Community Caregiving And Community Consciousness: Immigrant Latinas Developing Communities Through Social Service Programs

Community organizing and development involve a process that often begins before a formal group or goal is identified. This article is a qualitative interpretive analysis of a project involving a certification program for family child care providers that offered training to Spanish-speaking immigrant Latinas' in a medium-sized Midwestern city in Wisconsin. Using ethnographic data from field observations and comments by participants, the author examines how participants used the program to foster a pan-ethnic Latino community and evolved a community consciousness around childrearing and child care. Several elements intertwined in the program contributing to the development of a panethnic Latina sense of community: (I) opportunities for individual development, (2) social support networks and mentoring that reduced the isolation of recent immigrants, (3) meetings allowing for gender-appropriate and culturally-specific ways to gather, and (4) how the immigrants came to own the program and redefine its purpose as Latino community betterment instead of just individual opportunity. They used a community caregiving process stimulated by the relationship they created between community development and self-improvement, and they tied the agency's instrumental purpose to their community consciousness as an emergent pan-ethnic Latino community.