CHAPTER 1

Of Promise and Problem

The hardship of racial poverty experienced by communities of Mexican migrants and poor African Americans in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is underwritten by social relations, cultural practices, and political structures that make up an uneven and unequal economic topography. This chapter explores the quality of that topography, which in Tulsa is marked by the increasing relinquishing of state services to nonprofit organizations. Tulsa’s unique social program landscape offers a detailed view of the ambivalences and contradictions inherent in state social services scaling down. The result is the mobilization of politicized and institutionalized ideas of the community simultaneously organized around ethical practices of care that include the simultaneous incorporation and exclusion of people who seek help from nonprofit organizations. To understand the ambiguous and contradictory role of care, we join scholarship in human geography and anthropology that questions the relevance of care in the face of welfare and state entrenchment (Lawson 2007; White 2000; Milligan and Wiles 2010; Staeheli and Lawson 2005; Gutiérrez Garza 2022; Wilde 2022; Koch and James 2022). This framework allows us to contextualize the impact that nonprofit organizations have in the lives of both communities. Moreover, it enables us to understand how the imaginaries of the deserving and merited community are configured through the values and practices of self-reliance. Our case study establishes a dialogue with the book’s aim to contest liberal notions of poverty that rest on ontological and political claims of individualism, meritocracy, and white supremacy. In that vein, this chapter considers the production of deserving neoliberal subjects and communities through the production and control of racialized difference. We show how the focus on self-reliance echoes the state’s notions of liberal subjects responsible for their poverty. Therefore, we must find resources and engage in self-fashioning practices to change the subjects’ own social and economic circumstances (Harvey 2005; Larner 2003; Gilbert 2002; Wacquant 2012).¹

This chapter offers a comparative examination of the constricted economic and social articulations of the historical and everyday assemblages of race, gender, and inequality, which are the intersectional lived inequalities and disparities these communities navigate, as embedded in the economic experiences of these communities. This comparative and critical ethnic study examines the state’s politics and policies as the background against which interethnic relations are set, measured, and framed. Set within racialized forms of personhood that maintain these communities, we examine communities’ subordination to various forms of social control and dispossession. Furthermore, the relationship between African American and Latin American communities demonstrates a complex negotiation of solidarity and discord and generally of the politics of mutual mis/recognition. This chapter presents the difficulties and complications of community formation and relations. It focuses on how these poor communities generate coping strategies through respective displays of value to secure their engagement with the interventions of nonstate organizations and other aid programs concerned with alleviating poverty.

We explore how racialized and impoverished subjects deal with the denial of social personhood. We do so through the comparative analysis of personal narratives and life stories from the respective vantage point of Mexican migrants and African American people in Tulsa through social valuations of care regimes toward family and children. Our analytical framework considers the question of whether these two groups navigate and engage with different institutions/programs, with a particular interest in their experience with and perceptions of early education programs. In examining these experiences and practices, we show how aspirational paradigms that emerge from both the personal and community narratives of progress and within the policy discourses of the organizations complicate these communities’ perceptions of themselves and each other. Ultimately these discourses and paradigms, we argue, qualify these communities as sites of possibilities to become the right type of parent or citizen or become a problem for the state within a neoliberal logic.

Our discussion presents differentially racialized poverty and its resulting hardships as mediated through these spaces and their concomitant ideologies, rules, and expectations, constructing concrete ideas and imaginaries of both communities. Understanding the quality of that experience and the positionalities that it produced takes an analysis of the assemblages of economic hardship. For each community, this assemblage comprises the histories of their emplacement in Tulsa, alongside the city’s history, the formation and function of their respective senses of community, and their incorporation into the local political economy. Taken together, these qualify as notions of race and ethnicity that operate, struggle even, within the constricted economic and social structures of everyday life in Tulsa. Therefore, this discussion presents the challenges of navigating the conditions of poverty within and against the interventions of state agencies and other aid programs concerned with alleviating poverty.

Our research is based on fieldwork in Tulsa among Mexican and African American women who participated in the early education program Educare. We collected the life stories of fifty women and used semistructured interviews to gather data on care arrangements and forms of cooperation around child care. Our interviews investigated emic notions of care and well-being of children, good parenthood, and notions of success (social and economic). We developed the analysis by comparing the data gathered through the interviews and our personal experiences in the field. We both worked with and interviewed women actively participating in these early education programs and hence were involved in the various programs that the state and nonprofits have to alleviate poverty and create self-reliant individuals. Most of our interlocutors worked as community lay advisors, called Promotoras, at the Center for Family Resilience in the Department of Human Development and Family Science at Oklahoma State University, a center funded by the George Kaiser Foundation (founders of Educare).²

During our conversations, it became clear that despite the differences between these two communities women had similar ideas about their roles as mothers and, more importantly, what they had to do to fit the model of the deserving liberal subjects. At the same time, during our conversations, it became evident that regardless of women’s efforts to become a particular type of mother (typified by the white American middle class), their racialized and gendered subjectivities deeply marked their successes or failures. Furthermore, our own racial (Black and Mexican) and gendered positionalities informed how our fieldwork analyses developed. The narratives and quotes we selected for our chapter are from the interviews; therefore, the reader will find sections written in the first person and the third. This chapter discusses two distinct stories of two communities that have been subjected to forms of social control that correspond to their racial and class identities. These identities, however, do not exist in isolation; they play a fundamental role in the much-needed imaginary of the American poor.

Historical Incorporation

Oklahoma gained statehood in 1907 after acquiring Indian Territory land through agreements that reversed the already-compromised terms of sovereignty arising from Indian Removal in the 1830s. The first African Americans arrived in what would become Oklahoma as Freedmen members and the slaves of the Five Civilized Tribes that made their way west along the Trail of Tears. In the 1890s, a second wave followed the short-lived promise of a land free of Jim Crow. By the time Mexicans began migrating to Oklahoma in 1910, the state had a crop of all-Black towns and the Greenwood District of Tulsa, home to a thriving commercial community of Blacks, had earned the moniker of Negro Wall Street. The Mexicans arrived via the Bracero Program to fulfill the great demand for labor in burgeoning industries in the Southwest (coal mines, cotton fields, meatpacking plants, oil fields and quarries, and railroads). The 1920s saw challenges that impacted both communities.

In 1921 the African American community suffered the Tulsa Race Massacre, which saw white mobs raze Greenwood. Despite negligence on the part of local authorities and the National Guard to protect Greenwood’s residents or to stem the violence on the part of its white citizens, the millions of dollars in property damage, and the hundreds of lives lost, these residents were never compensated, leaving the burden to rebuild to the decimated community. In 1929, with the onset of the Depression, the government implemented campaigns to deport, intimidate, and “voluntarily repatriate” Mexican migrants. The intent of this repatriation, according to Balderrama and Rodriguez, was threefold: “to return indigent nationals to their own country, in this case, Mexico; to save welfare agencies money; and to create jobs for real Americans” (2006, 104), narratives that still resonate in current immigration policies throughout the country. During labor shortages resulting from World War II, Mexican migrants were brought back to Oklahoma to work on the railroads, in cotton fields, and in other industries under the Bracero Program. However, the continuing demand for agricultural and unskilled labor continued to pull many unauthorized workers.

The 1960s witnessed the arrival of Mexican Americans who moved to Oklahoma from agricultural jobs in the valley of Texas in search of more stable, year-round employment. The numbers of Mexican-born residents of Oklahoma grew by 1980, even when the economic crisis pushed many native-born Oklahomans out of the state. By 1986 more than twenty thousand unauthorized residents of Oklahoma legalized their status following the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). Although IRCA succeeded in legalizing and bringing out of the shadows thousands of immigrants, the Hispanic population in Oklahoma remained relatively invisible since they were interspersed throughout neighborhoods in various cities and remained isolated from the native population by language barriers. From midcentury through the early 1990s, the now predominantly Black area of North Tulsa, with Greenwood serving as the southern border, saw a series of devaluations and dispossessions through urban renewal. The construction of Tulsa’s highway system bifurcated neighborhoods, causing social and economic destabilization and starting a pattern of deepening impoverishment that continues today.

After 9/11, state senators established tighter border controls, bringing more U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to the state, and allowed local law enforcement agencies to get involved and have authority to enforce federal immigration laws. New regulations were put in place, and the passage of HB 1804 barred unauthorized migrants from receiving public assistance. Although HB 1804 mirrored existing federal law provisions, it created a sense of heightened vigilance, suspicion, and intolerance among private citizens, public employees, business owners, and officers.

These histories of dispossession and exploitation show how racialized communities, when factored into the calculation of neoliberal capitalism facilitated by policies at all levels, are produced as “kinds” of people. In this case, the “illegal” Mexican migrants and “poor” African Americans become signifiers or various forms of deviance. As De Genova and Roy have argued, Mexican migrants “have been rendered effectively synonymous with migrant ‘illegality,’ to the point that this dubious distinction has become a constitutive feature of the racialization of Mexicanness within the U.S. racial order” (2020, 353). This notion of illegality creates a need, an unabated desire, to become incorporated. The result is these communities subscribing to external qualifications of deservingness and value that resonate within neoliberal models of white middle-class Americanness. When thinking comparatively between Tulsa’s African American and Mexican communities, these ideas are complicated and sometimes contradictory but follow the same desire to move past their structurally relegated positions.

A Cycle of Hurt

This structural displacement is illustrated by the story of Shantel, an African American single mother of three young children. She worked hard to support them alongside paying her way through Tulsa Community College. She feared that the challenges her mother faced, and her mother before her, had already fallen to her. It was only a matter of time before her children, especially her two daughters, would see the same fate. This intergenerational anxiety was colored by the fear that one could not outrun their past. While Shantel fought to stave off what she thought was inevitable, Keisha had already fallen victim to it. Keisha’s mother had been imprisoned, which is unsurprising given that Oklahoma has the second highest state percentage of incarcerated women. At twenty-one, Keisha, the mother of two toddlers, now found herself faced with the prospect of also caring for her two younger sisters. After several months of looking after four children on her own—her father and her daughter’s father were also serving time in prison—Keisha had a mental breakdown. Less than a year later, she suffered another. As a result, Keisha spent six months in a mental health facility. Thankfully, a friend was willing to take in her daughters but could not care for her younger sisters, whom Keisha had no choice but to give to foster care. In one of our conversations, Keisha shared the difficulty of the decision: “It really hit me. Because I had my little sisters for over a year, and foster care told me I either need to adopt them or put them in the system, the pressure was on, and I didn’t have anybody to call, and I was like ‘I don’t know what to do!’”

Keisha’s mental break and Shantel’s fear of the same or worse directly result from how poverty and the inequalities that induce it impact the lives of so many women of color. These are adversities that cause the extreme stress of their circumstances. Anxieties like these can be seen as the unfortunate symptoms of intergenerational poverty—the reproduction of overall systemic, but primarily economic, vulnerability and instability. The markers of this intergenerational and systemic condemnation show up in premature births, lower quality education, and health care. Education and employment then pose complex propositions: how does one do better when one literally cannot afford to do so?

Stories of dispossession and structural inequality back in Mexico mark the migrant personhood of Hispanics and their eventual racial locations in Tulsa. For instance, Claudia arrived in Oklahoma twenty years ago with a suitcase and her six-year-old child. “I came to the U.S. because I needed to get away from my violent husband. After years of being abused, I decided that if I wanted to live, I needed to escape. I owe it to myself, but mostly to my daughter.” She did not know anyone but found people at the local Catholic church who helped her find a cleaning job, housing, and schooling for her child. Her daughter grew up in Tulsa, and although she did not have any documents, she had become part of the DREAMers movement and was planning to go to college. However, at sixteen she became pregnant by a man who turned out to be a violent drug dealer. The story, according to Claudia, was repeating itself. “It was like starting all over again.” This time, however, she needed to protect her daughter and her grandchild from the father. With minimal resources due to their undocumented status, Claudia found a second cleaning job at night and helped her daughter care for the baby. Her main concern at this point in her life was to remain invisible to avoid la migra and get deported. “Getting separated from my family would really be the end of this American dream that I am still dreaming,” she told me while we sat at her kitchen table and drank coffee.

For forty-three-year-old Carmen, who lived in the rural area of Zacatecas, Mexico, and struggled to live off the land, migrating to California with her husband and four children in the late 1990s was the solution to their economic problems. The lack of support from the state and the structural poverty in which rural families, like Carmen’s, live in Mexico have pushed thousands of migrants to search for better opportunities in the United States. They crossed the border through the hills with the help of a coyote and started their new lives in California. After ten years of living there and realizing that the family was fractured due to the two sons’ involvement in gangs and drug dealing, Carmen and her husband decided to move to Tulsa, where they had family and where jobs were vast and housing affordable and, most importantly, where her sons could have a second chance. She told me the story of her journey to the United States while sitting in her house eating quesadillas and drinking Coca-Cola. She has just returned from her cleaning job at a hotel, and although she was tired, she enjoyed sharing her life story with me.

Moving to Oklahoma represented the hope that I needed to save my sons from prison and drug addictions. We believed that starting all over again would help them recovering and would help us as a family. Unfortunately, it did not work; they both ended up in prison for a few years in Oklahoma before they were deported back to Mexico. It was my fault; I left them alone when they were kids back in California because I had to work all day and sometimes nights as well. I did not pay enough attention to them; I had no choice; it was either support them and bring food to the table or like in Mexico, die of hunger.

What do these stories tell us about structural poverty? What do these women have in common? The stories presented here illustrate the cycle of hurt in which poor women from Mexico and African American women from Tulsa find themselves trapped. Generational suffering and the experience of the stigma of failure reveal the conditions of structural poverty. Failure is compounded by perceptions of motherhood that are intimately linked to social reproductive roles. Within their families, these women are the primary carers and are responsible for the social outcomes for their children. When they desire for their kids to “turn out right,” they seek more than their children simply becoming good people. However, these women’s poverty, intertwined with their racial and class identities and their position vis-à-vis whiteness, meaningfully impact their chances to secure ideal futures for their children. These conditions of structural discrimination and an overall permanent precarity inevitably create a sense of an almost cultural ineptitude and incapacity to improve despite their efforts. In this regard, it is through the figure of the mother as the bearer of moral values and the person who holds the key to the family’s success, particularly the children, that we must understand the cycles of poverty and dispossession. Poverty circumscribes these women’s lives at economic, social, and emotional levels, and as a result, it becomes impossible to surmount.

Aspiration and Deservingness

How do people living in a constant state of dispossession and precarity manage to navigate a system that pigeonholed them as being unfit? In this section, we illustrate what the subscription to external notions of value and deservingness looks like in the lives of Mexican migrants and African Americans. The first time I visited Jennifer’s house, I realized how extremely clean and nicely decorated it was. There were framed studio family photos in the living room, two big sofas, a dining table for eight people, a huge television, and a piece of furniture with shelves where the family keeps the crockery and other family photos. She was twenty-four years old and migrated to California with her parents and two brothers eighteen years before. Originally from the State of Mexico, the family followed the grandfather and the father, who had crossed the border more than twenty years ago. Rosalia, the mother, crossed the border with her sister Amelia and six children between them. After paying thousands of dollars to a coyote, they successfully crossed the border through the desert in two days. Like other migrants, they came to Tulsa ten years earlier after struggling in California with unaffordable and dreadful housing and unemployment. Oklahoma was a second migration destination that offered good opportunities in terms of jobs (construction, roofing, factory work, and service-sector jobs) and, more importantly, affordable housing.

Migrant families in Tulsa, in contrast to California, could afford to rent or even buy two- to three-bedroom houses where they could live without sharing rooms with strangers. For most, purchasing a home represents the American dream and the possibility to break the cycle of poverty—structured along racial lines—in which they grew up back in Mexico. The American dream is also shaped by the possibility of speaking English, having a car, getting a free education for children, and consuming goods they cannot get back home (Mahler 1995; De Genova 2002, 2005; Menjívar 2000, 2006).

The view for people like Jennifer is that Mexico hinders people’s opportunities to improve despite their efforts and hard work (particularly for Brown people), while the United States offers opportunities to those self-made subjects who are willing to work hard, to make the right sacrifices, and, in a self-fashioning type of way, to become new (neoliberal) subjects. “I always tell my husband that we are an example of what can be achieved through hard work and sacrifice. Things do not come easy, so when you see people who have a nice car or a house, it is probably because they are hard workers,” Rosa, from Guanajuato, told me during our interview while pointing at the troika (the pickup truck) that her husband recently bought.

These notions resonate with liberal ideas that frame poverty as an individual failure based on an almost intrinsic weakness of character that gets in the way and disallows certain people to achieve their dreams and overcome dispossession and inequality. Though migrants are aware of the structural social and economic conditions that restrict people’s progress in Mexico, the way they talk about poverty reflects those liberal notions of personal failure. This ideology is supported by the figures that they embody in the United States. On the one hand, they are perceived as hardworking people capable of sustaining forms of manual labor unwanted by most and as people who are willing to make enormous sacrifices for their families. Even among the most conservative circles, their recognized and added value is erected upon their labor, upon their capacity to be docile and malleable subjects. This image has become part of their self-identity and becomes relevant when migrants compare themselves to other racialized communities in Tulsa. For instance, according to Mexican migrants, the poverty that characterizes African Americans and Native Americans has to do with their reliance on welfare versus developing an ethic of hard work and their inability to release their painful pasts marked by colonialism and the violence of slavery. “Ana, these morenos [referring to African Americans] have suffered, I know, but they need to get over it and stop being so comfortable with the help that they get from the government, otherwise they will never succeed,” Rosa explained to me. As Lisa Marie Cacho notes, “Claiming deservingness through demonstrating respectability assumes that we can make a clear distinction between people of color who are criminal and people of color who are respectable, but this distinction is far from being fixed or stable” (2012, 119).

In this regard, some Mexicans aspire toward this notion of respectability as economic success through an “ethic” of hard labor. Still, hard work has paid small dividends in respectability or opportunities for many African American working poor in North Tulsa, whose landscape is surprisingly vacant of public life. The best chance to see public social life in the Black community of North Tulsa is on a Sunday after church. “Everyone goes to church, and I mean everybody,” shared Shameca Brown, who works as a community lay advisor at the Center for Family Resilience at OSU–Tulsa. At Metropolitan Baptist, Shameca’s claim seems substantiated. The people whom I meet seemed “respectable” in every sense. Speaking with members of the congregation and many other residents in North Tulsa, it became clear that the issue of deserving was no longer a question that they asked themselves. Instead, they were fixed upon the recognition of their denial.

So while there is a notion that depicts the migrant person as an usurper who deprives citizens of their fundamental rights and resources, it leaves open the question of what kind of figure the working poor African American represents. Regardless of the achievements and efforts of either community to make themselves into deserving subjects, they remain a marginalized community and, in their respective ways, disposable or deportable, but fundamentally disposable. Such figuration has its origins in the intersections of history with the political economy of the U.S. nation-state and its need for cheap and disposable labor across time. Despite the multiple changes to immigration law and the welfare system’s modifications, a deep-rooted and immutable condition embodies the figure of the Mexican migrant and the poor African American constructed through a draconian production of laws and regulations. These regulations allow or deny access and processes of equal incorporation that can be exploited while simultaneously extending the promise of opportunity.

Landscape of Help

Within the circumstances of precarious emplacement, the poverty experienced by each group has come to define their very existence. Despite existing in Oklahoma for over a century, mobility out of this position is difficult because the economies in which these groups navigate and seek opportunities are at times tenuously constructed. That construction is defined by casual, often illegal, and sometimes even dangerous work. The framework of inequality that secures these opportunities limits expectations of success. In the case of Mexican migrants, this mobility is also underpinned by the lived experience of “illegality” and, for African Americans, “criminality.” Where the economy fails these groups, an arrangement of agencies and organizations organized around the state, church, and nonprofit sector seeks not only to mitigate the poverty endemic to these communities but also to control, manage, and turn people into respectable neoliberal subjects. These subjectivities exist in parallel because of the criminalization that both communities regularly experience. Criminalization defines some as “deviant” and in doing so separates them from those normalized as “needy” in these communities. These interventions articulate the notions of deserving and merit and work to propagate the idea people must “work” to earn their support. Additionally, these institutions, rather than fully recognizing the structural issues of neglect and exploitation that have caused these communities’ circumstances, instead locate their challenges in their failure to succeed in the spheres of education and parenting. Others, particularly church organizations, identify their specialisms around health care issues for the poorest and least able.

Many of these projects and programs are funded by organizations that, with vast wealth originating from oil and banking industries in Tulsa, can produce societal outcomes based on their ideations and the personally held philosophies and principles of foundation benefactors. Tulsa’s billionaires, like George Kaiser, whose wealth derives from oil and banking, and the Schusterman and Zarrow families, both from Tulsa, have dedicated much of their fortunes to philanthropic projects intended to fill the gaps created by long-standing state budget cuts. According to funders, philanthropy in Oklahoma is used as a resource to alleviate poverty and inequality. Still, that alleviation structures the frameworks of success and progress rooted in their inherently white, upper-middle-class, and often liberal philosophical backgrounds. These families’ philanthropic foundations have covered services ranging from education to health care and public parks. Hundreds of millions of dollars stream from private donors to fill the service gaps but do not manage to replace equitable service distribution provided by the state.

For instance, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies focuses on preventing, intervening, and treating child abuse and neglect in Israel and Tulsa. They are involved in reforming Tulsa’s public education system and provide development opportunities for teens and professional development for teachers through various coaching and mentoring programs. Similarly, the Anne & Henry Zarrow Foundation targets poverty by supporting housing and shelter resources, social services, and mental health and indigent health care initiatives. The initiatives of the George Kaiser Family Foundation include criminal justice reform, programs for women in recovery after incarceration, community health projects, and Tulsa Educare, a pre-K program partly subsidized with federal Head Start grants. Our research worked with families who were recipients of the Educare program funded by the Kaiser Foundation. According to the foundation, Educare is a “research-based program with a foundation in the best of early childhood practices that ensure school readiness of children most at risk for school failure.” The program involves a partnership between private philanthropists, Head Start /Early Head Start, Tulsa Public School officials, and community partners dedicated to narrowing children’s achievement gap in their communities. These organizations form a social welfare system that resembles a practice of aid that recalls the efforts of foreign actors in developing countries.

One entry point into this matter is our work with poor mothers who have enrolled their children in early childhood intervention school programs. Through partnerships between philanthropists and the local Tulsa government, these programs, modeled on Head Start / Early Head Start, seek to narrow the achievement gap for children in their communities. They do it through a curriculum that develops school readiness to prepare students to learn on par with their middle-class peers when they start kindergarten. Opportunities like these early childhood intervention programs do much to secure as great a chance as any for eventual mobility for their students (Gormley et al. 2011; Lowenstein 2009). However, the problem that we began to address is that despite those demands and limited resources, these programs often insist upon intense family engagement due to their design based on middle-class models of intensive forms of parenthood. Here is where a disconnect occurred for the mothers who worked with us. One of the requirements under this family engagement regime is the Parent as Teacher (PAT) program. This program is a voluntary parent education and family support program for families who have children from birth to three years of age. Parents are supported by PAT-certified parent educators who know about child development and early learning. The program aims to “capture teachable moments in everyday life to enhance their child’s language development, intellectual growth, social development, and motor skills.”³ Most importantly, this program is inspired by philanthropy’s tackling poverty strategies characterized by participatory approaches in the interests of helping people to help themselves and by managerialism inspired by the “will to improve” (Li 2007).

For the Mexican community, the help offered by these programs represents the only gateway to, first, justify their dangerous and complicated journeys to America and, second, achieve respectability despite their collective identifications as racialized and disposable migrants. Participation in these projects is inextricably linked to the migration goal of ser alguien en la vida (“to become someone in life”), a dream that can be achieved only in the United States. Becoming someone in life, or what can be put as turning out well, was explained to us as a combination of a good education at home and school and self-reliance. Within this triad, mothers are at the center of making moral persons of their children by providing care at home and by transmitting good moral values such as respect for others, honesty, and becoming good people free of vices. These, according to Mexican mothers in Tulsa, are aspects that will help their children becoming self-reliant individuals who will achieve their personal best. Turning out well entails finding better opportunities through hard work and good education in the United States.⁴ When asking about the expectations for the future of their children, Elena looked at her six-year-old girl who was playing with a stuffed animal on the floor of the caravan house and told me, “I see her [daughter] graduating from university with a good job and money. I do not see her as a millionaire but earning enough money to live a comfortable life. I see her breaking the poverty chain (romper la cadena) that has circumscribed the lives of my ancestors and my own back in Mexico. I want her to think that the priority is not to work but to study so she can earn a title and then work.” Prioritizing education over money entails the acquisition of social and cultural capital that these Mexican migrants have never had within their families back in Mexico. A lack of education is seen to lead to poverty and the possibility of making harmful choices, like marrying too young, getting pregnant, or becoming friends with the wrong people. The rationale behind breaking the poverty chain is much more social than economic, much more racialized along the lines of a middle-class white lifestyle that could provide stability, success, and security.

For the Black community in North Tulsa, given the particularly complicated history inherited from the demise of Greenwood’s famed Black Wall Street, the question is if these programs are developing a community on its own terms. Unlike members of the Mexican community, who recognize the complicated process of becoming American, African Americans have a particular challenge. As such, they have too long been beholden to narratives not of their own making. Instead, they have worked according to the schemata developed by others seeking to dictate the terms of their existence. And so with these programs they fall yet again into the discursive bind of Blackness where suffering and struggle predominate. These terms are the definitive bases upon which Blackness in North Tulsa is formed and must operate. In this context, Black communities are condemned to the qualification of needing improvement. This qualification, in turn, reifies the notion of Blackness as a deviant mode of existence. Thinking back to Shantel, we see her anxiety rooted in a desire to escape this very fact. With the two antecedent generations before her having lived the stigma of failure, with her odds increasingly long, she aspired to break the cycle of her poverty becoming an intergenerational inheritance. Still, she found it impossible to free herself from the stigma and the drawbacks attached to her racialized subjectivity.

There are several practices that these social programs require from these communities, such as training, empowerment, and capacity building. These are perceived as unquestionably “good,” in terms of both their assumed effectiveness and the moralities they imply. However, perhaps unsurprisingly, the values and practices of self-reliance, especially at the community level, can often be at odds with development projects that despite their best intentions seem to never fail at relaying a message of ineptness or deficiency to those they seek to help. There are multiple ambivalences and contradictions inherent in such development initiatives. This point is made evident by the fact that very few provide any of the structures or services used or engaged by the middle class, many of whom serve as the workers in, and even models for, these initiatives. These initiatives reinforce the neoliberal scaling down of social services that are the state’s responsibility (Staeheli and Brown 2003; Peck 2004; Katz 2001; Cope 2001).

The Challenge of Progress

For African American mothers, the basis of the PAT program and others like it is identifying a deficiency. The deficiency is first located in the child. As in the case of the word gap model by which lower-class children are identified as having significantly limited vocabulary compared to their middle-class peers, this deficiency is seen not only as an issue with their abilities but effectively as a function of the parents’ incapacity to adequately teach, to parent, to mother. As a result, parents are given teaching tools and are encouraged to model “good” behavior. The training is usually done in visitation sessions, carried out by a group of mothers previously trained at the Center for Family Resilience at OSU. The center organized program facilitators into two groups, one dedicated to working with African American women and the other focused on Mexican/Hispanic migrants.⁵ These women, called Promoters or Promotoras, visited women from both communities weekly, offering training in children’s health, development, and early education. They were also in charge of monitoring and screening mothers’ work with their children and disciplining them when necessary. Shameca explained that one of the lessons included parenting suggestions such as “labeling your own feelings in difficult situations,” which was done by telling the child, “I feel so mad. I am going to go take some deep breaths in the other room to get myself under control.” And even when waiting in lines, parents should not cut, to teach the child how they would want them to respond in a similar situation. For the African American mothers, prescriptions like these were laughable at best and outright patronizing at worst. While the ability to take part in a variety of social programs and to reap their benefits meant accommodating these prescriptions and being “trained” accordingly, the ideas of progress, aid, and development as incorporated and circulated by these programs did not sync up with the ideals and expectations of the African American mothers in the program. These programs, rather than taking the ideas of these women’s intersectional positions seriously, flattened them to one-dimensional adjectival qualifications of poor, Black, mother.

Instead of fully appreciating “how profoundly race and racism shape the modern idea of the human,” these programs resist both the complexity but also histories of what have created their circumstances, overlooking the “essential role that racialized and racializing assemblages play in the construction of modern selfhood” (Weheliye 2014, 4). Moreover, these organizations and agencies ignoring these histories fail to recognize that any intervention into poverty must hold them at the core of their programs’ conceptualization, inception, and application.

For Mexican mothers, these prescriptions were necessary prerequisites to gain membership into a social group and a society that will enhance their children’s opportunities in the future. For instance, among the Mexican Promotoras who oversaw training, it was essential to convince mothers that children needed to be sent to Educare (or other early education programs) from an early age, even though most mothers believed that babies and toddlers should remain under the care of their mothers or other family members (like siblings or grandmothers). “No one will love and take care of my baby as I do. It breaks my heart to think about sending my baby to school at an early age,” Susana from Mexico comments.

Similarly, Sara explains that “Promotoras say that if I want my child to have better opportunities in this country, I have to send him to Educare as soon as possible because they will teach him and will teach me how to exploit his full potential. I came to this country to provide a better future for my children. I know I have to adapt and change for them; it is just very different from the way we were raised and the way we raise our kids in Mexico.” For Mexican women, becoming a mother isolated from kinship networks that help raise children is not the ideal way to care for children. The presence of a community of care is considered pivotal in making up good people. When the opposite happens, and mothers are isolated from such networks of care, it is seen as a negative consequence of migration due to a lack of a network in the new place. For these mothers, being told by these programs that children need to be sent to school at an early age and that mothers must also become teachers at home seems contradictory. Nevertheless, women’s ideas and imaginations of these programs advertise ideals related to the American dream and becoming American. This category is imagined and explained as becoming closer to a family model, which implies white and middle class.

Again, for the African American participants, theirs is not a narrative of becoming American and therefore incorporated into the normative sense of citizenship, articulated as their community being full of promise for Mexican immigrants. No, for African Americans, their existence is an aberrant form of incorporation, and so rather than the promise of incorporation, they are presented as a problem. This framework is unsurprising given that Mexican culture valorizes whiteness as intertwined with assumptions of upward mobility, cultural refinement, and an accomplishment.⁶ This is a consequence of a national racial order in Mexico that has historically pushed for a nation built on an idea of mixture (mestizaje) in which whiteness is at the top of the racial pyramid and has been preserved as a symbol of distinction and social improvement (Wade 2001, 2005, 2010; Goldberg 2009; Moreno Figueroa 2010; Moreno Figueroa and Tanaka 2016). However, not everyone can self-fashion themselves into these ideal middle-class “white” Americans. In this regard, some Mexican mothers would talk about and emphasize the difference between them and other Mexicans and Hispanics. Poor Brown Mexicans who have been incorporated into Mexico’s liberal order as racialized and impoverished subjects, once in Tulsa, reproduce differences and forms of subordination between them and other poor subjects as part of their strategies to achieve full personhood. The attempts to define boundaries prove futile as the liberal order in the United States relies on this community’s exclusion and subordination. Still, efforts to become American, to “civilize” themselves and get rid of the Indito (Indigenous), hence the Brownness, become part of the new habitus they need to construct and secure belonging in the United States. “As you have seen, most of the people here are from Mexico, but they come from rural Mexico, so they do not have education, they don’t speak English, and more importantly, they do not even speak proper Spanish. It is very difficult to convince them that their children need proper time and education. It is hard to get them involved and educate them. Culture gets in the way,” Sara said during the interview.

According to some mothers, “culture” gets in the way by creating obstacles for migrants to become more American, whiten themselves, and become “better” people. The so-called culture has important ethnic, racial, and class implications that reflect the racial and class structure that subsists in Mexico (and various countries of Latin America), where white middle-class identifications and aspirations are given primacy at the top of the racial pyramid. Regardless of people’s efforts to become less Mexican, to perform being American, their racial indexes and identifications maintain them in constricted economic and social spaces embedded in a structural inequality characterized by racial systems of social control crosscut by the legal production of illegality (Boehm 2012; Chavez 2008; Coutin 2005; Menjívar and Kanstroom 2014; Gutiérrez Garza 2018). Some of the strategies that Mexican communities use to fight against such valuations arise from their active participation in early education programs like Educare. Because migrants’ aspirations revolve around the future success of their children or their possibilities to succeed, programs that promise the alleviation of poverty through the teaching of strategies of liberal self-fashioning are quite successful. More importantly, considering that the Mexican women interviewed had staggeringly low levels of education (the average being primary school), the prospects of improvement through schooling in the United States were regarded as crucial to their children’s futures.

We could argue that the early education programs in Tulsa offer much-needed help for those mothers who, regardless of being employed full-time, are interested in improving their children’s success rates from an early age. One fundamental feature of such programs is that their goals are to educate children and, as women explained, help them get ready for school and educate parents. Parents (particularly mothers) and children are in unison learning how to learn and how to teach; becoming a teacher is regarded as an ingredient for good parenting. The women who attend these programs must constantly reflect on their roles as mothers and as teachers to improve the lives and prospects of their children. Through these programs, children can learn how to be American, advance, and prepare for school. The process also involves monitoring the continuous efforts that parents must make to self-fashion new subjectivities as parents. The monitoring is done not only by the institutions and teachers but also by children who surveil and correct their parents. These modes of surveillance and control are necessary for the programs’ social and financial success; however, at the same time, these programs reproduce the structural conditions that keep migrants’ personhood invisible and understood as an inferior other.

It is essential to note the early role of caregiver that many impoverished people played as children, especially girls, to younger siblings. During fieldwork, we both encountered several cases in which the oldest daughters were in charge of their siblings’ caring and education while mothers were at work. Structural conditions of inequality and poverty and the lack of state resources to help families in need challenge the educational and developmental model pushed by early education programs like Educare. In that model, the presence of mothers is fundamental in the making up of “good children.” The practical reality of women who had to work part- or full-time to support the household constantly got in the way of achieving the personhood demanded by the programs, creating feelings of ineptitude and guilt. They find themselves trapped in the responsibility of not being the caring mothers they should be for their children and the guilt of not being good teachers helping in the development of their children. Particularly for African American parents with children at these schools, many felt the required practices were condescending and too similar to something they would encounter with the Department of Children and Family Services. These contradictions and incongruences might be assessed as being a problem of cultural relativity, but we think such a conclusion does not go far enough. Instead, work needs to be done in revealing the complex ethical-moral terrains in which such programs and policies are played out. Doing so will show how such programs are at odds with historically and culturally produced ethics of the raced poor by understanding their agency, rationalities, and moral orders of the factors that keep them poor.

The one-size-fits-all logic proves to be similarly problematic when working with racialized impoverished communities. When working within these contexts of poverty, such programs must strive to go beyond received notions of what is and is not “good,” especially when that idea of good is coupled with the problematic preposition “for.” Such programs must alter their logic from this abstract question: “How can we bring about the end of poverty?” This question grants an unending capacity and license to reproduce an ever-increasing scope and cycle of need, by continuing to ignore the deeper root causes of poverty (Scherz 2014, 140). This change cannot be made by simply critiquing the work of organizations and programs seeking to alleviate disparities as a middle-class imposition or explaining why such projects fail to work. Because in fact many of them do work, or at least inasmuch as they can provide metrics of impact (see Gormley 2008; Gormley et al. 2005; Garces, Thomas, and Currie 2002). To be sure, the reliance on statistical modeling obscures the intimate and daily challenges and traumas many programs’ participants experience. Therefore, the issue is not qualifying the success that these programs have but assessing and questioning how the lack of an in-depth assessment of the needs, realities, and wants of the people they aim to assist reproduces a liberal order that depends upon the existence of those same poor people.

The Paradoxes of Liberal Incorporation

Envisaging how to better the lives of poor women requires enabling them to identify their challenges on their terms, creating sustainable change, and providing a collective partnership for social mobility rather than reproducing impermeable senses of immobility. Understanding the navigation of poverty at both the individual and community levels requires thinking about the hope and aspirations that drive the poor’s lives. In Tulsa, the history of Black enfranchisement and self-determination during the era of Black Wall Street continues to shape the ideals and expectations for the quality of an aspired for life while simultaneously making painfully evident how the raced poor continue to face disenfranchisement and external dependency. Mexican migrants’ aspirations of becoming successful and achieving the American dream are shaped by their racialized presence, targeted through legal regimes of deportation and thus erasure from the social landscape. Through attempting to better their lives, either through enrolling their children in programs like Educare or hustling to make a living by working several jobs, both communities have engaged in social practices and performances of deservingness to help them to insert themselves into educational programs that will break the poverty cycle and allow their children to attain full personhood. This chapter has provided a nuanced account of various structural positions in Tulsan society by examining the structuring notions of history, citizenship, and race. We see that the experience of poverty as a historically generated framing of community runs against this liberal order, here represented by the development frameworks of philanthropic organizations and nonprofits. The paradox is that this racialized and impoverished subject cannot be fully incorporated into the liberal order because the liberal order depends on subordination, control, and racialized difference.

NOTES

1. We understand this self-reliant subject in a Foucauldian sense by which an individual engages in “technologies of the self which permit individuals to effect their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, a way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom perfection or immortality” (Foucault 1988, 18).

2. The program was led by Dr. Joseph G. Grzywacz, the Kaiser Family Foundation Professor of Family Resilience.

3. The program is coordinated by various partners, including Head Start, the Community Action Project, Union Public Schools, and YMCA. Besides offering parents training, PAT also helps families link with other community services and providers as needed.

4. Considering that all of the Mexican women interviewed had staggeringly low levels of education (the average being primary school), the prospects of improving through schooling in the United States were regarded as a crucial factor in their children’s futures.

5. Both of us worked in close relation with these women; they were the ones who gave us access to other women of both communities.

6. This racial identification with whiteness originates from a colonial history in which mestizaje, as a whitening process, became the foundation of the Mexican state. Mestizaje is not necessarily an ideology of mixed race but a mixture that entails a racial hierarchy whereby Indigenous and Black people would eventually disappear through the process of blanqueamiento (whitening) (Wade 2005, 2010; Goldberg 2009).

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