999). Teenage
Pregnancy and Parenthood: Filling in the Research Gaps. London:
Health Education Authority.
14. Aggleton, Peter J. & I. Warwick 1997. "Young People, Sexuality,
HIV and Aids," In L. Shorr (ed.) Aids and Adolescence.
Amsterdam, Netherlands: Harwood Academic Press.
15. Bernstein, Neil. 1995. "Learning to Love." Mother
Jones, Jan-Feb, 20(1):44-50.
16. Hennesy, Rosemary. 2000. Profit and Pleasure:
Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism. Routledge, New York.
17. Daponte, Beth Osbourn. 1996. "Race and ethnicity during an economic
transition: the withdrawal of Puerto Rican women from New York City's
labour force, 1960-1980." Regional Studies,
April 30(2): 151-167.
18. Grosfoguel, Ramon. 1996. "Racialization of Latino Caribbean
Migrants in the New York Metropolitan Area," Centro
de Estudios Puertorriqueños: Special Issue on Race and Identity,
8(1-2): 190-201. See Fine, Michelle. 1992.
19. Benmayor, Rina, Ana Juarbe, and Rosa M. Toruellas. 1988. Responses
to Poverty Among Puerto Rican Women: Identity, Community, and Cultural
Citizenship, Hunter College, CUNY, Center for Puerto Rican Studies,
New York.
20. Peiss, Kathy, 1990, "Charity Girls and City Pleasure: Historical
Notes on Working-Class Sexuality, 1880-1920" In Dubois
and Ruiz, Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in Women's History,
ed. By Ellen Dubois and Vicky Ruiz, New York: Routledge.
21. Geronimus, Arline T. 1991. "Teenage Childbearing and Social
Reproductive Disadvantage: The Content of Complex Questions and the Demise
of Simple Answers." Family Relations.
October (40): 463-471.
22. Cofresi, Norma. 1999. "Gender Roles in Transition among Professional
Puerto Rican Women." Frontiers. January.
20(1):161-178.
23. Alvarez, Celia. 1988. "El Hilo Que Nos Une/The Thread That Binds
Us: Becoming a Puerto Rican Woman," Oral History
Review, Fall 16(2):29-40.
24. My thanks to Gina Peréz for pointing this out. Personal communication,
May, 2001.
25. Zavella's (n.d.,1) work demonstrates how among Mexicana/ Chicanas
sexual experience spans a continuum between heterosexual and openly lesbian
relations and desire where they theorize creatively about "carnal
desire in ways that embody contradictions of acquiescence and contestation.
"See Zavella, Patricia. n.d. "Talkn' Sex: Chicanas and Mexicans
Theorize about Silences and Sexual Pleasures," in Chicana
Feminism: Disruption in Dialogue, ed. Gabriela Arredondo, Aida
Hurtado, Norma Klahn, Olga Najera Ramirez, and Patricia Zavella, Durham:
Duke University Press, forthcoming 2001.
26. See Behar, Ruth, 1993, Translated Women: Crossing
the Border with Esperanza's Story. Boston: Beacon Press and Prieto,
Yolanda, 1992, "Cuban Women in New Jersey: Gender Relations and Change,"
In Seeking Common Ground: Multidisciplinary Studies of Immigrant Women
in the United States, ed by Donna Gabbaccia, Westport, CT.: Greenwood
Press, pp.249-290.
27. See the works of Castillo, Ana. 1991. "La Macha: Toward a Whole
Beautiful Self." In Chicana Lesbians: The Girls
Our Mothers Warned Us About, ed by Carla Trujillo, Third Woman
Press, pp.27-35, Trujillo, Carla, 1991, "Chicana Lesbians: Fear and
Loathing in the Chicano Community," In Chicana
Critical Issues, ed. By Norma Alarcon, Rafaela Castro, Emma Perez,
Beatriz Pesquera, Adalijiza Sosa Riddel, and Patricia Zavella, Berkeley:
Third Woman Press, pp.117-126, and Zavella, Patricia. 1997. "Playing
with Fire: The Gendered Construction of Chicana/Mexicana Sexuality,"
In The Gender/Sexuality Reader: culture, history,
political economy, ed. By Roger Lancaster and Micaela di Leonardo,
New York: Routledge, pp. 392-408.
28. Horowitz, Ruth. 1983. Honor and the American
Dream: Culture and Identity in a Chicano Community. New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press.
29. Trujillo, Carla. 1991. "Chicana Lesbians: Fear and Loathing
in the Chicano Community," In Chicana Critical
Issues, ed. By Norma Alarcon, Rafaela Castro, Emma Perez, Beatriz
Pesquera, Adaljiza Sosa Riddel, and Patricia Zavella, Berkeley: Third
Woman Press, pp. 117-126
30. Fine, Michelle. 1992. "Sexuality, Schooling, and Adolescent
Females: The Missing Discourse of Desire." In Disruptive
Voices: The Possibilities of Feminist Research, Ann Arbor, MI.:
University of Michigan Press, pp.31-60 and Castillo, Ana. 1991. "La
Macha: Toward a Whole Beautiful Self." In Chicana
Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, ed by Carla Trujillo,
Third Woman Press, pp.27-35
31. Rapp, Rayna. 1988. "Family and Class in Contemporary America:
Notes Toward An Understanding of Ideology." In Rethinking
the Family, Some Feminist Questions, ed. By Barrie Thorn with Marilyn
Yalom. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
32. A paternal uncle was the first person contracted to work in the local
landscaping business, recruited directly from his hometown of Orocovis,
Puerto Rico during the early sixties. As soon as he could, Mr. Rodriguez
bought his own landscaping business. The business helped various family
members and town folk migrate and work, becoming a thriving enterprise
for all involved.
33. Bette, Julie. 2000. "Women without Class: Chicas, Cholas, Trash,
and the Presence/Absence of Class Identity." Signs:
A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 26(11):1-30.
34. Landale, Nancy S. and Susan M. Hauan. 1996. "Migration and Premarital
Childbearing Among Puerto Rican Women." Demography,
November, 33(4):429-442.
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