WHAT? Unwed teenage mothers are irresponsible fools. That’s more or less what I believed until I got to know some of them. How stupid and embarrassing is that?
I had been lead to believe, through social media, they were struggling, low potential individuals, who sought attention and love. I bought into this stereotype. After interacting with these women at my community partner site Young Moms Marin (YMM) I have come to realize how askew my view was and how my perceptions had been negatively altered towards these women, as well as how our society plays into racist and socially unjust views of these Latina teen moms. I hadn’t realized to what extent racism and social injustice affected people within our communities prior to this class, Anthropological
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It should be noted that one’s theory, “…determines what you want to do in terms of helping people grow. So it’s extremely important that you have a theory about it that helps you decide” (Horton, 100). Essentially, one should select a theory that will benefit people with education or with social change at the point of their positionality regarding the theory, not yours. One theory is that the young moms need help to change the stigmas that define who they are, but they don’t have the tools or confidence to take action outside of the group to challenge the stereotypes that they face. To see if my theory was accurate and see for myself the true position the young moms were in, I attended the group meetings on …show more content…
The perception of my role at YMM has shaped my interaction with the moms I meet in a positive way. I noticed that each week I found myself connecting with new moms, and getting to know a little bit more about who they were. At times it feels like my hard work serving the moms goes unnoticed, but as Remen said, “All hard work and personal sacrifice suddenly seemed… to be worth it” (Remen, 1). My view about my role has shifted slightly. I still think of myself as a helper, but with more emphases on the serving. I have discovered that this experience has allowed the moms and me to benefit from one another. The moms benefit from having me there because they know someone trustworthy and loving is taking care of their children, and I benefit from the moms because they gave me a lot of insights to the discourse that surrounds teen