Motherhood in migration: schools as acculturation agents

ABSTRACT

Motherhood roles lie at the intersection of gender, professional, family, and social identities and are highly contextualized in culture, making them particularly relevant for acculturation success. We provide an empirical example of how schools act as acculturation agents, using the experiences of career-oriented migrant mothers whose children attend elite private schools in Santiago, Chile. This study contributes to consumer acculturation research and to research on matricentric feminism, which positions mothers’ concerns as the starting point for theories, politics, and practices of empowerment. We employ Turner's notion of root paradigms to discuss how schools maneuver their unique institutional agentic power, acculturating career-oriented migrant mothers and their families into a cultural framework of female domesticity and intensive mothering.