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“It was a shitshow”: testimonios of Latina student affairs mother-practitioners navigating personal and professional worlds during COVID-19

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“It was a shitshow”: testimonios of Latina student affairs mother-practitioners navigating personal and professional worlds during COVID-19

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“I t Was a Shitshow ”: Testimonios of Latina Student Affairs Mother-Practitioners
Navigating Personal and Professional Worlds During COVID-19
by
Alejandra Delacruz Hong

Rossier School of Education
University of Southern California
A dissertation submitted to the faculty
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Education

August 2022

© Copyright by Alejandra Delacruz Hong 2022
All Rights Reserved

The Committee for Alejandra Delacruz Hong certifies the approval of this Dissertation

Michelle M. Espino Lira
Sheila M. Bañuelos
Robert A. Filback, Committee Chair

Rossier School of Education
University of Southern California
2022

iv
Abstract
This study examined the lived experiences of Latina mother-practitioners in student affairs
during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic affected individuals in a variety of ways, and as
people continue to grapple with its evolution, exploring the experiences of Latina mother-
practitioners ensures they are a part of research related to it. Qualitative methods were used,
namely testimonio and photo-elicitation, to tell the stories of six Latina mother-practitioners.
This study is guided by Chicana/Latina feminist epistemology, borderlands, and cariño. The
findings included that participants’ personal and professional worlds were completely blurred
during the pandemic, the pandemic caused an increase in anxiety for participants, and that
participants were conflicted about their futures in higher education. Recommendations for
practice include centralizing historically marginalized people in academic research,
implementation of family-friendly human resource practices, fair compensation for Latina
mother-practitioners, and creation of support networks.
Keywords: working mothers, Latinas, student affairs, COVID-19

v
Dedication
To my beautiful family, thank you for sustaining me through the chaos. I owe everything to you
and your unconditional love.

vi
Acknowledgements
This dissertation was only possible because of the support from my husband David and
my daughters Hailey Luna and Lucy Eva. Thank you for your encouragement and patience
during the 5 years of my doctoral journey. I love you endlessly.
I am so grateful for my family who has always supported my dreams, my mother Paula
and her husband Juan, my sister Evelyn, my brother-in-law Eugenio, my brother Enrique, my
sister-in-law Lupe, my nieces Nayeli and Elyssia, and my nephews Enrique, Eugenio Jr., and
Ismael. I’d also like to thank my extended family for their love and support. Words can’t express
how much I love you, familia!
To my life-long BFFs Maria and Gloria thank you for a lifetime of memories and your
unconditional support throughout this process. My SB Hot mess crew Adam, Adam-Jon, Alex,
Juan & Raquel, Marney & Amir, thank you for providing fun memories and being there through
my toughest moments. Sally, Andrea, and Jenn, thank you for writing with me, sharing words of
encouragement, and always being down for making fun memories. D’Andre, thank you for
spending hours and hours writing with me, gossiping with me, and giving me feedback, I
appreciate you. To my skonkas Erica, Charlie, Cristine, Gabe, Leslie, Paola, Noemi, and Sara
thank you for your years of friendship and support, I appreciate you all. To my Nesskuhs, you
were the initial inspiration behind me pursuing my doctorate and I can’t thank you enough for
letting me a part of your lives. To the Zaldoval family, thank you for always checking in on me
and reassuring me when I doubted myself. Benjamin, you make me laugh like nobody else and I
am eternally grateful for your friendship. Paige, Sabrina, and Colette, thank you for keeping me
grounded and believing in me. Kim, thank you for being a wonderful and trusted friend. To my
sister for life Maritza, I love you, thank you for always being in my corner. Rocio, thank you for

vii
being a consistent friend and someone I can always count on. Rick, I am so grateful for your help
in crossing this finish line, I appreciate your edits, advice, and thoughtfulness. To my fellow
mamas, Christina and Mercy, thank you for always being there for me and inspiring me to keep
going. My Bad Bs: Dominique, Jenell, Queena, Soraira, and Vanessa, thank you for making
classes fun, leading the way in this process, and always finding a way to make me laugh.
To my classmates and writing warriors Alex, Clara, Josh, Liliana, Lynn, and Vanesa, I
could not have crossed the finish without you. Thank you for holding me accountable, giving me
feedback throughout the process, spending countless hours on Zoom together, and being there
for me during many, many moments when I thought I would never finish this program.
Special thanks to my colleagues in Student Equity and Inclusion Programs for your
support. Special thanks to my supervisor, Naddia. Thank you for your flexibility and continuous
encouragement. Monique, thank you for being a constant source of inspiration.
To my editor Guadalupe, thank you for helping me finalize this manuscript, I appreciate
you! To my committee, thank you for everything along this journey to becoming Dr. Hong. Dr.
Bañuelos, thank you for your kindness, feedback, and for being invested in my topic. Mil
gracias! Dr. Espino Lira, from my very first NASPA as a new professional you have been a
source of inspiration for me and I am so honored to that you agreed to be a part of my
committee, muchas gracias! To my chair, Dr. Filback, thank you for being so supportive and
helping me find my voice as a scholar, I appreciate you!
Finally, thank you to the six participants who opened their hearts to me to make this
possible. It was a true privilege to be able to hear your testimonios and share your stories in this
way. You are all incredible mothers, dedicated professionals, and overall badasses and I’m lucky
to be in this profession with you.

viii
Table of Contents
Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iv
Dedication ........................................................................................................................................v
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ vi
List of Tables ................................................................................................................................. xi
List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... xii
Chapter One: Overview of the Study ...............................................................................................1
Statement of the Problem .....................................................................................................2
Contexts ...............................................................................................................................3
Guiding Conceptual Framework ..........................................................................................8
Purpose of Study ..................................................................................................................9
Significance of the Study .....................................................................................................9
Limitations, Delimitations, and Assumptions ....................................................................10
Positionality .......................................................................................................................11
Definitions..........................................................................................................................13
Chapter Summary ..............................................................................................................14
Chapter Two: Literature Review ...................................................................................................15
The COVID-19 Pandemic..................................................................................................15
Working Mothers and Mothering ......................................................................................20
Conceptual Framework ......................................................................................................26
Chapter Summary ..............................................................................................................30
Chapter Three: Methodology .........................................................................................................31
Population and Sample ......................................................................................................32
Data Collection Strategies..................................................................................................34
Data Analysis .....................................................................................................................37

ix
Validity and Ethical Considerations ..................................................................................38
Role of the Researcher .......................................................................................................39
Chapter Summary ..............................................................................................................40
Chapter Four: Personal Worlds and Mom Life..............................................................................41
Paloma................................................................................................................................42
Jane ....................................................................................................................................46
Alma ...................................................................................................................................52
Liana ..................................................................................................................................58
Josefina ..............................................................................................................................62
Elvia ...................................................................................................................................70
Chapter Summary ..............................................................................................................75
Chapter Five: Personal World, Identity, Mental Health, and Coping ............................................76
Paloma: “In Between a Virtual World and An In-Person World” .....................................76
Jane: “I Could No Longer Just Self-Manage” ...................................................................79
Alma: “I Was Having Panic Attacks” ................................................................................82
Liana: “I Was Either Stress Eating or Having Cocktails” .................................................84
Josefina: “Just Trying to Stay Above Water” ....................................................................88
Elvia: “I Didn’t Know What I Was Doing” .......................................................................89
Chapter Summary ..............................................................................................................91
Chapter Six: Professional World and Personal Career ..................................................................92
Paloma: “I Took on Way More Responsibilities” .............................................................92
Jane: “Am I Woman Enough?”..........................................................................................95
Alma: “I Burden Myself With Extra Perfectionism” .........................................................99
Liana: “If Anything, I Did Less” .....................................................................................105
Josefina: “It’s a Train Wreck” .........................................................................................109

x
Elvia: “It Was Insane” .....................................................................................................112
Chapter Summary ............................................................................................................116
Chapter Seven: Discussion and Recommendations .....................................................................118
Discussion ........................................................................................................................118
Recommendations for Practice ........................................................................................127
Future Research ...............................................................................................................128
Conclusion .......................................................................................................................130
References ....................................................................................................................................131
Appendix A: Interview Protocol ..................................................................................................153
Appendix B: Pre-Survey Protocol ...............................................................................................157
Appendix C: Recruitment Tools ..................................................................................................160
Appendix D: Photo Elicitation Protocol ......................................................................................161

xi
List of Tables
Table: 1 List of Participants 33

xii
List of Figures
Figure 1: Paloma’s Son on a Tricycle on Top of Dozens of Books 46
Figure 2: Jane’s Living Room in March 2020, 2 Months After Their Move 49
Figure 3: Josefina’s First Ultrasound, Taken on March 9, 2020 65
Figure 4: Josefina’s Pop-Up Pool 68
Figure 5: Elvia’s Son in Front of the Television 73
Figure 6: Elvia’s Daughter in Front of a Tablet 74
Figure 7: Paloma’s Son’s Shoes in a Puddle of Water 77
Figure 8: Medicine Bottles 81
Figure 9: A COVID-19 Testing Tent Set Up in a Community College Parking Lot 86
Figure 10: The Note Given to Liana’s Mother After Her COVID-19 Exposure 87
Figure 11: A Full Laundry Basket, a Tablet, and School Supplies on the Floor 96
Figure 12: Alma and Her Daughter in a Virtual Meeting 103
Figure 13: An Email From Liana’s Management 107
Figure 14: Two Little Princesses 125
Figure 15: Four COVID-19 At-Home Tests 126
Figure C1: Recruitment Post for Social Media 160

1

Chapter One: Overview of the Study
Working mothers in the United States are stressed, burned out, and near their breaking
points due to the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic (Bauer & Ngondo, 2022; Grose, 2021;
Power, 2020). While challenges for working mothers existed prior to COVID-19, the pandemic
intensified those challenges (Burk et al., 2020), causing millions of women to leave the
workforce (Dzhanova, 2021; Kurtz, 2021; Ryssdal et al., 2021). The pandemic altered all areas
of life, but school and work closures combined with social distancing guidelines meant that
families felt the burden of trying to manage everything from home without their typical support
networks (Del Boca et al., 2020). Working parents, mothers in particular, in every industry had
to re-envision how to manage their personal and professional worlds, and academia was no
exception. Millions of mothers left the workforce during the pandemic either by choice or
necessity. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that between March and April of 2020,
approximately 3.5 million mothers with school-aged children left their jobs either by taking a
leave of absence or completely exiting the labor market (Heggeness et al., 2021). Furthermore,
single mothers, Black mothers, and Latina mothers left the workforce in higher numbers than
their White peers (Dzhanova, 2021; Heggeness et al., 2021).
In academia, working mothers experienced a sudden shift to a virtual world and were
expected to provide care, attention, and patience to their students and campus roles while caring
for their children and families in a remote environment (Burk et al., 2020). This study explores
how one subset of academic moms, Latina mother-practitioners in student affairs, navigated their
personal and professional worlds between March 2020 and January 2022. Latina mothers
working in student affairs are often in time-intensive roles that require practical and emotional
labor outside of the traditional workweek (McKinnon-Crowley et al., 2022).
2

Chapter One introduces the context of life for working mothers during the COVID-19
pandemic. The chapter begins with the statement of the problem, followed by a background on
virtual and gendered worlds, competing roles, the sociocultural landscape during the height of
the pandemic, and the guiding research framework. Chapter One continues with the purpose and
significance of the study. The chapter then addresses the limitations, delimitations, and
assumptions in the study and concludes with a list of definitions.
Statement of the Problem
Parents who work outside of the home must balance professional work with caregiving
responsibilities in their domestic context; however, women of color are disproportionately
burdened by increased responsibilities in both their personal and professional lives (Glynn,
2018). The COVID-19 pandemic made balancing these multiple responsibilities a greater
challenge than ever before and came with staggering consequences for working women. In
December 2020, the U.S. economy lost 144,000 jobs, all of which were previously held by
women (Kurtz, 2021). Looking further into the data, Black and Latina women held most of the
eliminated jobs in retail and education (Dzhanova, 2021). The fact that job losses so harmed
Black and Latina women reveals how the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately harmed
women of color.
In higher education, women of color manage unpaid labor at home and often take on
more domestic-type work in professional settings as well (Turner, 2002). In light of COVID-19,
the effort put into paid work, parenting, and educating children grew exponentially. Research
shows that inequities in women’s unpaid labor and caregiving responsibilities are associated with
structural factors, such as cultural and familial expectations, sexism, racism, and classism
(Hankivsky, 2014; Wight et al., 2013) and lead to negative consequences, such as stress, burnout,
3

and exhaustion (Acker & Armenti, 2004). While research on the experiences of mother-scholars
exists (Caballero et al., 2019; Stromquist, 2015; Turner, 2002), research focused on mother-
practitioners is more limited. Understanding these women’s experiences is important to
determine how their workplaces can better support them and their well-being, particularly in the
context of the COVID-19 global pandemic.
Contexts
Four main contexts offer a background for this study. First, I briefly provide information
about the field of student affairs. Next, I offer data on remote work and gender dynamics during
the pandemic. I continue by presenting background on the competing roles with which working
mothers contend. I conclude by noting the sociocultural landscape at the beginning of the
pandemic.
Student Affairs
As this study focused on Latina mother-practitioners in student affairs, the context of the
field is important to highlight. Student affairs in the United States date back to administrators
with the primary responsibility of securing the welfare of students pursuing academic credentials
(Hevel, 2016). The field consists of a wide range of departments on campuses, including
academic advising, admissions programs and services, counseling services, housing and
residential life programs, professional preparation programs, multicultural student programs and
services, and transfer student programs and services, among others (Wells, 2015). When
COVID-19 required colleges and universities to shift to online work, not every academic unit or
student-facing service could easily transition. For example, academic units requiring lab
components struggled to shift. Student affairs departments faced similar challenges. While
departments like admissions programs could more easily shift the majority of their operations to
4

a remote environment during the height of the pandemic, others like housing and residential life
programs cannot deliver services virtually. The field of student affairs is a time-intensive,
demanding profession dominated by women that often demands emotional energy and other
duties beyond the typical workday (McKinnon-Crowley et al., 2022). During the pandemic, the
challenges associated with working in student affairs were exacerbated.
Virtual and Gendered Worlds
The shift to remote work in 2020 was widespread and meant that more people than ever
before were working and learning in a new environment. However, the shift in environment did
not lessen gendered expectations of the roles men and women are expected to play in their homes
and society. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, approximately 15% of U.S. employees worked
from home at least some of the time (Sull et al., 2020). In early April 2020, 50% of U.S.
employees were exclusively working remotely (Sull et al., 2020). While working from home was
a welcome change for some, the reality of having to balance work and child care due to school
closures offered unique challenges (Dunatchik et al., 2021) that were often more pronounced for
women, especially working mothers (Ryssdal et al., 2021; Shockley et al., 2021; Zamarro &
Prados, 2021). Concerns and challenges about remote work, especially in service roles with
direct contact, were plentiful. Professional concerns included feelings of isolation, lack of sense
of belonging to the organization, and productivity levels (Falicov et al., 2020; Hafermalz &
Riemer, 2021). In addition, societal expectations that working mothers default to traditional
gender roles highlighted the gendered nuances of negotiating work and personal lives (Shockley
et al., 2021).
Gender dynamics continue to be a concern when discussing remote work, despite the
assumed flexibility in working from home (Dunatchik et al., 2021). The pandemic
5

disproportionately harmed working mothers, as they are more likely to work in service jobs that
experienced a high number of closures (Heggeness et al., 2021).
C. Collins et al. (2020) asserted that working mothers of young children cut their work
hours four to five times as much as working fathers. Further, fathers working from home were
generally better able to protect themselves from the intrusions of unpaid labor such as child care
(Dunatchik et al., 2021). For working mothers, there is a tension between a desire to be a good
mother and the desire to contribute to the workforce (Christopher, 2012; Johnston & Swanson,
2006).
Competing Roles
Personal and professional worlds have always entailed navigating competing roles,
especially emphasized for working mothers of color (Crowley & Curenton, 2011; Kayumova et
al., 2015; Segura, 1994; Segura & Pierce, 1993). For example, in the last 60 years, the amount of
time men spend on housework has increased, and the amount of time women spend on
housework has decreased; however, women still spend more time (13–16 hours a week) on
household chores than men (7–10 hours a week) every week (Dugan & Barnes-Farrell, 2020).
The move to remote work, online school, and lack of adequate child care changed how these
competing roles were managed and how much time was spent on each role.
The division of housework has not changed much even when women work outside of the
home, and the large gap in household work done by women and men was further brought to light
during the pandemic (Guy & Arthur, 2020; Power, 2020). During the pandemic, both mothers
and fathers increased their home-life responsibilities. Women, however, experienced a 55%
increase in time spent on household responsibilities compared to fathers, who experienced a 45%
increase in time spent on household tasks (Dunatchik et al., 2021). The boundaries between work
6

and personal became blurred, and gendered approaches to managing the shift to life online
persisted (Shockley et al., 2021). When it came to housework and child care, mothers took on
more of those responsibilities in addition to their paid work (Gogoi, 2020), and the pandemic
highlighted the disparities.
The responsibilities associated with child care have been an especially challenging aspect
of life during the pandemic. Typically, child care duties are unseen or conveniently ignored when
parents are working (Wattis et al., 2013). The COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible to hide
parenting responsibilities in workspaces due to school closures, stay-at-home orders, and work-
from-home policies. An immediate need for child care was especially difficult for working
parents with school-aged children (Burk et al., 2020). Typical alternatives to school and daycare,
such as babysitters, grandparents, friends, and neighbors, were not an option because of social
distancing guidelines (Alon et al., 2020), meaning parents had to take on the entire responsibility
of child care alone while juggling work and other responsibilities, such as household chores.
Working mothers assumed these responsibilities at a higher rate than working fathers, making
mothers more susceptible to economic insecurity and decreasing their well-being (Fortier, 2020).
These competing demands and the negative consequences have been a typical part of
working mothers’ lives. Prior to the pandemic, working mothers were already dealing with high
levels of stress, lack of sleep, and constant exhaustion (Acker & Armenti, 2004). The pandemic
exacerbated these feelings and negatively impacted women’s professional lives through
disruptions to their paid work (Heggeness et al., 2021), a higher likelihood of reduced work
hours (Crook, 2020), and higher rates of job losses. The effect on women’s paid labor and the
higher rates of women leaving the workforce led to what was termed a “shecession” (Dunatchik
et al., 2021, p. 195). In addition to the inherent stress associated with the pandemic and the
7

additional weight of managing competing roles, people of color all over the United States
continued to experience and grapple with systemic oppression, which was especially relevant
and highlighted in May 2020.
Sociocultural Landscape During the Pandemic
White supremacy and racism in the United States continue to be prominent in almost all
aspects of life, including healthcare, education, and policing (Holt & Sweitzer, 2020; Manning &
Costello, 2020; Tatum, 2003; West et al., 2021). It is impossible to set the context of COVID-19
without including the context of police brutality, racism, and social uprisings that coincided with
the pandemic (Forrester, 2021). In Black and Latinx communities, death rates were substantially
higher than in White communities (Lunstrum et al., 2021; Murty & Payne, 2021), highlighting
the fact that “ the biology of pandemics cannot be separated from the politics of difference”
(Lunstrum et al., 2021, p. 4) and leading Congresswoman Barbara Lee of California to describe
this historical moment as a “pandemic within the pandemic.”
Instances of police brutality and systemic racism are not new, nor are public protests in
response to these acts (Bell et al., 2021; Holmes IV, 2020; Holt & Sweitzer, 2020; Hooker,
2016). The murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd during the pandemic
led to civil unrest, protests, uprisings, and social engagement in movements such as Black Lives
Matter (Bell et al., 2021; Nicolaides & Lim, 2020).
For parents who serve as student affairs practitioners, there were questions about how to
engage in the movement, support and empower their students (Navarro, 2020), and talk to their
own children about racism, police brutality, and systemic oppression. These conversations are
often racialized, with White parents wondering if they should broach this topic with their
8

children at all and with parents of color talking to their children about how they will experience
these power dynamics early on in their children’s lives (Dastagir, 2020).
The grief and pain associated with the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor,
George Floyd, and countless other Black individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic cannot be
separated from the feelings associated with the health crisis. Latina mothers in student affairs
grappled with these questions and were affected to varying degrees by the reality of police
brutality and social uprisings. The coinciding pandemic prevalence of systemic racism has led to
negative consequences in the Black and Latinx populations, such as poor mental health (Garcini
et al., 2021) and a decrease in life expectancy of 2.7 years for the non-Latinx Black community
and 1.9 years for the Latinx community (Forrester, 2021). The research lens of this study is
predicated on the idea that systems of oppression and the associated negative outcomes are
relevant to research and should therefore be named and explored.
Guiding Conceptual Framework
This study is guided by Chicana/Latina feminist epistemology (Delgado Bernal, 1998),
Anzaldúa’s (1987, 2012) borderlands concept, and cariño, or authentic care (Duncan-Andrade,
2006). Chicana/Latina feminist epistemology is used as a research tool to challenge
epistemological racism by telling participants’ stories (Delgado Bernal, 1998). Borderlands
aligns with Chicana/Latina feminist epistemology and highlights the in-between spaces in which
Latinas often find themselves (Anzaldúa, 1987, 2012). Anzaldúa posited that the Mexico-U.S.
border is a metaphor for the boundaries of language, culture, sexuality, socioeconomic class, and
other social identities influenced by multiple systems (Anzaldúa, 1987, 2012). Finally, these
concepts are grounded in the concept of cariño (Duncan-Andrade, 2006). Cariño, as a research
tool, asks that researchers leave a space better than it was found and challenges the researcher to
9

approach the research with genuine care for each participant (Duncan-Andrade, 2006, 2007,
2009).
Purpose of Study
The purpose of this study was to understand the experiences of Latina mother-
practitioners in student affairs during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic altered our way of
life and highlighted that gender gaps continue in workplaces and homes across the United States
(Branicki, 2020; Elaine, 2020). This study sought to highlight the experiences of Latina mother-
practitioners using the following research question: How have Latina mother-practitioners in
student affairs navigated their personal and professional worlds during the COVID-19
pandemic?
Using testimonio and photo-elicitation, this study shed light on Latina mother-
practitioners’ professional and personal worlds testimonio “challenges objectivity by situating
the individual in communion with a collective experience marked by marginalization,
oppression, or resistance” (Delgado Bernal et al., 2012, p. 363). Photo-elicitation is a research
method that relies on photographic images as data (Clark-Ibáñez, 2012). Once data were
collected, themes, findings, and recommendations were presented to amplify participants’ voices.
Significance of the Study
Research regarding Latina practitioners is limited; this study contributes to the literature.
This study also contributes to the literature regarding working mothers, highlights the unique
context of living through a pandemic, and explores how Latina mother-practitioners navigated
their personal and professional worlds during the pandemic to help illuminate the experience of
nuanced gendered expectations and living in metaphorical borderlands. One metaphorical border
that Anzaldúa (1987, 2012) discussed is gender, asserting that culture is made by men and
10

perpetuated by women and that the culture expects women to be “subservient to males” (p. 39).
During the pandemic, the cultural expectations that women put aside their careers for the benefit
of their families were evident.
This study is also beneficial for practitioners with the power to make decisions about
workplace policies and environments. Burk et al. (2020) underscored the need to care for
employees’ well-being and consider the potential threats to higher education professionals.
Women have experienced a large portion of the job losses incurred because of the pandemic,
reversing years of advancements made by women in the workplace and threatening their
livelihood and well-being (Gogoi, 2020; Zamarro & Prados, 2021).
Finally, this study serves to celebrate the survival Latina mother-practitioners. During an
unprecedented time in history, mothers across the globe continue to show up for their children,
families, workplaces, and communities. This study showcased how mothers navigated their lives
in the face of the trauma, grief, and loss associated with the pandemic.
Limitations, Delimitations, and Assumptions
There were two main limitations in my study. The first is that the study focused on
working mothers in academia. Every participant holds at least a bachelor’s degree; therefore, this
study is not representative of women without a post-secondary education. This is important to
highlight because educational attainment typically means a higher chance of stable income and
job stability, more job opportunities, and higher earning potential. Working mothers with a
degree are in a better position than those without a degree. The second limitation was that
interviews were held over a month, which meant that the women’s experiences potentially varied
more than if all interviews took place in a shorter time. The first two interviews took place right
at the start of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 in mid-December 2021. The third and fourth
11

interviews took place right before Christmas when Omicron was quite prevalent, and the fifth
and sixth interviews took place in January 2022, when the Omicron variant was in full force right
after the holidays.
There are four delimitations in this study. The first is that this study focused on how
mothers navigate their personal and professional worlds, but I only interviewed working
mothers, excluding mothers who do not earn a wage. Second, while there are mothers at all
levels of academia, I decided to focus only on mother-practitioners and not on students, faculty,
or other individuals in academia. The third delimitation is that I only studied Latina mothers and
not a more diverse group of mothers. Finally, I only interviewed mothers of school-aged children
who worked from home for at least 6 months during the pandemic.
There were several assumptions in this study. The first assumption was that the COVID-
19 pandemic had a significant influence on the lives of Latina mothers working in student affairs.
The study revealed that this assumption was correct. The second is that qualitative methods are
the best fit for collecting data and answering the research question. The data analysis proved that
this was generally true as a quantitative study would not have revealed participants’ experiences.
Finally, there was an assumption that a critical approach was an appropriate lens to guide this
study. This assumption was true given the framework that guided the study.
Positionality
The practice of naming the researcher’s positionality is a key part of the process and an
opportunity to remain reflective during the writing process (Guy & Arthur, 2020). Additionally,
my methodological approach is rooted in testimonio, in which solidarity and resistance to
dominant academic ideology are central. I feel it is important to provide a bit of my testimonio
early in this process for transparency as a researcher and build solidarity with the participants.
12

My identity as a Chicana/Latina mother-practitioner led me to this topic and the
particular choices in methodology, framework, and approach. During my undergraduate studies
at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968,
2018) shaped how I started to see the world around me. Freire’s notion that cultural structures
are built on systemic and deliberate actions that can be upheld or transformed for liberation
became the main lens through which I approached my studies and career. When the pandemic
caused life to shift to a virtual space, my ability to give that level of thought to my approach was
threatened. As a student affairs practitioner engaging with and supporting some of our most
vulnerable student populations, a doctoral student, a wife, and a mother of two young daughters,
the pandemic became about survival, not liberation. The last 2 years of the pandemic were
marked by feelings of stress, burnout, exhaustion, fear, guilt, frustration, gratitude, and
uncertainty. Navigating my personal and professional worlds made me feel vulnerable and
disconnected from my support network. I felt as if I were parenting at work, with my colleagues
as an audience. As a Latina, knowing that the pandemic has disproportionately damaged my
community was an added source of grief and frustration.
The combination of these factors influenced my decision to research this topic and tell the
stories of mothers navigating the pandemic through an academic lens rooted in cariño. Social
activist bell hooks (2001) stated that “the heart of justice is truth telling, seeing ourselves and the
world the way it is rather than the way we want it to be” (p. 33). This dissertation is an
opportunity for the participants to tell their truths about how the world has been for them over
the last 2 years. This is my love letter to Latina mothers who are at the forefront of student
services while raising children during a time of collective grief and trauma.
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Definitions
Throughout my study, some terms may overlap or seem redundant or confusing,
specifically the terms describing the Latinx identity. I decided to use the term “Latinx” when
describing the community as it is more gender-inclusive (Salinas, 2020), and it encompasses
people of many Latin American backgrounds. I will use the term Latina when exclusively
discussing women as it is a gendered term. Finally, I will use the terms Chicanx and Chicana
when the literature makes it clear that the community represented is mainly of Mexican or
Mexican-American descent. Below are additional key terms used throughout my study.
Chicana(s) is a political term that emerged from the 1960s Chicanx movement that most
often describes people of Mexican descent living in the United States, though the term has also
been used by individuals from other Latin American countries (Pizarro, 1997).
Chicanx(s) is a gender-inclusive term to describe the community.
Latina(s) is a term used to describe women who are of “Chicana, Cubana, Mexicana,
Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, Dominicana, South or Central American descent” (Urquiza,
2020, p. 35).
Latinx(s) is a gender-inclusive term used to describe the community and the intersections
that exist (Salinas, 2020). Latinx people are “a mosaic of people. They are Mexicans, Hondurans,
Puerto Ricans, Argentineans, Cubans, Salvadorans, Dominicans, Panamanians, Guatemalans,
Nicaraguans, Peruvians, Costa Ricans, Bolivians, Chileans, Colombians, and Venezuelans, and
we can go on with an extensive list of Latina/o subgroups” ( Rodríguez et al., 2008, p. xvi).
Additionally, Latinx individuals have different racial categories they identify with.
Mother-practitioner(s) is adapted from the term mother-scholar (Caballero et al., 2019)
and refers to women who are non-faculty practitioners in higher education.
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Student affairs practitioners are non-faculty practitioners who work in student affairs,
student life, or other student-centered services such as student activities, cultural centers, and
recreational sports (Brown et al., 2020; Kupo, 2014; B. C. Mitchell & King, 2018).
Working mothers refers to mothers who are engaged in the labor force for a wage (Glenn
et al., 1994).
Chapter Summary
This chapter provides context for working mothers in higher education student affairs and
the multiple roles they hold. It introduces the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and some of
the challenges of living life in online spaces, defines key terms, and includes a positionality
statement. Chapter Two reviews the literature on the topic and provides the conceptual
framework guiding the study. Chapter Three describes the methodological approach and how the
data was analyzed. Chapters Four, Five, and Six present the findings from the data analysis, and
Chapter Seven discusses the findings, provides recommendations, and concludes with final
thoughts.

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Chapter Two: Literature Review
The COVID-19 pandemic increased the amount of time working parents spent on
caregiving responsibilities while also working from home, especially for mothers (C. Collins et
al., 2020). For mothers in academia, this meant less time available for responsibilities like
research for faculty (Crook, 2020) and more demands but less funding for college and university
staff (Bessette, 2020). The chapter begins with the context of COVID-19, followed by literature
on working mothers and mothering, and concludes with the conceptual framework guiding the
study.
The COVID-19 Pandemic
In January 2020, shortly before the Lunar New Year, reports emerged from central China
about an unidentified new viral disease that caused pneumonia-like symptoms (Morens et al.,
2020; Shih & Sun, 2020). Within weeks, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially
named the new disease COVID-19, an acronym for coronavirus disease, the 19 signifying that it
was first identified in the year 2019 (New York Times, 2020). By the middle of March 2020,
COVID-19 had spread around the world. On March 11, 2020, the WHO officially declared a
global pandemic (Wan, 2020). Thus began months of social distancing, lockdowns, quarantines,
self-isolation, and shifting the most daily activities to a virtual environment. Higher education
was not immune from the negative consequences associated with COVID-19 and shifting to a
virtual environment (Lederman, 2020; Mangan, 2020).
COVID-19 Impact on Higher Education
As the number of individuals diagnosed with COVID-19 increased around the world,
non-essential businesses such as museums, sports stadiums, theaters, and entertainment venues
began to close their doors to the public (Haelle, 2020). Colleges and universities, which often
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operate like small cities (B. C. Mitchell & King, 2018), had to make quick decisions on how to
move forward to prioritize the health of their communities while still offering classes and support
services for their students. On March 6, 2020, the University of Washington became the first
major university in the United States to move its classes to an online modality (Mangan, 2020).
In the days and weeks that followed, more colleges and universities across the country followed
suit and began offering all classes and most student services online (Gardner, 2020). By April
2020, over 80% of the world’s learners were affected by school closures, as 165 countries opted
for nationwide closures (UNESCO, 2020).
The move to remote learning presented challenges for campus communities, including
students, faculty, administrators, and staff practitioners. Students were asked to return to their
homes, in some cases spaces that were not entirely safe nor conducive to their learning.
Additionally, students who previously relied on campus for structure and resources, such as food
and housing, found themselves with limited options during a stressful time (LeBlanc, 2020).
Faculty members adjusted their living spaces to double as classrooms and transitioned to online
teaching, in many cases with no previous online teaching experience and little familiarity with
online learning management systems (N. Johnson et al., 2020). University practitioners also
scrambled to convert their homes into offices, pivot to deliver services remotely, and execute
plans laid out by their institutions (Bessette, 2020).
From an institutional standpoint, campuses faced unprecedented financial challenges.
Whitford (2021) described that “institutions large and small had to cough up money for expenses
related to COVID-19 testing, personal protective equipment and online learning resources. At the
same time, they were bleeding tuition, housing and auxiliary services revenue” (para. 2). For
example, a survey of 271 business officers in higher education indicated that their institutions
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accrued between 2 and 10 million dollars in unanticipated budget costs due to COVID-19
(Lederman, 2020). Additionally, in the fall of 2020, the president of the American Council on
Education penned a letter to Congress estimating that colleges and universities in the United
States had collectively surpassed $120 billion in expenses related to COVID-19 responses (T.
Mitchell, 2020).
The consequences of campus closures extended beyond the financial impact on campuses
to personal challenges for individuals, such as personal financial struggles, physical health
concerns, and overall decreases in mental well-being (Stewart, 2020). For higher education staff,
fears of job security surfaced while simultaneously feeling the weight of responsibility related to
implementing many of the COVID-19 responses set by senior administration (Anderson, 2020).
Student affairs practitioners faced additional challenges, including job losses, increased child
care responsibilities, and increased responsibilities at work (Flaherty, 2020b). For Latina mother-
practitioners, there is the added reality that the Latinx community has been disproportionately
harmed by the consequences of the pandemic (Fortuna et al., 2020) and the need to find new
ways to negotiate personal and professional worlds.
COVID-19 Impact on Working Moms
The pandemic negatively impacted people around the world, but in the United States,
people of color have been affected at disproportionate rates. In December 2020, the economy lost
140,000 jobs, all of which were held by women and most of which were held by Black and
Latina women (Dzhanova, 2021; Kurtz, 2021). For working mothers, the pandemic exacerbated
challenges with unequal workloads in professional settings and additional work at home and
introduced new challenges with the necessity to keep children at home due to school closures.
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In academia specifically, submissions to research journals authored by women declined
(Flaherty, 2020a), and women with children reported having less time per day to devote to
research than their male peers (Pettit, 2021). While the need to balance work and professional
lives is not a new dynamic, the pandemic made it more difficult. In a small study of eight
participants, Burk et al. (2020) found that the increased demands on time, workload, and stress
caused by the response to the pandemic was exacerbating feelings of “failure, guilt, unhappiness,
and being overwhelmed by employment” (p. 3) in academic mothers.
While current research on balancing motherhood and working in higher education is
mostly focused on faculty, staff practitioners also share many of the same challenges faced by
their faculty peers. In one autoethnographic study, a participant who identifies as a staff member
and a mother shared how her identity as a working professional in education suddenly shifted
and explained the difficulty of having to navigate this new reality due to remote work (Guy &
Arthur, 2020). The participant acknowledged that after a week of “being forced” to
simultaneously work while parenting, she realized that she was not emotionally prepared for the
difficulty of being an educator and a mom in the same space at the same time. COVID-19
allowed for reflection on boundaries and personal priorities and highlighted the need for policies
that support caregiving (Miller, 2020), a notion that is not specific only to U.S. society.
COVID-19 quickly became a global pandemic, and therefore, the obstacles faced by
individuals in the United States also occur in other parts of the world. Research from the United
Kingdom confirms that the burden of caregiving has fallen mostly on women. As options for
paid caregiving became more limited, women stepped in to fill the gaps in support (Wright et al.,
2020). This gendered disparity is true of women in many sectors around the world, including
academic mothers. A joint study conducted in Italy and the United States found that academic
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mothers in both countries shared an increase in time spent on child care at the expense of their
work (Minello et al., 2020). Additionally, the study found that the pandemic increased feelings of
fear and insecurity regarding the future of their careers. Similarly, research from Germany also
found that women more often perform care work due to gender roles, and those additional
responsibilities could have negative financial impacts, such as furloughs or missing out on
promotions (Power, 2020). Much like in other parts of the world, the negative impacts of
COVID-19 are gendered and racialized.
COVID-19 Impact on Latinx Community
By October 2020, the United States had approximately 25% of all confirmed COVID-19
infections, the highest number in the world (Carethers, 2021). Women, people of color, and
individuals from low-income backgrounds faced more barriers and more negative consequences
due to the pandemic (Polonijo, 2020). Black and Latinx communities specifically have been
disproportionately harmed by the pandemic. In California, Black and Latinx people experienced
higher rates of COVID-19 infections, partly because they represent large percentages of frontline
workers in conjunction with unequal access to health resources (Polonijo, 2020). The high rates
of illness in Black and Latinx communities damaged individuals’ physical, emotional, and
mental health (Carethers, 2021; Gallegos, 2020). In addition to occupation, the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention attribute increased risk to structural discrimination, access to and
utilization of adequate healthcare, housing, and social gaps, such as income and education (CDC,
2021). These factors have contributed to higher COVID-19 diagnoses and hospitalizations in
Black and Latinx populations, increased risk of job losses, and worsening existing social
inequities, such as educational attainment (Fortuna et al., 2020). This context is critical to this
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dissertation as the focus is on Latina mothers who work in higher education and their
experiences during the pandemic.
Working Mothers and Mothering
Mothering evolves continuously and involves relationships with others (Arendell, 2000).
Research around mothering and support strategies has focused on how mothers succeed in their
roles (Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2004), how women from diverse backgrounds negotiate work-
family obligations (Loder, 2005), and generally about their work identities (Johnston &
Swanson, 2007). Over the last five decades, the numbers of women advancing their education
and working outside of the home have risen significantly, yet differences such as pay gaps
continue to exist (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2017).
Ideologies around mothers in the workplace continuously shift, but certain social
structures persist, such as mothers with male partners taking on more child care and housework
than their partners (Christopher, 2012). Acker and Armenti (2004) argued that women in
academia, specifically faculty, continued to face obstacles, such as conflicts with work-life
balance, anxiety, stress, and lack of sleep. They posed the question, “why, in these changing
times and after 30 or more years of feminist writing and resistance, do these problems appear to
persist?” (Acker & Armenti, 2004, p. 4). In the 17 years since Acker and Armenti posed that
question, researchers continue to explore the lived experiences, obstacles, and coping strategies
of women in academia.
The Significance of Mothering
Mothering extends beyond the identity of motherhood and emphasizes the labor required
of mothering. Glenn et al. (1994) defined mothering as the act of caring for and nurturing another
and stated that mothering is not a biological construct but rather a sociocultural construct.
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Research on mothering, particularly working mothers, is significant as working mothers are
critical to families, society, the labor market, and the economy. For many women, the real or
perceived professional consequences of becoming mothers shape their family planning choices
(Abetz, 2019; Caballero et al., 2019). All caregivers are responsible for balancing work and
home lives; however, mothers have the added challenges of unequal gender expectations,
biological time constraints, pregnancy, and childbirth (Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2004). Working
mothers must also contend with often-competing ideologies and expectations that pressure them
to parent within the confines of intensive mothering norms while adhering to ideal worker norms
(Meisenbach, 2010).
For mother-scholars, family planning can interfere with the next career milestone or
current career trajectory (Lapayese, 2017). Adapting from the mother-scholar terminology
(Caballero et al., 2019), mother-practitioners in academia who are not faculty experience similar
barriers in their home and work-life negotiations. For mothers in higher education, their needs
are often overlooked and not reflected in institutional policies and practices (Abetz, 2019).
Competing Ideologies
Mothering during the COVID-19 pandemic brought to light how working mothers must
contend with competing ideologies in their professional and personal lives. Mothers who worked
remotely during the pandemic navigated increased caregiving responsibilities while maintaining
their professional careers (Power, 2020). Prevalent ideologies like “intensive mothering” (Hays,
1996), which asks mothers to place their children above all else, are not congruent with the
prevalent “ideal worker norm,” which asks individuals to prioritize paid work over all other
obligations (Kelly et al., 2010). Not only are these ideologies not always feasible or congruent,
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especially during the pandemic (Williams, 2020), they may not align with individual values,
choices, or cultural ideologies.
Intensive Mothering
The intensive mothering ideology suggests that good mothering requires the labor of
nurturing the child, listening to and interpreting the child’s concerns, and ultimately prioritizing
the child’s well-being above the mother’s own convenience (Hays, 1996). Intensive mothering
is, by definition, a time and resource-intensive way to raise children (Hays, 1996). The belief that
intensive mothering is the ideal way to parent is limiting and often in opposition to how mothers
approach and construct their personal and professional identities (Christopher, 2012; P.H.
Collins, 1994; Segura, 1994). Working mothers may not agree with this ideology, but they are
often still held to unrealistic expectations that ask them to provide the majority of caregiving
responsibilities while also navigating their professions, something that was increasingly difficult
during the COVID-19 pandemic (Burk et al., 2020).
The Ideal Worker
The concept of the ideal worker reflects assumptions of little to no responsibilities
outside of work. Employees are expected to work long hours, arrange their lives around their
jobs, and ultimately prioritize paid work as their main responsibility (Kelly et al., 2010).
Typically, this ideology centers around men as the ideal worker and marginalizes women who do
not fit those expectations (Misra et al., 2012). Ideal worker norms assume someone else will take
on domestic responsibilities, such as child care and housework (Misra et al., 2012). Women,
especially mothers, are less likely to meet the ideal worker norm and, therefore, more likely to
lose out on economic benefits associated with being an ideal worker (Kelly et al., 2010).
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In academia, roles such as live-in residential life coordinators and processes such as
tenure for faculty are modeled after male professionals who are expected to have more freedom
and fewer family obligations (Acker & Armenti, 2004; Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2004).
Additionally, much academic work requires time-intensive effort and is expected to be done
beyond traditional work hours when most women are expected to tend to their families (Maranto
& Griffin, 2011). In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the tension between mothering and
being an ideal worker was prevalent due to little separation between work and home.
Work-Home Spheres During COVID-19
Perhaps in part due to the intensive mothering expectation, mothers in the United States
are seen as existing between a dichotomy of the supermom who has a career or the domestic
stay-at-home mom who self-sacrifices for her family (Uttal, 1996). Before the COVID-19
pandemic, the lives of professional women were not neatly separated into separate spheres
(Marquez, 2011). Within the context of COVID-19, there was less chance to separate work from
home for professionals who must work remotely while their children are attending school
remotely. Nevertheless, the division of labor at work and home is a relevant component of
studying working mothers.
Division of Labor at Work
For women to gain influence in business, politics, science, academia, and other
professions, women must be able to participate in the workforce (Peters, 2007). The concept of
the ideal worker is not always congruent with what is expected of working mothers. In addition
to fulfilling the ideal worker expectations, women face unspoken expectations in the workplace.
Women are expected to demonstrate certain qualities at work, such as cheerfulness, that do not
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directly align with their roles, whereas men are expected to possess qualities that do align with
their work roles (Meisenbach, 2010).
In addition to demonstrating certain qualities in the workplace, women must also contend
with additional unpaid labor, such as office housework (Grant & Sandberg, 2015; Williams,
2014). Jang et al. (2020) defined office housework as “menial administrative tasks that keep an
office running” (p. 2) and found that all employees perform these extra tasks, but men take on
tasks like fixing broken objects while women take on tasks such as organizing parties and
offering emotional labor when colleagues are in distress. Performing these unpaid tasks hinders
women’s careers as it takes up time, undermines their authority, and influences how peers and
supervisors view them (Williams, 2014). Women are taking on more in the workplace, and they
perform more tasks related to housework and child care in their homes.
Division of Labor at Home
For working adults, responsibilities are not limited to workspaces. For adults with
dependents, household responsibilities often equate to additional, unpaid, labor at home. Women
who work outside of the home are more likely to engage in unpaid household labor at the end of
the workday. Per Hochschild (1990), this second shift includes preparing meals, cleaning, and
child care (Glynn, 2018). Furthermore, working mothers of young children spend more time on
household responsibilities on days when they also work outside of the home compared to
working fathers (Glynn, 2018). Estimates of how much more time mothers spend in unpaid
domestic labor range from a week and a half (Milkie et al., 2009) to a month per year
(Hochschild, 1990). Despite a lack of agreement on how much more time women spend in
unpaid labor at home, researchers do not negate the notion that women take on the larger share of
domestic work. England (2010) argued that this inequity is due to gender norm stereotypes such
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that men have little incentive to take on more homemaking activities, but women have an
economic incentive to join the workforce.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the division of labor at home was mostly taken on by
women. The disruption of in-person school and closure of daycares resulted in reduced work
hours for fathers and mothers, but mothers reduced their work hours four to five times more than
fathers (C. Collins et al., 2020). Additionally, mothers were more likely to work longer hours
because they had to juggle work, child care, and homeschooling their children (Yildirim &
Eslen‐Ziya, 2021). One goal of this dissertation was to contribute to the literature on the Latinx
community, specifically on gendered issues like how mothers view the division of labor in their
homes and workplaces and how that division influences their mothering.
Latina Mothering
As mentioned earlier, intensive mothering may not be an ideology that all mothers feel
they resonate with or are able or willing to adopt. For example, Randles (2021) offered the term
“inventive mothering” to highlight the agency of poor and working-class mothers who ensure
their children’s needs are met despite structural barriers such as economic injustice and racism.
Additionally, mothering can look differently depending on the culturally-specific context.
Ideologies around good mothering typically center around White, middle-class mothers
and exclude single mothers, working-class mothers, adolescent mothers, and/or women of color
(Johnston & Swanson, 2006). One way women of color experience mothering differently from
White women is in the construction of their motherhood identities. For women of color,
mothering and the economic concerns of their community do not exist independently (P.H.
Collins, 1994). Working-class Black and Latina mothers, for example, view working outside of
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the home as an integral part of their mothering identity (P. H. Collins, 1994; Segura, 1994),
which is seemingly in opposition to intensive mothering ideology.
Chicanx/Latinx families hold distinctive family features which are not widely reflected in
research. Chicanx/Latinx families tend to have multiple maternal figures in the home, and
mothers tend to work outside the home, rely on extended family networks, and value family
solidarity (Segura & Pierce, 1993). Latina mothering is not solely an individual role but a
familial effort, which can lead to tensions. For Latina/Chicana mothers, cultural gender norms
can conflict and emphasize being a woman dedicated to her family and her home while
simultaneously encouraging self-reliance (Villenas & Moreno, 2001).
Factors outside of the homes also shape Latinas’ mothering experiences. Caballero et al.
(2019) asserted that institutional barriers for Latina mothers include low wages for graduate
students and adjunct faculty, low-security employment, few resources for child care, unpaid
service, and work obligations outside of the traditional workweek. The labor needed to maintain
dignity while facing these barriers, gender discrimination, unfair work environments, and racism
influences Latinas’ mothering experiences (Villenas & Moreno, 2001). Mothering is not
exclusive to the private sphere; conceptualizing mothering as labor and as love is essential to
challenging current ideologies on mothering that do not serve working mothers (Glenn et al.,
1994). The concept of living in between multiple spaces while creating new spaces for mothers
to conceptualize their roles and identities is central to this study.
Conceptual Framework
A conceptual framework serves as the set of ideas or beliefs that frame the phenomena
being studied (Maxwell, 2013) and serves as a guide to answering the research question. In this
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study, the research question is how Latina mother-practitioners in student affairs navigated their
personal and professional worlds during the COVID-19 pandemic?
The conceptual framework for this study is guided by Chicana/Latina Feminist
Epistemology and Anzaldúa’s (197, 2012) borderlands concept. I also used Duncan-Andrade’s
(2006, 2007, 2009) concept of cariño. The conceptual framework served as a touchpoint for
developing questions, analyzing data, and interpreting results.
Using this framework allowed me to address the research question by grounding the
study in concepts that centralize the ways Latinx people make meaning of their lives. For
example, the concept of borderlands (Anzaldúa, 1987, 2012) emphasized the negotiations that
working mothers made in their personal and professional worlds during the pandemic.
Participants were asked questions based on the concept of simultaneously living in between
different worlds (see Appendix A). Additionally, Chicana/Latina feminist epistemology validates
Chicana/Latina funds of knowledge and challenges racist academic ideologies often embedded in
dominant research (Delgado Bernal, 1998). Chicana/Latina feminist epistemology was used to
develop questions that speak to the lived experiences of Latina mother-practitioners and to
analyze and interpret the data. The concept of cariño (Duncan-Andrade, 2006, 2007, 2009)
prioritized caring for participants as individuals and was the foundational approach to the study
but was not used to frame questions, analyze the data, or interpret results. This conceptual
framework illuminated the spaces in which Latina mothers exist and understood how they make
meaning of their lived experiences by centering their narratives.
Chicana/Latina Feminist Epistemology
Epistemology, or the study of knowledge, refers to how knowledge is produced and how
individuals understand the world around them (Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016). Gonzalez et al.
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define funds of knowledge as knowledge that has been culturally developed to empower
individuals and argue that honoring these funds of knowledge in academia makes for a more
enriching experience for students (Gonzá lez et al., 2009). Funds of knowledge have also been
used to explore the impact of gender, race, and socioeconomic class on knowledge and meaning-
making (Ciofalo, 2018; Luttrell, 1989) and in the higher education context (Kiyama & Rios-
Aguilar, 2018). The dominant epistemological perspective in the United States is Eurocentric and
prioritizes objectivity, individuality, and meritocracy (Delgado Bernal & Villalpando, 2002).
Delgado Bernal and Villalpando (2002) further stated that this perspective assumes there is one
universal fund of knowledge and one legitimate way of interpreting and legitimizing knowledge,
often discrediting the ways of knowing among people of color in academia.
Delgado Bernal (1998) offered Chicana feminist epistemology as a way to resist racist
epistemology through a focus on untold stories. While Delgado Bernal (1998) originally used the
term Chicana only, the framework has been applied to research about Latinas, thus representing a
broader range of women with shared histories and experiences. According to Delgado Bernal
(1998), Chicana feminist epistemology requires researchers to
• centralize Chicanas/Latinas in the research
• challenge how Chicanas/Latinas have been represented in research
• ask research questions that are specific to the experiences of Chicanas/Latinas,
including questions regarding race and ethnicity, class, immigration, bilingualism,
and other experiences that Chicanas/Latinas face
• legitimize Chicana/Latina knowledge through questioning a universal way of
knowing and,
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• acknowledge that Chicanas/Latinas lead lives that are different from the experiences
of men and White women.
Using a Chicana/Latina feminist epistemology is more than a system of knowing (Fierros
& Delgado Bernal, 2016). It is a way to resist racist epistemology through untold stories
(Delgado Bernal, 1998). Additionally, Chicana/Latina feminist epistemology is grounded in
collective experiences and includes participants in data analysis. There is a need to use theories
and methodologies that challenge “the apartheid of knowledge present in academia that shadows
the knowledge and experiences of Communities of Color” (Pérez Huber, 2009, p. 640).
Traditional feminist approaches have not always included the needs of women of color or
focused on the intersections of race, gender, and class, excluding marginalized women’s
narratives (Elenes et al., 2001; Preuss & Saavedra, 2014).
Borderlands
Borderlands is a concept in line with Chicana/Latina feminist epistemology. In 1987,
Anzaldúa produced a personal account of living life between borders as a queer Chicana living
on the U.S. side of the Texas–Mexico border (Perales, 2013). Anzaldúa’s (1987, 2012) writings
used the Mexico–U.S. border to paint a picture of metaphoric borders that Chicana/Latina
women navigate every day. According to Anzaldúa (2012), “a borderland is a vague and
undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant
state of transition” (p. 25).
Borderlands was a natural fit for this project because it highlights the existence of being
in multiple spaces simultaneously and legitimizes Latinas’ experiences and knowledge. For
working mothers, work and personal spaces have mostly existed separately, but they blended
together during the COVID-19 pandemic (Miller, 2020). Working mothers do not exist on one
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side of the home or work “border” but in all spaces simultaneously. Anzaldúa’s (1987, 2012)
concept of borderlands validates this fluidity of space and makes it an empowering space.
Cariño
Cariño is the Spanish word for affection or authentic care and is a guiding concept of this
dissertation. Duncan-Andrade (2006) defined cariño as “the foundation of relationships among
the poor and working classes—often the only thing left to give, in families raising children on
substandard wages” (p. 451). Duncan-Andrade argued for educational research to center the ethic
of cariño while preserving high academic standards (2006).
Cariño has been used in research on high school students (Curry, 2016; Duncan-Andrade,
2007; Valenzuela, 1999) as well as research on violence in the immigrant community
(Valenzuela, 2017). I used cariño is foundational to this research because it is the holistic lens
through which I approached the study. Valenzuela (1999) captured this notion by stating, “the
literature on caring is properly premised on the notion that individuals need to be recognized and
addressed as whole beings. All people share a basic need to be understood, appreciated, and
respected” (p. 108).
Chapter Summary
The literature in this chapter presents the context of life during the COVID-19 pandemic,
introduces research on Latinx people in education, and offers studies on working mothers and
mothering. The chapter concludes with the conceptual framework that guides this study,
Chicana/Latina feminist epistemology, borderlands, and cariño. The following chapter will
discuss the methodological approach of this study.

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Chapter Three: Methodology
This chapter presents the methods I used to conduct this study and how I analyzed the
data. The research question for this study asked, “How have Latina mother-practitioners in
student affairs navigated their personal and professional worlds during the COVID-19
pandemic?”
To answer the research question, I used qualitative methods. Simply put, qualitative
research depends on words as data instead of numbers (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). Qualitative
methods make it possible for researchers to achieve multiple goals, including understanding how
individuals make meaning of their experiences, recognizing the specific contexts influencing
participants, focusing on process instead of outcomes, remaining flexible about the data, and
drawing local conclusions about what the data represents (Maxwell, 2013).
An urgency for dialogue is at the crux of why qualitative research, and interviews were
the best fit for this study. To that point, Chicana activist Cherrie Moraga once said, “I am a
woman with a foot in both worlds; and I refuse the split. I feel the necessity for dialogue.
Sometimes I feel it urgently” (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 2015, p. 29). Interviews lend themselves to
dialogue and to hearing people’s narratives and lived experiences in their own words and with
their own level of urgency. When the researcher is unable to observe behavior or how people
make meaning of their experiences, interviews are especially important (Merriam & Tisdell,
2016). The focus of this study was on how Latina mothers have experienced the COVID-19
pandemic, and those experiences are not easily quantified via numerical data. I specifically used
testimonio as the methodological approach as it is best suited for collecting data in Latinx
populations in addition to photo-elicitation.
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This chapter consists of five parts: a description of the interviewee, a description of the
data collection strategies I used, information about how the data were analyzed, the steps I took
to make sure the study was valid and ethical, and my role as a researcher in the methodology.
Population and Sample
In qualitative research, the population sample is purposeful, nonrandom, and typically
small (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). The population for this study was Latina mothers who work as
student affairs practitioners. I conducted virtual interviews with six Latina mother-practitioners
about their experiences navigating life during the COVID-19 pandemic. Keeping the number of
participants low meant that I could delve into the nuances of how each participant constructed
meaning from their lived experience given their own context (Maxwell, 2013). While qualitative
data is concerned with individual meanings, the context of the COVID-19 pandemic is a
collective experience that has yet to fully be researched and analyzed.
I used purposeful and snowball sampling by recruiting participants through my
professional network to find participants (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). I created a demographic
and eligibility survey (see Appendix B), which I administered using the Qualtrics software. Once
I received IRB approval, I set out to recruit participants from my network of Latinx student
affairs professionals and my network of student affairs moms. I created a recruitment flyer (See
Appendix C), sent it to two colleagues, and posted it on two social media groups associated with
Latina mothers and my personal social media pages. Within 48 hours, I had all six participants.
I sought to interview a diverse group of mothers, so the criteria for participants were
intentionally broad. Participants had to work at higher education institutions in the United States
as student affairs practitioners, and they were required to have worked remotely at any point
during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, I only interviewed mothers of at least one school-
33

aged child, as the responsibility of homeschooling during the COVID-19 pandemic hindered
navigating personal and professional worlds.
All interviews took place via Zoom, and by coincidence, all participants live and work in
California. To protect their privacy, I gave participants pseudonyms, de-identified where they
work, and described their roles in more generic terms (see Table 1).

Table 1
List of Participants
Pseudonym Children Relationship
status
Campus role Type of
institution
Paloma, interviewed on 12/14/22 4-year-old Married Student equity
program
coordinator
Community
college
Jane, interviewed on 12/16/21 5-year-old
2-year-old
Married Counselor,
transfer
services
Community
college
Alma, interviewed on 12/20/22 5-year-old
2-year-old
Married Assistant vice
president for
student affairs
Public 4-
year
university
Liana, interviewed on 12/23/322 12-year-
old
Single Admissions
counselor
Public 4-
year
university
Josefina, interviewed on 1/7/22 5-year-old
3-year-old
1-year-old
Married Diversity and
inclusion,
engineering
Private
research
institution
Elvia, interviewed on 1/11/22 6-year-old
3-year-old
Married Academic
advisor,
public health
Private
research
institution

34

Data Collection Strategies
I collected data through interviews, namely testimonio and photo-elicitation. As a token
of gratitude, I made a $25 donation to Esperanza United
1
, an organization that provides resources
to the Latinx community, in each participant’s name once all interviews were complete. I chose
to use testimonio and photo-elicitation as research methods because they are emergent, meaning
there was the flexibility to adapt the study based on what surfaced during data collection
(Merriam & Tisdell, 2016).
Testimonio
Historically, research produced by people of color has been judged as biased, lacking
rigor, and ultimately illegitimate (Delgado Bernal & Villalpando, 2002). Testimonio bridges
theory, methods, and epistemology (Pérez Huber, 2009). Testimonio as a research methodology,
much like counternarratives, allows the researcher to serve as a witness to the participant as they
embark on a “verbal journey” of their lived experience (Pérez Huber, 2009). Testimonio is
grounded in the knowledge that people of color face structural barriers, such as racism, sexism,
and classism, and is a useful tool in highlighting the knowledge held by people of color and
validating experiences faced by people of color (Delgado Bernal, 2002). While testimonio is
commonly used in autobiographical scholarship, it can also be used to tell another’s story by
centering the stories and voices of participants with the goal of eliciting change and raising
consciousness (Delgado Bernal et al., 2012).

1
Between the time I publicized this as the incentive and the time I finished conducting
interviews, Casa Esperanza changed their name to Esperanza United. Additionally, while the
initial agreement was that I would donate $25 per participant, I also included $25 on behalf of
each of my committee members and myself bringing the total to $250.

35

Testimonio is more than just oral history or storytelling; it requires critical reflection of
personal experiences in the context of sociopolitical realities (Delgado Bernal et al.,
2012). Collecting data through testimonio allowed for an increase in vulnerability and deeper
connections between the participants and researcher (Carmona, 2014). Using testimonio as
methodology required that I actively listen with compassion and fully engage with the
participants as they shared their stories and experiences (Carmona, 2014).
Using a Chicana/Latina feminist approach in methodology allows researchers and
participants to co-construct meaning (Guajardo & Guajardo, 2013) and opens the door to healing
(Carmona, 2014; Chabram-Dernersesian & de la Torre, 2008). For these reasons, testimonio was
used to center the voices of Latinas in higher education regarding how the COVID-19 pandemic
impacted their personal and professional worlds.
This study included six Latina mothers. While no set number of interviews makes a
qualitative study complete, six testimonios felt like an appropriate number. Participants were
asked questions organized in chronological order starting from the time leading up to March
2020, their experiences during the pandemic, their current situations, and what they anticipate
moving forward. Questions were open-ended enough to align with testimonio (see Appendix A).
Interviews were conducted virtually via Zoom and took between 40 and 120 minutes.
Participants were given pseudonyms, and any identifying details about their institutions or roles
were changed slightly to protect their privacy.
Photo-Elicitation
In addition to utilizing testimonio, I also collected data using photo-elicitation, or
participant-generated photos. Photo-elicitation is a research method in which photographs are
used to prompt “verbal data” (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016, p. 170). Personal documents such as
36

photographs can be rich sources of data by highlighting what is important in a way that research
observation cannot capture (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). Photo-elicitation has been used in
research on a variety of topics, including food (Andersson et al., 2016; C. M. Johnson et al.,
2010), health care (Alvariza et al., 2020; Rayment et al., 2019), Latinx folks (Schwingel et al.,
2015), education (Clark-Ibáñez, 2012), and parents (Coba-Rodriguez & Jarrett, 2022;
Kantrowitz-Gordon & Vandermause, 2016).
Merriam and Tisdell (2016) emphasized that photo-elicitation research loses objectivity,
and the power lies in the subjectivity of how individuals can see the same image differently.
Clark-Ibañez (2012) stated that “researchers can use photographs as a tool to expand on
questions and simultaneously, participants can use photographs to provide a unique way to
communicate dimensions of their lives” (p. 1512). The core of my study is about Latina mothers’
lived experiences during a very specific time in history and will therefore be subjective.
Once I set up interviews with each participant, I invited them to submit a photo that we
discussed during the interview. I asked them that their photos not include faces or any
identifiable information (see Appendix D) or to edit them to meet these parameters. I told them
that photo submission was not a requirement, and instead, they could come prepared to share a
story about their experiences. I prepared a prompt for participants who did not submit a photo:
Latina mother-practitioners are living in what Gloria Anzaldua refers to as borderlands
due to the need to work, homeschool, and lead their lives in remote environments during
the COVID-19 pandemic. I invite you to submit a photo that symbolizes your experience
as a Latina mom and professional during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The prompt was unnecessary as all participants submitted at least one photo.
37

Data Analysis
Maxwell (2013) asserted that while data analysis occurs after data collection, it is an
integral part of the research design and should be decided on during the design formulation
process. Maxwell advised that data analysis should begin after the first interview and continue
until the completion of all data collection. The researcher does not know what will come up as
part of the study, and analysis becomes more intensive during the progression of data collection
(Merriam & Tisdell, 2016).
Given the conceptual framework, the data were analyzed using a Chicana/Latina feminist
epistemology lens. Data were analyzed using Delgado Bernal’s (1998) assertion that
Chicana/Latina feminist epistemology requires the researcher to acknowledge that
Chicanas/Latinas have different collective lived experiences than men and White women. The
data analysis process was iterative to search for patterns and themes.
While there are many ways to analyze data, including memos, coding, and connecting
strategies (Maxwell, 2013), coding is one of the most common and the primary way I analyzed
the data. A code is a “word or short phrase that symbolically assigns summative, salient, essence-
capturing, and/or evocative attribute for a portion of language-based or visual data” (Saldaña,
2016, p. 4). Coding entails looking for patterns and interpreting the data through the lens of the
researcher and serves as a way to find themes (Saldaña, 2016). In addition to coding the data as
interviews were conducted, I wrote memos to keep track of what was coming up during data
collection. Memos serve to better understand the study and as a source of reflection about the
project (Maxwell, 2013).
Visual data were analyzed as Saldaña (2016) suggested by “intuitive inquiry and strategic
questions” (p. 57). I analyzed the photographs through affective methods, namely emotion
38

coding and values coding. Emotion coding refers to the emotions inferred by the researcher
about the participant, while values coding refers to the values, attitudes, beliefs, or worldviews
that the participant prioritizes (Saldaña, 2016). Emotion coding makes sense for visual data in
this study because the research question is about identity and personal experiences.
Validity and Ethical Considerations
Maxwell (2013) described validity as the correctness of a conclusion or interpretation of
an account. To maximize trustworthiness in the data collection phase, I used triangulation of data
(Merriam & Tisdell, 2016), specifically testimonio and photo-elicitation. In the data analysis
phase, I conducted member checks to ensure that my interpretations of participants’ experiences
were accurate and plausible (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). Additionally, I employed peer
examination with a trusted classmate to discuss the process, findings, and interpretations
(Merriam & Tisdell, 2016).
Conducting an ethical study from conception to presenting conclusions is a critical
component of qualitative research (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). It is not the research design that
determines an ethical study, but whether the researcher led the study with integrity and in an
ethical manner (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). Ethical considerations include informed consent,
protecting the privacy of participants, and the relationship between researcher and participant
(Merriam & Tisdell, 2016). To ensure an ethical study, I followed Merriam and Tisdell’s (2016)
12-item checklist for ethical issues, which ranges from the purpose of the study and methods
used to boundaries, mental health considerations, and ethics versus legality.

39

Role of the Researcher
The researcher is the main instrument in qualitative data (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016),
contributes their own assets, and holds biases that can threaten validity (Maxwell, 2013).
Additionally, testimonio calls for the researcher to contribute their personal experiences to the
research (Pérez Huber, 2009). Prior to conducting interviews, I was keenly aware that as a Latina
mother who works in student affairs, I entered the project with thoughts, feelings, and lived
experiences that could be shared by some of the participants. One limitation was that because of
shared identities, the questions I prepared were subjective and through my own lens.
Navigating my personal and professional worlds during the pandemic has been
challenging. When my campus shifted to a remote environment on Friday the 13th, 2020, it felt
like an especially bad omen. That same afternoon, our daughters’ schools sent out the memo that
they would also switch to an online modality. The first few weeks were complete chaos with my
partner and me working from home, one daughter doing kindergarten remotely, and one pre-
school-aged daughter with no structure. At the same time, my responsibilities at work increased
exponentially, and I found myself working 10- to 12-hour days. Our family eventually got into a
groove, but in summer 2021, as more and more campuses and businesses were reopening and I
was in the thick of working on my dissertation, we were asked to return to campus. The return to
campus came with new challenges and anxieties associated with health risks, child care, work
responsibilities, and our home life.
While listening to the testimonios of my participants, their narratives resonated, and some
experiences mirrored my own. While some may view this as a limitation or challenge, I feel this
was a strength of the study. I believe my experiences as a Latina mother-practitioner were an
asset when analyzing the data.
40

Chapter Summary
In summary, this chapter gave an overview of the methods used for this study. I discussed
the population and sample, data collection strategies, and data analysis. The chapter concludes
with the measures I will take to ensure validity, trustworthiness, and ethical considerations, as
well as a note on my role as the researcher. The following three chapters will present the findings
of the study.

41

Chapter Four: Personal Worlds and Mom Life
Latina mother-practitioners navigate their lives with intersecting and, at times,
fragmented identities (Caballero et al., 2019). During the pandemic, their lives became even
more challenging (Staniscuaski et al., 2020) as they parented, managed their careers, and
navigated the metaphoric borderlands between these and other spheres of responsibility. Through
interviews and photo-elicitation, six participants shared their experiences over the last 2 years.
Three overarching themes emerged from the information that they shared. In this and the
following two chapters, these themes will be elaborated on in their own chapters, drawing on the
participants’ testimonios and incorporating their responses to the photo-elicitation prompt.
This chapter presents segments of the participants’ testimonios about their roles as
mothers and how the COVID-19 pandemic affected their mothering. Chapter Five presents
findings related to the effects of the pandemic on these participants’ mental health. Chapter Six
highlights how these women navigated their careers and presents their current professional
outlook, including their thoughts on returning to campus after health and government guidelines
became more flexible.
In this chapter, the focus is on the participants’ experiences as moms and caregivers. The
testimonios and photos in this chapter show that COVID-19 had a significant impact on their
personal lives and that mothering during the pandemic was all-consuming and required a delicate
balancing act. Participants shared feeling overwhelmed as their responsibilities at home
increased and their mothering approaches shifted.
The testimonios revealed how most participants are the primary parent and the person
carrying the mental load for their families. Even for women who had additional support, deciding
42

to accept help was not easy, given the health risks involved in interacting with people outside of
their household.
Another common theme in the testimonios is the notion of “just surviving.” Balancing
multiple responsibilities and living in the metaphorical borderlands between different roles is not
new (Anzaldúa, 2012; Barlow & Chapin, 2010; Caballero et al., 2019); however, the pandemic
made it harder for these women to navigate their lives (Hermann & NEale-McFall, 2020;
Mannon, 2020). The pandemic harmed their relationships, mothering, mental health, and sense
of self.
In this chapter, I also include brief segments at the top of each testimonio to introduce the
participants: Paloma, Jane, Alma, Liana, Josefina, and Elvia. The segments also share how they
found out about COVID-19.
Paloma
Paloma is a student equity program coordinator at a California community college. She
and her husband have a 4-year-old and have a close-knit relationship with their extended family.
Before the pandemic, Paloma balanced motherhood, her career, and graduate school. Paloma’s
graduate program was over 450 miles away, so she flew out to take classes once a month.
Paloma shared how prior to the pandemic, she struggled to balance schoolwork, household
responsibilities, work, and finding time to be with her child:
I was hardly seeing my son now that I remember. I was hardly spending time with him. I
felt the days at work were very long, and I wasn’t really connecting with my family. Only
on the weekends, like, weekends were family time. For me, family is important, so I
would prioritize that on the weekend, and I was spending long hours at work because, at
43

my job back then, I didn’t have that much flexibility to work from home, we weren’t
allowed to work from home in the past, and this pandemic really changed that.
Paloma shared that she struggled with this negotiation of motherhood and career to a larger
degree during the pandemic.
Pandemic: “Disconnected ”
Paloma did not know about COVID-19 until March of 2020 and felt “disconnected” from
what was happening. When she did start to acknowledge the pandemic, her main concern was for
her family:
I was one of the last ones to go buy groceries so that just made me realize I wasn’t even
taking it that serious like I thought I should be. I was more like worrying about my
family, making sure that they had food, and here where I live, all of the stores were super
jam-packed, so that’s when I started to say, like, oh my gosh, I waited until the last
minute to buy food? I made sure that my family, like my mom and dad, separately, that
they had food, but I didn’t really think about myself.
Paloma felt frustrated with how constantly the information about COVID-19 was changing and
felt “super overwhelmed, confused, and kind of numb.”
Mom Life: “I ’ll Figure It Out ”
Before the pandemic, Paloma’s family helped with child care, and she managed her and
her husband’s schedules to ensure her child had backup care if needed. Typically, Paloma’s
mother-in-law and sister-in-law provided child care during the workday. Paloma said,
I would drop him off, and then they would help me with him during that time, but once
the pandemic hit, like, they tried to not. Well, I mean, my mother-in-law is one of the
vulnerable populations, so she couldn’t help me anymore.
44

During the pandemic, Paloma’s responsibilities included her previous responsibilities of being a
student, managing everyone’s schedule, buying groceries, and cooking. The main difference was
that now she did not have any outside help with child care while she worked from home. Paloma
shared her frustrations with the lack of resources and support:
Most of the schools for his grade level were closed during the pandemic, and the few that
were open were impacted or asked for income to see if you qualified, and we didn’t
qualify for many, so it was so frustrating to feel like there was no support. I didn’t really
think I could ask for help, even from my family, because one of my sisters was strict to
not ask my mom for any help during that time. So, I didn’t have an option but to get my
son on a schedule and myself on a schedule so that I could get stuff done because my son
was with me the whole time.
Paloma comes from a tight-knit family where she is one of six siblings. During the pandemic,
Paloma’s father was “dealing with mental health issues,” so she and her siblings had to ensure
one of them “was looking out for him.” Paloma was also extending help to family members after
an accident, and much of her time was spent “trying to find a way for us to look out for each
other.” Paloma was grateful for the flexibility to work from home because, in the past, her job
did not allow for that: “this pandemic really changed that.”
Paloma shared that while she does not live with her parents, she still feels “a sense of
responsibility to look out for my dad and also to make sure that my mom had the support she
needed when my dad was going through his depression.” Through all of this, Paloma and her
partner’s relationship suffered. Paloma said,
It was really hard. Our relationship suffered because it was hard to balance the work in
my schoolwork, even though I was at home and balancing my son’s schedule and my
45

own so I could get stuff done. I felt like at some point, I was almost, like, I had to hide to
do my homework from my husband because I feel like he didn’t really understand that
even though I was at home, I couldn’t really find time to focus unless it was waking up
three hours before my workday or like once everybody fell asleep.
Being a working mother and graduate student during the pandemic has been lonely.
Paloma shared that she is one of the few mothers in her department and advocating for herself
during the pandemic was additional emotional labor. Because her colleagues do not have
children, she did not feel comfortable asking for accommodations when she needed them
because she did not want to feel like “a burden to anyone.” At the time of our interview,
Paloma’s child had gone back to in-person school, and it was difficult for her to navigate. School
guidelines dictated that if a child presented with any COVID-19 symptom, they would have to
miss school. Paloma said she was struggling with these guidelines:
The thing that I’m having a hard time with right now, and I totally understand why, but
even if they get COVID tested and they have a negative result, but they have a little bit of
boogers, they can’t be in school for 15 days. So, it’s really hard because even though he’s
enrolled, if he has a runny nose, he can’t be at school, and it’s like, ok, we’re enrolled,
but we can’t be there. It’s hard.
Paloma’s challenges of working and mothering reminded her to accept uncertainty. Paloma
shared a photo of her child that reminds her “that it’s okay to not be okay; it was okay to not
have all the answers.” She shared a photo (Figure 1) that reminds her of the past year because it
gave her a “feeling like I need to let go and being okay with things all over the place, like being
okay with uncertainty at times,”

46

Figure 1
Paloma’s Son on a Tricycle on Top of Dozens of Books

Jane
Jane is a married mother of a 5-year-old and a 2-year-old. Jane has worked at a California
community college as a counselor in transfer services for over 5 years. In 2019, Jane gave birth
to her second child. During this same period, a close relative who served as a support system
passed away. After finding themselves with two young children and no help, she and her
husband moved in January of 2020 to the same city where her parents live, which is a 2-hour
drive from her institution. Jane works part-time, so making the commute twice a week in
exchange for being close to her support system was worth it for her. Jane also shared that the
timing of the pandemic had a silver lining: “I did the commute for a short time because I have
47

been working remote since February of 2020, then the pandemic hit and, in a way, it was a
blessing for me that I haven’t had to do that commute.”
Pandemic: “I ’m Probably Fine ”
For Jane, COVID-19 was a concept on social media and in background conversations but
not a part of her day-to-day consciousness. In the first 2 months of 2020, she developed a sore
throat. She shared that she would normally stay home, but that was not the directive she was
hearing:
I sent an email, and I said I’m probably fine, but because of everything that’s going on,
it’s better if I stay home, and then they said, “okay, that’s fine.” And I believe, by the end
of the day that day, which would have been sometime probably in mid to late February, I
believe they sent everybody home, and they never went back.
She shared that she did not know what to expect when they sent everyone home, but in the back
of her mind, she thought everything would go back to normal quickly.
Mom Life: “I Really Do Not Want to Be a Stay-at-Home Mom ”
One major transition for Jane during the pandemic was her view of motherhood and her
mothering style. Before the pandemic, she had “normal mom stress. Like, the house was messy,
gotta clean it up,” and her focus was on being a good mom. Jane had a mentor who emphasized
that family comes first, so that was her framework. She said, “I always wanted to be that mom
that was teaching her 5-year-old quadratic equations and such.” She shared a comment from a
colleague after she had her first child that illustrates her feelings toward being a working mother:
One of my colleagues asked me if I worked at other campuses because a lot of the
community college counselors will work for multiple colleges. I responded, “I work at
this campus, and my other job is being a mom.” And she said, “Oh, that must be so nice.
48

You get to stay home with the kid,” and I’m like, “I promise you the hardest day at this
campus is still easier than one day with the kids.”
She felt her colleague was wrong and that going to work was her outlet. At some point, she
wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, but “now that I think about it, at some point, that’s all I
wanted to do, and after COVID-19, I do not want to be a stay-at-home mom. I really do not want
to be a stay-at-home mom.”
Jane is a self-described “Type A, super organized person,” and the pandemic forced her
to shift that approach in her mothering, organization of the house, and how she viewed and
managed her children’s education. She was handling a recent move at the beginning of the
pandemic. As the “house manager,” she was supposed to be unpacking and getting things in
order: “I know where everything goes. There’s no way I’m gonna let my husband unpack and
put everything away. So now, I have a bunch of boxes that need to be unpacked, but when do I
unpack them?” She shared a photo of her living room and gave more context (Figure 2):
I could no longer organize a house and set it up and unpack boxes because I’m trying to
do that, but there’s this mess that is accumulating. That mess just never went away.
Eventually, I got through the boxes, but the mess just kind of stayed. Even if I pick it up,
I promise you, by the end of the day, it’s back.

49

Figure 2
Jane’s Living Room in March 2020, 2 Months After Their Move

Jane manages most things on her own as the primary parent in her household and has
very few extended family members for support. Outside of her parents, who live close by, she
and her husband have no close relatives or extended family whom they interact with. Before the
pandemic, her mother-in-law lived in the same area and provided child care any time Jane or her
husband had to work late. When her mother-in-law passed away, they were left with two small
children and no additional support, which prompted them to move closer to her family.
When the pandemic started, Jane began to work remotely while her children’s schools
and therapy also shifted to a virtual modality. Her oldest child was in pre-school, and they had
just enrolled him at a new school in their new city. The child attended class a handful of times
before they went remote. Her second child was 7 months old and “had some challenges at birth
and was getting some services through infant education and therapy, and all of those went
remote.” Jane had an especially difficult time navigating the changes in her children’s resources:
50

Just the increase of work was a lot, and then I was really upset that I had to be the teacher
with my oldest child and the speech therapist and the infant educator and the physical
therapist. Like, what is that? If you try to do physical therapy with a 2-year-old over
Zoom, it’s not going to happen.
Jane also shared that the challenge of having her older child’s preschool become virtual. The
school gave parents “like a million different accounts and passwords.” She struggled to
remember “the app for downloading assignments versus the one for looking at pictures, and they
had different passwords. Why don’t you just keep it all in one?” Eventually, she stopped asking
her older child to log into remote preschool:
We just stopped. I just gave up, and I’m not kind of a blow-it-off mom, but I became a
blow-it-off mom. Even now, honestly, that things are better, and my child is in
kindergarten, that’s one thing that has changed. If my child really wants to stay at my
mom’s house, I just won’t send them to school.
Jane said that while the teacher does not give homework, she does give suggestions for
assignments that her child can do at home. She admitted that they do not do any of it and said, “If
he asks to do it, I’ll let him know where it is.” She disclosed that she felt “really bad about that
because I feel like I’m ruining their future.”
At the time of our interview, Jane was still working remotely and trying to navigate her
children’s school protocols which was a frustrating process:
My youngest is in pre-school, and my oldest is in kindergarten. For my oldest, whenever
there’s an exposure, you gotta go pick them up, and they all get sent home. I don’t even
remember the rules. They just give you a piece of paper with the rules, and they keep
changing the rules, and I just try to keep up. They have to go get a test, and the negative
51

COVID test has to be 5 days from the exposure, so whenever the child was at school.
Your test can’t be before that, and if it’s negative, then you could send your student. So,
that has already happened a couple of times. I’m so glad that we moved down this area
because if the same situation would have happened in our previous city, how would I
have done this?
Jane reflected on all of the changes that her family has been through during the pandemic as it
relates to her children’s education and development. She said, “I feel like time stopped for me,
but it didn’t stop for them, and they keep growing, and 2 years makes such a difference for their
development. Definitely not in the same place where they were when we started.” She elaborated
on how she had changed as a mom and her new perspective on her children’s early education:
I kind of just became that slack-off mom. My oldest has so many tardies, so many
unexcused absences, I just don’t care. And part of it is because I do work in higher
education. I’m just like, well, that’s not gonna affect his college admissions. And if he
doesn’t get his kindergarten certificate at the end of the year, like, big deal, who cares?
He’s a good kid, he’s a very kind-hearted child, and that’s what I care about.
In addition to being the primary parent responsible for her children’s education, Jane is also the
primary person in charge of managing her household. She does “pretty much everything” in her
home. She is responsible for all of the cleaning, each family member’s schedule, school events,
extracurricular registration for her children, household budget, laundry, and miscellaneous
responsibilities like changing the sheets and taking out the trash. The only thing Jane doesn’t do
in her home is cook. Jane mentioned that she tells her husband, “If you saw inside my brain, it’s
like a constant. There’s a wheel in there, and it’s spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning,
52

spinning.” She also described some of the extra things she does that are not a necessity, like
getting special gifts and cards for her children’s teachers:
I go as far as color-coding the hangers. Just the other day, I realized we have a bunch of
baby clothes that the kids have outgrown. My husband would never notice that, you
know, you’re putting the 2-year-old in 18-month-old clothes. So, I bought hangers in two
colors, one for each child. And you know, I have to be the one to wash the clothes, and
fold them, and put them away because he will not pay attention to the label and put it on
the right hanger. So little things that I think are pretty much extra, but it helps run the
house, it helps keep things going.
As we were wrapping up, Jane felt like maybe she had not conveyed enough information. Jane
apologized by saying, “sorry, I’m probably not giving you enough, but I do everything, like
everything. I just, if it needs managing, I do it. Pretty much, I do everything for everyone.
Everything. It’s always been me doing it all.”
Alma
Alma and I met about a week before Christmas. She is an assistant vice president for
student affairs at a public, 4-year institution. She lives with her husband, her 5-year-old, her 2-
year-old, and, as a result of the pandemic, her adult sister. In the fall of 2019, Alma was
promoted to her current role and also gave birth to her now 2-year-old. She shared,
My pregnancy was really difficult, so I had a lot of anxiety, and I had just really
immersed myself into work to distract myself. Early on, we did a genetic test because I
was an older parent, and the genetic test came back that the baby had down syndrome. I
was not devastated because I had a kid with down syndrome. I just was sad because it
was sort of like what life am I giving my oldest child if I have a child who could
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potentially have all these complications? What life am I giving that child? So, it was a
really difficult time. So, my pregnancy was sort of like any little thing would take me on
a spiral of like a shithole, basically. Any little thing would make me imagine the worst.
Navigating her new professional role and transitioning to her identity as a mother of two was a
complex time for Alma, and doing so within the context of a global pandemic contributed to her
stress.
Pandemic: “Sleep-Deprived ”
Alma had recently returned to her job from maternity leave and said that she was “sleep-
deprived and disconnected from the news,” but a week or 2 after returning to work, senior
administration started to talk about the virus, and she started to pay attention:
My baby was 4 months old, and I had a toddler, and I was just really disoriented, and I
had a lot of self-doubts, and then the pandemic hit, and I had no choice but to snap out of
it.
She focused on work and making sure students had the support they needed as they transitioned
to remote learning.
Mom Life: “There Was No Win-Win Situation. I Just Did the Best That I Could ”
Alma considers herself fortunate to have additional support in terms of child care. She
shared that she felt “very, very lucky” because her mother retired to take care of her children.
Alma’s mother lives an hour away and takes the train to Alma’s house every day. In the first few
months of the pandemic, her mother drove to her house but stopped because “she doesn’t like to
drive. She’s getting older, and she does not like to be on the freeway.” Alma had to make a very
conscious decision about her mother continuing to provide child care because She felt there was
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no way she could continue working from home without her mother’s help. It was a decision that
did not come easy:
Having to make that decision, to sort of sacrifice my mom because she’s over 65, and at
that point, we didn’t know a lot about the virus, but I needed to work. That was a very
difficult decision. I’m sort of experiencing some of that now with Omicron because she
has the vaccine but doesn’t want to get her booster.
Alma’s mother has been the primary person providing child care and supporting Alma’s
oldest through remote learning. When the pandemic began, Alma’s oldest child was in a dual
immersion preschool and was moved to online class via Zoom. The child struggled with the
switch: “She hated Zoom school, hated it. She did not thrive at all. Actually, I think it hurt her
confidence.” The remote environment was also difficult for Alma’s mother to navigate and get
accustomed to. Alma shared that her mother would forget to log her child into Zoom, or her child
would be out on the patio while the Zoom class was going on:
It created so much tension with my mom! Looking back, I’m not 100% sure if I would do
it again because I feel like it created a lot of insecurity in my child. I remember there was
an assessment, and my child could not stop crying, like uncontrollably crying, because
she didn’t know. She just froze up. In the beginning of kindergarten, they did another
assessment, and I felt like I was watching that same scene again. As a result of all of this,
my child is “behind,” but I wasn’t able to provide an educational experience for my kid.
Like, there’s no way. My mom has a third-grade education, she had a newborn who she’s
also taking care of, and I was working all day. There was no win-win situation. I just did
the best that I could.
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Now that Alma’s child is back to learning in person, she is more focused on how to help
her child “be a healthy, happy, individual that’s still interested in school.” She has also reflected
on her child’s transition back to in-person and believes that as an educational system, schools are
not trauma-informed enough:
They just defined my little brown kid as not ready, right, which is fine, she wasn’t ready,
and I know that, but no one asked to understand more. As a system of education, we just
pretend that our students just come here to learn and that they don’t have lives, and I
think about how I want my children’s experiences to be taken into account as they grow
as learners, and yeah there was none of that.
Alma felt like her child’s school did not invest enough in learning more about her child’s
experience during the pandemic.
On the day of our interview, Alma was working from campus, and her husband was
working from home. As we discussed her household responsibilities and mothering, she
suddenly got a text from her daughter’s school. Her daughter had a runny nose and was not
feeling well. Since her husband was at home, he could take care of the situation. This moment
highlighted the types of disruptions that have become commonplace because of COVID-19.
In addition to navigating her child’s education, Alma focused on giving each of her two
children the specialized attention they need to thrive based on their different personalities. Her
children are very different, and, sometimes, their personalities clash, resulting in more work for
her:
It’s just you really, really, hard having to be present at home with the kids and their
different things when I have, like all of these things being thrown at me, including 100%
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of the management of our home, plus all the stuff that I’m doing that work with my job,
the pandemic, student crisis, you know all of those things.
In addition to the tense dynamics between Alma’s children, the oldest child also struggled with
much change in their lives: “My child was struggling because she had recently become an older
sibling. They hated Zoom school, and her needs were not being met at school.” Alma’s adult
sister was also living with them and was attending graduate school online, resulting in “a full
house 24/7.” In light of all of this, Alma and her husband decided to sell their house and move:
We decided that we needed to find a house, that we needed to sell our condo because we
were just on top of each other. Obviously, I have the privilege to be able to say, “ok, I’m
gonna sell my house, and I’m gonna buy another house.” It took us almost 6 months in
this market to find something. Adapting to a new place and new routine in the middle of a
pandemic was not easy. It was a lot of give and take.
Moving to a new city altered Alma’s and her mother’s routine as well as the dynamics in
her household:
It took my mom some adjustment, of all people, to have me at home because she couldn’t
give my kids the iPad 24/7, or she couldn’t just turn on the TV or scream in the middle of
the day because I was in meetings. It really created this interesting dynamic of, like, I’m
parenting, but I’m also helping my mom adjust to having me there and adjust to my sort
of way of doing things because my mom would do whatever she wants with my kids, you
know. It’s not a bad thing, but just different.
Even though many things changed during the pandemic, Alma continued to take on the
majority of the household responsibilities and responsibilities with her family of origin. She
shared that her husband is a helpful and involved parent, but “he doesn’t carry the mental load”
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that she does. In their household, Alma gets help with cooking from her mother and is solely
responsible for everything else related to the household, including budgeting, preparing their
children’s lunches, doctors’ appointments, paying the bills, and all the shopping. Alma said,
His excuse is that he forgets, and I’m like, well, can I forget to pay our mortgage? Can I
forget to go grocery shopping? Can I forget to go buy the kids clothes; can I forget to go
get milk? That’s not an excuse? So, as good as he is with the kids, it is really challenging.
I carry that load all the time. It’s hard.
One household responsibility that Alma has recently outsourced is cleaning.
I’ve hired someone to help me clean once a month. Coming from an immigrant family,
that’s been really, really hard to swallow. I just feel a sense of guilt. And the woman who
comes, she’s become like part of my family. She’s been amazing, but I don’t tell my
mom that I get help because I feel like this judgment that I can’t take care of my husband,
I know it’s stupid, and it’s patriarchal, and it goes against everything that I believe in, but
I can’t tell my mom that I’m having someone come and help me.
When I followed up to ask Alma what kind of support she had during the pandemic with
other household responsibilities that may not be so obvious, she responded with an emphatic
“none!” At times, she feels resentful because she has to handle everything for her own family at
home and for her family of origin. She described a recent conversation with her sister, who
teased her that she is their mother’s favorite. Alma retorted that in order to be her mother’s
favorite, her sister would need to do all the things that Alma usually does:
I’m like, okay, well then, you can be my mom’s driver, my mom’s lawyer, her
interpreter. I still pay her bills; I manage her finances. I have always been that for my
family. I mean, I know that when my family comes over, they’re going to bring me an
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envelope so that I can read something for them because they don’t understand it, or
they’re gonna ask me to order Amazon because they know I have a prime account.
Alma acknowledged that this has always been her role in her family, whether she likes it or not.
She has been trying to create and maintain boundaries with her family, to no avail, but also
admits that she “created this dynamic.”
Liana
Liana, a single mother to a 12-year-old, and I met 2 days before Christmas. She is an
admissions counselor at a public 4-year university and is also finishing a master’s in education at
the same institution. From November to January, she also has a side job where she reds
admissions applications at a different institution. Two years before the pandemic began, she and
her child moved in with her mother and grandparents, who moved here from Central America
before her daughter was born. Before the pandemic, her grandmother passed away, and her aunt
moved in as well. Living with her mother and aunt, who are in their late 60s, and her grandfather,
who is 99 years old, brought additional stress.
In the months leading up to the pandemic, Liana was managing working full-time, being
a graduate student, working out three times a week, and her child’s schedule. She shared that it
was typical for her and her child to not get home until eight or nine in the evening and their
weekends were fully scheduled. Liana’s struggle to balance everything was more pronounced
during the pandemic:
I was always running on fumes, but you don’t know until life makes you slow down.
Every Saturday, my child had a game or some little party from a classmate, and then
Sundays, I would try to do my schoolwork. I would just drag her to the library with me
and use Starbucks as a bribe. So that’s what it was. It was just trying to find time for me
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to do my stuff as well as my child’s, but basically, my life was being run by my child’s
schedule.
Pandemic: “You Think We Had COVID and We Didn ’t Know? ”
Liana recalled that she and several of her family members were sick from December until
the end of January: “I was sick for so long. I was getting desperate like, what the hell’s going on?
To this day, my sister will mention, don’t you think we had COVID and we didn’t know?” It
wasn’t until after a wine-tasting trip in February that she started to pay attention and realized
how serious the situation had become. When schools started to close in New York, it was a
wake-up call for her:
All of us were like, oh my God, we were out drinking wine like nothing was going on!
That’s when the Trump Administration was like, “it’ll be gone. It’s not gonna come here.
We’ll just be racist and make laws to forbid people to come into the country.”
Liana felt like she had added pressure because of her living situation and inability to send her
daughter to school.
Mom Life: “It Has Been a Shitshow ”
Living in an intergenerational home means Liana has many household and familial
responsibilities. Prior to the pandemic, she lived a mile away from her mother’s home. She is
convinced that even if she still lived separately from her mother, grandfather, and aunt, she
would still have been pulled into helping with her mother’s household. Even though she lives in
her mother’s home, she said, “I run my own household. I buy my own groceries for me and my
daughter. Like, I don’t share common things. I cook for us. My mom cooks for her, my aunt, and
my grandfather.” The pandemic increased her responsibilities with her family, and she took on
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more. She was the only one leaving the house for groceries and other necessities. She “became
the grocery runner, household manager, and caretaker.”
The other important context in Liana’s household is that her mother is a nurse’s assistant
at a retirement home. When the pandemic began, and Liana watched cases spike at retirement
homes in New York, she worried,
You know the cases in New York were happening at retirement homes. So that was like
another added worry of, is my mom going to be, okay? Or also, you’re bringing home
these germs, not necessarily to me and my daughter, but my grandfather, he was 97 at the
time. As far as transitioning to working from home, that was a shitshow, but that, for me,
was in the back of my head. I mean, I’ll take FMLA whatever I’ll figure it out, but if my
mom is going to get sick and die, or my grandfather, then that’s a whole other situation
there.
At times, Liana felt it was like having a second child. Ultimately, she acknowledges she does a
lot for her family with little support from anyone else. As a single mom to a 12-year-old child,
Liana is careful not to put additional responsibilities on her child. Liana notes that her child
has always been a helpful person, even at school, but she’s still a child, and I don’t want
to put those responsibilities on her. She’s still 12. So, she helps, but also, there’s a fine
line of me setting the boundaries. She’s a child, and my family can’t expect her to do
adult responsibilities as far as other support. The only support I’ve had was that I would
tell my siblings that I needed money to cover the expenses because it’s not fair that I’m
the single parent and paying for things.
Along with helping the family members with whom she shares a household, Liana
periodically provided child care for her nephew. Liana’s sister is a first responder, and in May of
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2020, was put on tactical alert due to the social uprisings as a result of George Floyd’s murder.
Liana shared,
The protests were occurring, and my sister and her husband are first responders. There
was a week that they got put on tactical alert, and they had been relying on her in-laws to
babysit my nephew. They were put on tactical alert for weeks at a time, so in order to
help, she asked me to take him. So, I had him for a week here as I’m working, doing my
schoolwork, my daughter is doing her homework, and I now had a baby who was 4 or 5
months old at the time. Throughout this pandemic, I’ve had him here maybe a total of
three times. Twice for a full week and then another time just a couple of days when they
thought that something else was going to happen. So yeah, I mean, it has been a shitshow.
Of course, Liana is also navigating motherhood and parenting her child. Liana’s child was
enrolled in a private Catholic school when the pandemic started, and Liana was taking master’s
courses at the university where she works. Liana noted that her daughter’s school environment
was a great fit for them:
Even just being a commuter and a parent who raises her alone, a private school has come
in handy in different ways that I can never imagine having at a public school. It’s really
been a loving environment. She’s hyperactive. She’s always been a very talkative social
butterfly, and they take it as something special. They don’t discipline children for that.
They find other avenues like, let’s take a walk around the school or let’s go pick flowers
or things like that. I know that they actually care for my child.
Early in the pandemic, all of their social activities were canceled, and her daughter’s
school moved to Zoom. The school schedule shifted to minimum days, but the teachers were on
Zoom after lunch to support students who had questions about the homework or the lessons,
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“they were making themselves available to help every child. Nobody was going to fail, and I
have friends who have kids in public schools, and that was not the way their schools were run.”
Liana went on to share that even with her children’s school being supportive and high-touch,
there was still a lot of change and uncertainty:
During the first couple of months of online school, her school did not care where the kids
sat or what they were wearing. When they went back for fall 2020, the kids had to wear
their uniforms and be sitting at a desk. It was like they had given the kids a break the first
few months, but now it was real. The principal and the archdiocese kept saying that they
were thinking that after spring break, the kids would return in a hybrid model, but it
didn’t happen until the end of April 2021.
In the spring of 2021, Liana had to decide if she would send her daughter back to school. She
knew the structure would be very different for her child as the schedule had changed, there were
social distancing and masking requirements, and there still were no extracurricular activities
taking place. Liana decided to send her child back to school, including after-school care, with the
expectation that she would keep her mask on at all times to protect Liana’s grandfather. Liana
and her daughter hated that she would be at school until 6 p.m., but it was only twice a week, and
Liana believes it was best for her child’s education and social development.
Josefina
Minutes into my early January 2022 interview with Josefina, her mother walked into
frame, her 3-year-old asked her for something, and my 5-year-old interrupted our Zoom call. It
has become a familiar experience to share personal and professional spaces in a manner unlike
anything before. By coincidence, both of our children had been exposed to COVID-19 the day
before our interview, so our families were in isolation awaiting test results.
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Josefina is a diversity and inclusion officer for an engineering department at a private
research institution in California. She and her husband share a 5-year-old, a 3-year-old, and a 1-
year-old. Josefina started her current job in 2018 and had been back at work from maternity
leave after having her second baby for just under a year. In early March 2020, she found out she
was pregnant with her third child. She felt nervous about sharing her exciting news:
I had my first baby in a different department, and I was not in a healthy workspace when
I shared with that supervisor that I was pregnant. She did not respond well. I’d already
been working there for several years. I worked really hard all the time. Like all the time
around the clock type of thing, and she counted on me a lot, but she wasn’t a great boss.
She definitely put a lot, too much, on my plate. But, at the time, I didn’t have any kids,
and work was super, super important to me, and I would just do it because I cared about
the work, and I still do. I just look at work differently now since becoming a parent.
Josefina’s nervousness around sharing the news of her second and third pregnancies is not trivial.
Research has shown that for professional women, becoming a mother has a negative impact on
their career trajectory (Hodge, 2017; Lapayese, 2017; Mannon, 2020). Luckily for her, Josefina’s
new boss took the news well: “When I told my new boss that I was pregnant, she was so great
about it. She herself has kids, and she’s a woman of color, and I do think that that made a big
difference.”
Pandemic: “This Is Intense ”
Josefina remembers learning about the pandemic in February of 2020, “I was reading
articles and hearing stories of what was happening in China, and I remember watching
somebody’s videos of being in quarantine, and I thought, this is intense and serious, and
wondered if it would happen here.” Josefina also recalled comparisons to the H1N1 pandemic
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(Cox, 2020) and how college campuses handled that endemic and the decision-making process at
the executive level.
Mom Life: “If My Life Was a Four-Pane Window … I Run Out of Panes ”
Prior to the pandemic, Josefina was the primary parent in her home due to her husband’s
work hours and commute. She said,
That’s circumstantial. It’s not necessarily because we assigned a gender role to it. I work
closer, my hours are a little bit different, my job is a little more flexible. So, I have been
the primary parent sort of since day one. Pre-pandemic, it was stressful to get up on time,
get the kids up and dressed, get them out of the house, drop off, go to work, pick them up,
come home, and do the evening routine by myself until he got home. And then dinner and
bedtime and all that good stuff. It was a different kind of stress.
Josefina was trying to balance being a working mother with being a present parent, something
she did not necessarily experience as a child because both of her parents worked long hours
while she was growing up. At the beginning of the pandemic, Josefina found out she was
pregnant. Josefina noted that being pregnant with her third child was the “foundation for my
primary experience during the pandemic.” Josefina shared a photo of her very first ultrasound
(Figure 3), which she received on March 9, 2020, just days before the world shut down.

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Figure 3
Josefina’s First Ultrasound, Taken on March 9, 2020

Navigating a pregnancy during the pandemic was not a comfortable experience for
Josefina:
I was afraid to go out, and then when we finally started going out, I had to wear a mask
and, like, you’re already short of breath when you’re pregnant. I was pregnant during
peak summer. It was like 100 degrees, and like I’m standing in lines to get into grocery
stores, sweating, and feeling like I can’t breathe but feeling like if I take my mask off,
I’m going to put myself and the baby at risk, and on top of that having to go to doctors’
appointments alone.
Josefina was also navigating how her pregnancy fit into her work life. She did not share her
pregnancy with anyone at work because it was “too early.” She recalled that she would be in
Zoom meetings with her colleagues, and if she shifted just right, people could see her “big baby
belly” and ask if she was pregnant. Josefina recalled responding, “oh, did I not tell you about
that?” She also felt grateful that her colleagues were finding out.
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Josefina describes the onset of the pandemic as “a really tough time” for her and her
family. Josefina’s husband works in IT and was considered an essential worker who could not
work remotely. Initially, Josefina was working remotely, and their children were still being taken
care of by their babysitter. Eventually, Josefina’s husband joined her in working remotely, and
for a time, they stopped sending their children to the babysitter, so the four of them were home
together for a long time. Josefina is also a doctoral student and is very involved with her family
of origin. Josefina shared with me that when she thinks of all her roles, she sometimes forgets
she is a student:
I’m a student, right, that’s right! That one always seems to fall off the list when I start
listing my identities. When I’m processing with my husband, one of the ways I’ve
described it is like if my life was a four-pane window. I have my mom role, and I’m the
wife, and I’m a sister and a daughter, and then I’m like, where? Like, I run out of panes.
Like my window doesn’t have enough panes to also be a great employee and be a great
student, and it is tough. It’s tough to squeeze everything in and sometimes even being a
wife, we sacrifice our time together all the time.
Forgetting she is a student is ironic because education is a core value for Josefina. She
recognizes that her parents had different expectations when it came to education, which is part of
the reason she prioritizes her children’s education. Pre-pandemic, her oldest was “enrolled in an
amazing preschool with an amazing teacher and having a great experience.” When the pre-school
went remote, she and her husband made it a point to keep their babysitter employed. They
purchased school supplies, dividers, and tablets and helped turn space in the babysitter’s home
into a pseudo-classroom for Josefina’s two children, the babysitter’s four children, and two
additional children whom she was caring for during the pandemic. It was important for Josefina
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to keep their babysitter employed: “They are an immigrant family; they have limited income, and
she relies heavily on us as a primary family for her.” Josefina eventually realized that it was
unreasonable for the babysitter to sit with her daughter on Zoom for 3 hours a day when there
were multiple other children who needed online learning, but she felt compelled to keep her on:
Pulling her felt so unfair. I was like, if I pull her, I’m pulling that income, and
simultaneously, how am I supposed to work? I went back and forth on that for the first
couple of weeks for a long time. We tried to make it happen so I could work, she could
get paid, and my kids could go to school.
Navigating Zoom classes was a challenge for Josefina’s daughter, who had never used a
computer before. When Josefina decided to keep her children home instead of sending them to
the babysitter, Josefina had to sit with her child, teaching her how to use a mouse, keeping her
focused, and making sure she was on task. Not only did it present a challenge with her work
schedule, but she also knew her child was not having a great experience. Her child was not
learning in Zoom class, and she was having a hard time with homework and retaining
information. Josefina decided not to do any summer programming for her child and kept her
home until they enrolled her in a Catholic school in the fall of 2021. With her child’s return to in-
person learning came new stressors. At the time of enrollment, there were no approved vaccines
for children under 12, but as Josefina shared, “she needed the social interaction. She was getting
anxious and missing her friends.” Josefina already felt like her daughter had missed a piece of
her childhood, and she could not continue to deny her the ability to learn with her peers.
Beyond her children’s formal education, Josefina relied heavily on family outings for her
children’s social development, entertainment, and play. Josefina recalled that pre-pandemic, they
would “go to Target, buy them a little pizza and popcorn and push them around and chill.” When
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places like malls, parks, and playgrounds were closed, Josefina remembers her children’s
boredom, “People were quarantining, nobody could come help us, and the kids were bored and
stir crazy, and I was like, I don’t know how to entertain them for these many hours in our little
house..” To keep her children entertained and “to keep them from destroying the house” while
she worked, Josefina and her husband invested in fun outdoor play activities (Figure 4).

Figure 4
Josefina’s Pop-Up Pool

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Josefina shared that deep into the pandemic, they decided they needed more things for
their children to do all day and on the weekends. They started buying pop-up pools and outdoor
activities. She and her husband would tell their children, “It’s recess. Go have fun and then sit
nearby and work and take Zoom meetings.” Josefina noted that their ability to invest in their
children’s play felt like the only way to give them some sense of normalcy while getting them
out of the house.
In addition to Josefina’s responsibilities with her children, Josefina has an immense
amount of responsibility with her extended family. She also frequently relies on them for
support. Josefina learned early on in motherhood that “it takes a village” and outsourced help
where she could and relied on her family where she could not. In the first few weeks of the
pandemic, Josefina’s family was “quarantining in isolation but moved into a bubble very early in
the process” because they saw her “drowning.” Josefina remembers creating a pod with her
family early on:
We decided we were gonna be a pod. I think before we were even talking about pods, we
had that language. We sort of shifted into that mode right away, and I think that’s
reflective of this strong family value we have. That’s just always been like an ingrained
part of our experience, that our family value is so critical and so that that made a really
big difference. It was so helpful.
While the additional support was extremely helpful for Josefina, it did not mean that she did not
also have responsibilities to address within her extended family. Josefina’s parents went through
a “late in life divorce,” which meant Josefina felt a “very strong responsibility to be there” for
her mother, who felt blindsided by the process. Josefina acknowledges that her family is very
involved with each other:
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They are all up in my life, and I am all up in theirs, and we all live like 5 minutes away
from each other, so between just like my family, and my siblings, and my mom, and my
dad, somebody always needs something. Like always.
Josefina is grateful that her job affords her some flexibility, but it is still a challenge to
navigate all her responsibilities because she feels it is never-ending. As she put it, “It’s all of the
things all of the time.”
Elvia
Elvia and I spoke in early January. The day I conducted Elvia’s interview, I was
quarantined in my bedroom with my 5-year-old, who had tested positive for COVID-19 a few
days earlier. Because my daughter was positive, but everyone else in our family was negative,
my partner and I decided I would quarantine with her and either take time off of work or request
to work from home until she tested negative while he cared for our older 8-year-old. During
Elvia’s Zoom interview, I wore a K95 mask to avoid getting COVID from my daughter. Elvia
was kind and understanding about the situation.
Elvia is a mom to a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old and serves as an academic advisor for a
public health program at a private research institution. She and her husband live with their two
children, and her aunt goes to their home every day to provide child care. In 2018, Elvia was laid
off shortly after returning from maternity leave. In August of 2019, she started a student affairs
position in the public health department at her institution, so when the pandemic hit, she was still
pretty new to her role. Adjusting to her new role was stressful: “My job was a new position. I
wasn’t replacing anybody, so I was just kind of figuring out what my role was in addition to
learning all the new systems. It was very stressful.”
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Pandemic: “Oh My God, What if I Have This Virus? ”
Elvia recalled learning about COVID-19 in January of 2020 from the news and from
being very connected to people in the public health field who were doing infectious disease
work. Additionally, Elvia was sick early in the year and wondered if it was COVID-19: “I
remember getting sick like I had a really bad cold, and I was like, oh my God, what if I have this
virus?” She discussed the moment she heard that the virus had made its way to California, “in
March, we heard that there was a case in San Francisco, and we were like holy shit, yeah, this
is…this is bad.”
Mom Life: “I ’m Just Trying to Survive ”
Elvia was acclimating to a new job and managing motherhood during the pandemic, and
in August of 2021, she enrolled in a doctoral program. In 2019 when she was interviewing for
jobs, she hired her 75-year-old aunt to go to her house twice a week to help with her baby while
her older child went to preschool. When the pandemic began, Elvia did not know what would
happen with her son’s schooling: “I assumed he was still going to go to school, and I was going
to be at home, so it’s going to be easy for me to just take him to school and come back home and
work.” Early on, her son’s school “sort of went back and forth” on whether they would remain
open. Since Elvia’s son was in a preschool at a local community college, parents were told they
did not have to take their kids to school because the campus was delivering academic and
support services remotely. Elvia struggled with what to do:
I was like, oh my God, I still have to work, but then in my mind, I was like, this is big,
this is a global pandemic. Other parents were still sending their kids to school, but I told
them that he was not going to go to school while I was working at home, for the month,
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or whatever. They were okay with that, but then the following week, they came out
saying that they were going to be closed as long as the campus was closed.
Elvia had to navigate working from home with her children unable to attend school or daycare.
At the time, her aunt lived far away, so they asked her to move in with them:
We bought a bed to put in my daughter’s nursery, and we said, “We don’t want you on
the bus. Can you stay with us”? And she said yeah because she was scared, you know, so
that’s when she moved in and lived with us. To help me with my daughter and my son
because now my son was at home.
In May of 2021, Elvia and her family moved to live closer to family. Their new home is
just a couple of blocks away from her aunt, so her aunt is now able to walk back and forth to
assist with child care for Elvia’s children. Elvia’s children are both back to in-person learning, an
experience that has come with its challenges. Elvia’s daughter is enrolled in pre-school 3 hours
per day, and her son is in a local charter school all day. The week that Elvia’s daughter started
preschool, the early education program she is enrolled in was open for only 2 days before they
had to close due to COVID-19 cases. Elvia again had a hard choice to make:
They closed down after 2 days because of positive cases. I’m not sure if it was among the
staff or the students, but I did not send her back because they were requiring a COVID
test, and I didn’t take her. I just kind of blew it off, so she’s at home for the next couple
weeks. I’m not really sure for how long. They haven’t told us when it’s going to reopen.
Elvia is thankful that she can rely on her aunt for child care while they are all adjusting to being
back to in-person learning and working.
Elvia shared she has help with most household responsibilities as they are shared among
her partner, her aunt, and herself. Tasks such as school drop-off and pick-up, helping her child
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with homework, extracurricular activities, cooking, and cleaning take coordination, but
ultimately, they are shared responsibilities:
I think it was a combination, and obviously, they picked up a lot of it. I’ve never done it
all. I’ve always shared the responsibilities, but it seemed like going to the market and all
that just became an extra feat that I would take on, but my partner’s always been there
with me, so I would share that responsibility. So, it was shared.
Despite the help, Elvia feels like it was still a challenge to manage everything, and it took a toll
on her mothering. For the first time, Elvia had to give in and let her children spend more time in
front of screens (Figures 5 and 6).

Figure 5
Elvia’s Son in Front of the Television

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Figure 6
Elvia’s Daughter in Front of a Tablet

Elvia described her photos:
These pictures are from December. I was working in the living room, and my kids were
in front of me. As much as I hate a TV as a babysitter, I’ve had to just accept it. That’s
been really hard for me because I’m more of a hands-on parent, and when they’re young,
it’s like the most important time of their brain development, and I’m just trying to
survive. That is my mode of survival, just surviving and keeping them safe. Being
indoors to me is like the safest that we can do right now.
Elvia felt like a lot of her pandemic experience was just surviving and trying to keep her children
entertained while keeping them safe.
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Chapter Summary
Participants shared several similarities in their identities and life experiences prior to and
during the pandemic. Several of the participants were balancing graduate school in addition to
working and mothering, and many of them also moved during the pandemic. Additionally, half
of the participants gave birth in 2019 or 2020, adding the challenge of navigating the pandemic
with an infant. All but one participant described managing their households almost entirely on
their own.
Despite everything that participants were managing in and out of their homes,
participants questioned themselves. Several participants felt like they were “not woman enough”,
not Latina mom enough, because they were not managing their homes the way their mothers did.
While some participants comfortably outsourced household responsibilities, others felt they had
to take it all on themselves. In one case, a participant refused to share with her mother that she
had hired help because of the fear of judgement that she couldn’t take care of her family
properly.
This chapter presented photos and testimonios highlighting how the pandemic impacted
these participants’ mothering. Participants shared feeling like they had to change their parenting
approach and struggled to manage everything. Participants also shared photos that symbolized
what it was like to parent during the pandemic. These changes often came with struggle, doubt,
and stress. The following chapter details these participants’ identity, mental health, and coping.

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Chapter Five: Personal World, Identity, Mental Health, and Coping
For the six participants in this study, the pandemic came with a range of emotions
resulting in these participants experiencing stress, anxiety, depression, lack of sleep, and
loneliness. Participants shared a common thread of feeling like they were drowning, treading
water, or just merely trying to survive their new reality.
Participants also grappled with how their identity played a role in their experiences
throughout the pandemic. Several of the participants felt the impact of the social uprisings in the
summer of 2020 within their academic settings, as professionals, and in their personal lives.
Participants shared how being a Latina mother is unique and reflected on the way they were
mothered growing up.
Participants also shared how they coped as a result of the emotions incurred by the
pandemic. Participants reflected on the ways they managed their feelings, and several shared that
they stopped being able to self-manage and turned to outside support. Coping mechanisms
included therapy, anxiety medication, self-medicating with alcohol, and walking.
Paloma: “In Between a Virtual World and An In-Person World ”
During the height of the pandemic, Paloma felt “a lot” of anxiety, depression, and guilt.
Paloma found that she was watching the news more, and it would cause her to “feel way more
anxiety and worry more.” Paloma said that her “anxiety was the worst.” Paloma described
feeling like she was drowning and shared a photo that symbolizes that for her (Figure 7):

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Figure 7
Paloma’s Son’s Shoes in a Puddle of Water

Paloma felt like she was “always underwater” and like she was “drowning” but did not
know how to ask for help. While Paloma experienced anxiety, there were also times when she
was really depressed. Paloma shared that she felt “frozen at times, like with no motivation at all.”
She also struggled with being a student and the lack of concern for the reality of what everyone
was living:
I feel like my instructors never really acknowledged that we’re in a pandemic, never
really acknowledged the George Floyd incident. I just feel like it was traumatic because
we never really got to talk about anything. We were just expected to move on, business as
usual. I feel like this year was really traumatic, and we had no real opportunities to
connect or even acknowledge what we were going through. That has been really hard.
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Paloma also struggled with feelings of guilt because she could not handle all of her
responsibilities. Paloma described how her relationship suffered during the pandemic:
So, my relationship struggled, and I felt like I was going crazy because I didn’t have
anybody to talk to, so it was hard for both my husband and I to balance it all. I think my
husband, at some point, felt like, “oh well, you’re home. You could do it all. Plus, why is
the house not clean?” There was more expectation of like, oh well, you’re just home. You
could easily do this or that, but in reality, it was really hard to balance all of that. I feel
like I still felt guilty. I feel like I was doing what I can, but on top of that, feeling guilty
because I wasn’t catching up with everything. There was this expectation of, oh well,
you’re home, you can do it, but it’s like no, I can’t.
All of this led to Paloma feeling generally overwhelmed. She struggled to express how she felt
because there was much uncertainty and confusion. At some point, she realized she was not
“taking the pandemic seriously enough” and realized that it was because she just “felt numb by
that point; it was too much to process.” Even now that she has returned to working in person, she
is still very aware that she is still “living in a pandemic” and continues to feel overwhelmed.
Paloma feels like she is “in between a virtual world and an in-person world. It’s more work, and
it’s still overwhelming.” Paloma recognizes that her motivation is still suffering, and she
constantly has to “prioritize and evaluate” where she is so she can keep up with all of her
responsibilities.
The one thing that helped Paloma most was keeping busy with her son. She described her
son as “a physical 4-year-old with a lot of energy.” When her city went through “really bad
fires,” Paloma said it was “very depressing” that they could not go out on walks to help with
their mental health. She coped by trying to do a lot of children’s activities and going for walks
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when it was safe to do so. Paloma believes staying active with her son helped her overall well-
being and that her son reminded her to “keep moving, keep walking regardless of whatever was
happening.”
Jane: “I Could No Longer Just Self-Manage ”
Jane “always had depression and anxiety but always just sort of self-managed” until the
pandemic. Jane recalls speaking with students who were struggling and telling them,
I mean this from the bottom of my heart, you matter so much more than a grade. A grade
can be changed. A grade can be fixed. You’re a person. You are not this paper. This
doesn’t represent you. You are so much more. If you need help, if you need support.
Let’s find something to get you the help you need.
Jane shared that despite the thoughtful and genuine advice she gives students, she hesitated to
take that advice for herself: “here I am struggling, and yet I wasn’t seeking help for myself. I’ve
always just dealt with it, and I felt like such a hypocrite.” Jane shared that her inability to have
contact with others increased her depression and anxiety. She felt “very, very, very lonely …
extremely, extremely lonely.” Jane further shared that she “had no one to talk to, no friends,” and
her personal life “just kinda sucks.” She does not “go out to like brunches with girlfriends or
really do anything. I just clean the house, and I sleep.” Jane is a natural introvert, and it is hard
for her to make friends in general, but now that she is in a new city during a pandemic, it has
been even more challenging. She realized she depended on her workspace for any social
interaction, and having that cut off because of the pandemic had a negative impact on her overall
well-being. Eventually, Jane decided to seek help.

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Jane was stressed about the “mess in the house.” She was struggling with loneliness and
having a hard time sleeping. When she finally decided to seek help, she was prescribed
medication:
For the first time in my life, during the pandemic, the depression and the anxiety got to a
point that I could no longer just self-manage, and I had to seek professional help.
I was given a prescription for antidepressants, so I take a daily antidepressant, and then I
have two additional anti-anxiety prescriptions, which I can take as needed. And that has
actually really helped because otherwise, I feel like I would just be in this dark, dark
space.
Jane acknowledged feeling grateful for the medication (Figure 8). Although she had anxiety and
depression prior to the pandemic, the pandemic “sure as heck made it worse.” However, once she
was taking the medication, she felt better. Jane shared that recently, while her kids were at school
and she was working from home, her house was really quiet, which would normally make her
“really sad, and the sadness would overcome” her. However, she was “okay because the
medication helps.” She can also sleep because at night, when she starts “going through the to-do
list, which just keeps going and going and going.” She takes the anti-anxiety pills to help her
“manage … otherwise, it gets very, very, very, very overwhelming.”

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Figure 8
Medicine Bottles

Jane shared that she still feels generally tired and overwhelmed. Recently, Jane could not
sleep because she was concerned about the mess in her home:
Last night, I was up till 2 o’clock in the morning organizing the garage. The night before,
I’m not lying to you, I was up till 7:30 in the morning just cleaning the house.
Sometimes, I will be up until like four or five just cleaning the house because that’s the
only time I can do it. So, I’m just tired all the time.
Jane said that being so tired is damaging her parenting. Jane feels like all she does is clean the
house and work, so by the time the weekend comes, she is too tired for anything else. Jane and
her husband still take their children out on weekends to do fun things so that they are not “totally
like jerk parents,” but they are exhausted and have no energy at the end of the week. Jane is
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trying to keep her head “above water” because she feels like she is “being pulled in so many
different directions.”
Jane has been able to rely on her parents during the pandemic, which has come with a
level of reflection on how she grew up and her identity. Jane’s parents are “like old school
Mexican” and did not mind watching Jane’s kids whenever she asked:
They were just like, “this is stupid. Just bring them to us. This doesn’t affect us. We’re
from Mexico. This doesn’t affect us.” So, we finally just gave up. We’re just like, please
take the kids so we can do our work and have some sanity.
Jane is very connected to her Mexican-American identity and how that shows up for her,
especially because her husband is White. Jane tells her husband that as a mom to sons who “look
like little Mexican boys,” she has to make it known that their mom is not “ignorant” and
understands the educational system. Jane said she will not let her children “be left behind
because someone makes a judgment about them based on their skin color.” Jane further
explained that if she feels her sons are not getting treated properly at school, she is “going to go
mama bear” because that was done to her, and her mother didn’t have the resources to advocate
for her. This reflection on her upbringing and identity contributes to the stress she feels because
it contributes to her mothering approach. In the end, that stress is slightly alleviated by having
her parents’ support. Jane explained, “I cannot even fathom or imagine what life would have
been like living in my previous city with absolutely no support during this pandemic.”
Alma: “I Was Having Panic Attacks ”
Alma dealt with “postpartum, anxiety, loneliness,” and a general sense of feeling
overwhelmed. She gave birth to her second child in late 2019, and in the months leading to the
pandemic, she felt “unlike” herself. She stated that her “hormones were all over the place,” and
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she believes she “had some postpartum stuff going on,” so everything was compounding for her.
Alma shared that she felt isolated and with few options for connection:
I had a lot of anxiety, and all of these things were compounding. I had no coworkers. I
had been at home already for 4 months with very little adult interaction besides my mom
and my husband and my sister. I had no sense of professional identity. It was just very
isolating and very anxiety-provoking. And there was no breathing room to do it any other
way.
Alma shared that her struggles during postpartum were reflected in her relationship with her
second child. She “had a hard time bonding” with her daughter, who is now more attached to her
father:
It is really hard to accept as a mom that you hadn’t bonded with your child because you
were so busy trying to save the world. You know, institutions don’t love you, and as hard
as the pandemic was, I was able to see my baby walk. I was able to see her say her first
word. I was able to be there. I was able to have dance parties at lunchtime, so as hard as it
was, I also had really good moments. But I was also so rushed all the time that I didn’t
even get the opportunity to really live in this historic moment and really remember all the
things that we went through together as a family. It really took a lot out of me.
In addition to feeling anxiety and her experiences after giving birth, Alma experienced loneliness
because of lack of contact with colleagues, limited social interactions, and a fractured friendship.
She expressed that this negatively impacted her well-being:
I don’t think that we talk enough about what this pandemic has done to relationships. One
of my best friends refuses to get vaccinated. I made a very intentional decision about not
hanging out with folks who haven’t gotten the vaccine. We used to hang out like every
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other weekend, and she has two girls almost the same age as mine, so it was really hard
for my kid, too. We were very cautious because I had a really young baby, so, for me,
that was a decision I had to make, but it did create additional stress.
Alma expressed that it was a lot for her to navigate, and there were times she would “just cry”
because of the stress and pressure she was under. She also shared that she feels “unsupported”
through this, and “it’s hard not to become resentful.”
Alma revealed that due to the stress, burnout, and anxiety she was under during the
pandemic, she started seeing a therapist:
I started doing therapy because I was having a lot of anxiety, like a lot of anxiety. I was
having panic attacks, and at night, I couldn’t sleep. And that was a hard decision for me
to make, to really acknowledge that I had had all this time, that I knew that I had
postpartum depression or anxiety, and I didn’t take care of it because I was so busy being
a badass at work, which no one asked me to be a badass but, you know, I was so busy
sort of in crisis mode. I didn’t realize that I hadn’t addressed sort of like the issues that I
talked to you about, you know, my pregnancy, my baby being in the NICU, and I had sort
of missed the opportunity to really delve into all those emotions and all these feelings,
and it was really difficult to be that vulnerable.
Alma acknowledged that she could not handle it all, so being able to discuss her feelings with a
therapist made a difference.
Liana: “I Was Either Stress Eating or Having Cocktails ”
Liana did not expect to feel as overwhelmed as during the pandemic. She shared that at
the beginning of the pandemic, she was unfazed: “a little stay-at-home order for 2 weeks, ok,
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fine whatever. This will be fine. I feel like I’ve been through worse shit in my life.” As time went
on, she started to struggle with the pressure of all her responsibilities:
As time went on and the orders continued, I just felt like it was coming from all angles,
the world, and then the fact that I’m now responsible for these elderly people. I’m the
only sibling with this proximity, and then I’m being asked to watch my baby nephew, and
you know, then it was like, are you really … are you kidding me right now? I really
started to get so overwhelmed, and I’m not a person that shows that.
Liana shared that a defining moment of the pandemic was when her mother was exposed
to COVID-19 at work early on before vaccines were available. Her daughter was in her online
class, and Liana was working remotely when her mother interrupted her to divulge that she had
been exposed at work. She recalls thinking, “it’s the middle of the workday. What the fuck,
really? Like really? Are we really doing this right now?” She knew she would have to jump into
action. As a “daughter of an immigrant,” she is “used to being a translator and booking all the
doctors’ appointments,” as it is a role she has taken on her entire life. Her mother’s doctor would
not see her and suggested they try the emergency room instead, but also reminded them that
going there came with an increased risk of exposure. After finding that calling the doctor was
“useless,” Liana tried calling the city and taking her mother to urgent care, which turned out to
be dead ends offering nothing. Eventually, she took her mother to a COVID-19 testing site run
by the county at their local community college (Figure 9). She met roadblocks at that testing site
as well:
I go in and say, “She needs a test. She works in a nursing home. She’s 60 something.”
They asked if she had a sore throat, and she did. They asked if she had a fever, and she
didn’t, so she didn’t qualify. By that point, I was losing my shit. So, we went into the
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tent, and they wouldn’t test her. This doctor who was working there from the city told her
the best that she could do was just to give her a note to stay home.

Figure 9
A COVID-19 Testing Tent Set Up in a Community College Parking Lot

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Figure 10
The Note Given to Liana’s Mother After Her COVID-19 Exposure

Liana recalled “going mama bear” and repeatedly asking what the point of them being
there was if they couldn’t help someone in a high-risk category The medical provider at the
county site was appalled that her mother was refused medical care from her primary physician,
but also expressed that her hands were tied and she could not provide anything other than the
note (Figure 10). This was a defining moment because it highlighted both her cultural
responsibility as a Latina daughter and the inequities in healthcare. This situation contributed to
her stress:
I felt like I had another child to advocate for. I was irritated to now have to balance being
an individual, a woman, a mother, and a daughter but also a parent type, being
parentified. And at the same time, it was just like making sure she was fine because she
was losing her shit, too, and she isn’t familiar with anxiety and mental health to know
how to navigate that.
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Liana also revealed how she dealt with the stress she incurred during the pandemic. Initially, she
was going to therapy, but it was not helping with the transition. Eventually, she started coping in
different ways:
I started having a couple of Trulys here and there at night. Before COVID, I was really
into working out and being in shape. I had lost like 50 pounds months prior to that, and
then I gained weight because I was at home stress eating. I was either stress eating or
having cocktails at night.
Liana continued to see her therapist throughout the pandemic and relied on time outside to help
her cope. Going on walks with her nephew was one of the ways she “stayed sane” during the
pandemic.
Josefina: “Just Trying to Stay Above Water ”
Josefina felt a shift in her mental health once she started to work from home. Josefina
acknowledges that prior to the pandemic, going into the office was “actually really good” for her
mental health as she was “able to be an adult person at work.” Moving to remote work was,
therefore, a difficult transition for her. Prior to the pandemic, Josefina felt like she was
compartmentalizing, and that worked for her:
I felt like being able to isolate some of my identities prior to the pandemic and getting
space from one thing or another was really helpful. And then, like, all of that merging
together in one space after March 2020 was really challenging. It took a lot of relearning
of how to emotionally support myself.
Josefina experienced anxiety around her work identity and her identity as a parent merging. She
recalls thinking early on, “What if my kids come in during a Zoom meeting? What are people
going to say?” Josefina had a hard time figuring out “who was in the same boat and who wasn’t”
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and knowing that while there were colleagues who were just like her, “just trying to stay above
water,” there were also colleagues who could not understand her and were “taking on new
exercise and diet routines and living their best lives in the pandemic.”
Josefina adds that there are culturally relevant factors that contribute to how she is living
through the pandemic. Josefina asserted,
There are women of color in our workspaces who are living the same sort of
responsibilities I am. We’re mothers, and we’re juggling several hats, and we’ve got kids
that want to be with us and sit on our lap, and while we’re doing all the things, there are
also women of color who have responsibilities to their parents, responsibilities to their
sisters, their siblings and their nieces and nephews. We’re also dealing with cultural
stereotypes, cultural intergenerational trauma, and other things. As a person of color,
there’s so many layers to your identity as a working parent. It’s a lot. It’s been a
challenging time.
Josefina admits that now that she is no longer working remotely and her children are in daycare
and school in-person, she is still feeling overwhelmed. With her daughter recently being exposed
to COVID-19 and her family having to quarantine, she feels like she is “back in 2020,
scrambling to wear all the hats.” Even though Josefina is struggling to find balance, she
expressed gratitude for being able to discuss these obstacles, calling it “very cathartic.”
Elvia: “I Didn ’t Know What I Was Doing ”
Elvia works in the public health department at her university, which came with a unique
set of stress. Elvia works with “epidemiologists who are actually doing research, started doing
research since the pandemic started” and shares that it is “very stressful to be in the data all the
time.” In addition to the stress, Elvia experienced insomnia and anxiety during the pandemic.
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Elvia shared that she has dealt with anxiety for a long time; however, it was “pretty much
controlled from college up until the pandemic.” Elvia started to feel anxious “all the time” and
having “really bad panic attacks.” Through tears, Elvia explained that she felt anxious and
overwhelmed all over again with the rise of cases due to the Omicron variant:
I’m gonna cry because I’m feeling that all over again this week. It has all been very
stressful. It’s like being back in 2020 when I didn’t know what I was doing. I was
worried about my kids’ development because they were isolated. I remember having
insomnia and just being worried about my kids’ development because this was not
normal, and it was stressing me out. I started a doctoral program in August, and we have
a group chat, and everybody’s like, “how’s everybody doing?” I’m like, “I feel like it’s
March 2020 all over again.”
Eventually, Elvia’s panic attacks and insomnia led her to seek professional help. Elvia meets
with a therapist once a month who is able to give her resources on managing her anxiety. Elvia is
grateful to have the support so her “stress doesn’t get out of control.” In addition to meeting with
a therapist, Elvia connects with friends to help her cope. Elvia stays connected with friends
virtually through Zoom gatherings and book clubs. She also has a good relationship with her
partner and kids and has found ways to do safe and fun activities with her family. Her family
also took on a project when libraries were closed:
I wanted to put a little library outside our house because the local libraries were closed,
and so it became a family project, and we built it and painted it, and we have it outside,
and it’s something that we take care of as a family.
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Elvia feels that despite the stress and anxiety caused by the pandemic, her personal life is
“great.” Her main priority is everybody’s health and safety, and she cannot wait for this all to be
over.
Chapter Summary
The women in this study spoke openly about the ways in which their mental health was
negatively impacted during the pandemic. The consequences of the pandemic resulted in feelings
of, guilt, numbness, depression, and loneliness. The loss of loved ones, fear of the virus, and
general stress took a toll on participants’ health and resulted in insomnia, anxiety, and trauma.
The general trauma of being in constant crisis had a negative impact on participants’ parenting,
relationships, and professional practice. Participants sought help, sometimes for the first time, in
a variety of ways including therapy and medication.
Photo-elicitation and the testimonios of these women show they experienced a range of
emotions, thought processes, and transitions. Every participant expressed being negatively
impacted by the consequences of COVID-19 and feeling overwhelmed at different points,
including at the time of our interviews. Participants also shared a range of ways that they coped
with their emotions, including physical movement, prescribed medication, and self-medicating.

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Chapter Six: Professional World and Personal Career
The focus of this chapter is on participants’ careers. Participants discussed their work
environments, changes in workload, the role of identity and cultural contexts in their careers, and
their professional outlooks at the time of this study. They shared the decisions their campuses
made in regards to returning to campus in the fall of 2021. The impact of the pandemic on
participants’ careers varied, and while several had an increase in work responsibilities or scope
of responsibility, one admitted to stepping back and doing the minimum due to how her
institution interacted with her. Some of the participants felt like their work environments were
supportive of them and their careers, while some felt like their senior administrators lacked
compassion and empathy, which translated to how they felt about their careers.
Paloma: “I Took on Way More Responsibilities ”
Paloma initially struggled with the shift to working from home. Before the pandemic,
Paloma’s institution “did not have that much flexibility to work from home,” so the shift was a
hard transition for her, especially early on. Paloma shared that her institution had certain
expectations for people working at home, including participation during meetings and keeping
cameras on during all virtual meetings. Paloma recalls feeling like she had no choice in the
matter and feeling uncomfortable. Paloma shared about a particularly difficult meeting that her
department hosted with a guest speaker. Paloma’s young son was in the room with her, and after
the meeting went on longer than the allocated time, he started to ask for her attention:
I coordinate a summer migrant program, and for most of our students, they needed some
sort of in-person or hard copy options for their registration. I really felt like I had to say
this at my meeting, and I unmuted myself, and, you know, it was just that moment that
my son had a tantrum. I would give him candy so that we would just let me be in the
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meetings. That would keep him calm. But I think it was already too many candies that I
gave him. When I said what I had to say, the guest speaker heard my son, and I think that
she wanted to, you know, acknowledge how some parents are working from home and
have their kids. She said, “Oh, I hear a little one there. I think he has something to tell
us.” It was really nice that she made it seem like that, but I felt like I couldn’t keep on
talking. I broke down crying, and I didn’t want to turn on my camera. I didn’t care what
they said, but I decided I wasn’t going to turn on my camera.
Coworkers reached out to thank her for participating and offered kind words, reminding
Paloma she was “doing a great job.” She still felt “embarrassed” and like nobody would
understand what she was going through. One co-worker asked, “Are you getting any help with
your son?” She felt frustrated and like her co-worker would not understand how hard it was to
get any support with child care at that time.
In addition to new expectations, Paloma also had a shift in her responsibilities. She felt
like she “took on way more responsibilities during the pandemic.” She described herself as
someone who takes initiative: “that type of person that’s like, this is what our students need, so
I’m going to get it done for them.” Paloma felt the necessity to go above and beyond to help her
students:
I felt that sense of urgency of like, yeah, I’m gonna do the home visits, I’m gonna drop
them off computers because they don’t have computers. So, I took on way more
responsibilities, but I felt I could handle it at that time.
Paloma also noted that general work tasks took longer to complete, including her student check-
ins. Additionally, the transition to working remotely came with a learning curve:
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There was a lot of like me trying to educate myself on YouTube, or connecting with our
IT, when I could because they were so impacted, on how to shift certain services virtual.
So, it was like things would take me longer to do, and I felt myself working overtime late
hours because I was trying to catch up and learn how to convert our case management to
Canvas, things like that.
The increase in responsibilities caused Paloma to shift her working hours as she was balancing
having her son at home while she worked. When her supervisor told her team, “Ok, no emails
after 5 PM,” Paloma quickly realized that would not work for her. Paloma expressed that
sometimes it was hard to find time to respond to emails during the day between meetings and
caring for her child. Paloma was grateful that her supervisor understood her situation and gave
her the flexibility to respond to emails during hours that worked for her.
In the last few months, Paloma felt the weight of taking on those additional
responsibilities. Paloma described feeling burned out:
I think there is this expectation that I would take on the same amount of work that I was
in the beginning, but to be honest with you, these past 2 months, I felt so burned out that I
felt comfortable in stepping back to some responsibilities. Lately, I’ve been not taking on
so many responsibilities at work because, you know, just managing my one-on-ones with
our students. It’s been taking a lot of my time. I just feel like slowly decreasing my
responsibilities at work because I already have so many. I’ve been doing that.
Paloma also shared that her professional outlook has changed during the pandemic.
Paloma has been re-evaluating her professional goals and her future. Paloma’s family was “really
impacted financially” by the pandemic, which led her to seek other professional opportunities
that offer more flexibility.
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About her return to campus in the fall, Paloma felt she felt pressured by the institution’s
president, even though she felt her campus was not “equipped” to bring people back. While most
of the staff is working in person, most faculty members hold classes online, and students still
meet with the staff virtually. This difference in expectations has led to “an uneven level of
responsibilities” between campus employees. Paloma wishes her institution was more aware of
the obstacles faced by working parents, that they offered clearer communication, and provided
more support in the transition. Paloma stated, “academia hardly acknowledges or values parents
and the role of mothering.” This ideology “haunts” her because, if she stays in student affairs, “I
must create my own spaces where we can make sure we support working parents and students
that are parents.”
Jane: “Am I Woman Enough? ”
Like most institutions, Jane’s department went completely virtual during the pandemic.
Jane shared that most workplace interactions took place over email, and staff meetings on Zoom
were impersonal. Jane shared that her colleagues had their cameras off most of the time and did
not engage during meetings. Jane noted that her online work environment changed her work
persona, and she could be more comfortable working from home, stating, “I don’t wear makeup
anymore. I’m definitely wearing a hoodie because I’m not wearing a bra. I got sweatpants on.”
Jane shared that she was excited to start a new job in her new city because it would give her “a
routine and a chance to wear professional clothes again.” Jane shared that with working
remotely, her schedule was all over the place:
I’m really excited about this new job because it’s going to be in person. I am so excited
about having a schedule. I’ll be honest, right now, there are times when I’m really tired,
and I will wake up at 8:20 to start work at 8:30. Like, I will just roll out of bed, and that’s
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really not like me. You know, it’s kind of gross. I am so looking forward to having a
routine, waking up and showering, doing my hair and makeup, and wearing stuff that
isn’t sweats. I start in a couple of weeks, and I’m not kidding you, I already packed my
bag. Like, I have my water bottle and everything. I am so ready to just go and just get out
of here.
In the middle of our conversation, Ice Cube’s song “Today Was a Good Day” began to
play in the background. Jane asked if I could hear the music, and when I said I could, she
covered her face with her hands and said this happens during meetings from time to time:
“That’s another thing. This computer, it just does things. Spotify turns itself on randomly. It’s
embarrassing when I’m with students.” Jane remarked that her students and colleagues now
know the type of music she listens to and shared that this is another example of how her personal
and professional lives collided during the pandemic.

Figure 11
A Full Laundry Basket, a Tablet, and School Supplies on the Floor

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Jane says this photo (Figure 11) signifies how she tries to multitask as much as possible
during the workday:
That’s right next to my desk. In between meetings, or as I’m talking to a student, I’ll be
folding laundry in that little space next to my desk. At the same time, my son doesn’t
understand that I’m working. So, it’s like, I feel really bad because he brings the iPad or
whatever, and he’s sitting on the floor next to me because he wants my attention, and he
wants my help. And he’s seeking me to help him and be there for him, and sometimes I
can, and sometimes I can’t, and you hear him say, “Mama, Mama, how do you spell this?
How do you spell that?” Normally I would go, “Okay, [and sound it out].” You know, but
when I’m busy, I just pull up the word “yellow,” and I put it down there, and I’m like,
“Okay, copy that.”
Jane expressed that this made her feel guilty about not being able to prioritize her son at that
moment. Jane feels this photo depicts her “trying to work, and do housework and be a mom,”
which are three things that would never happen at the same time pre-pandemic:
If I was in the office, I know that I would feel guilty about being gone, but I could be
distanced. And I still want to be next to him, helping him, but if I was in the office, I
could be disconnected from him. He wouldn’t be asking me. I wouldn’t hear it. I’d be
okay.
While Jane’s work responsibilities did not necessarily increase or decrease, the types of
responsibilities she was managing changed. During the pandemic, she met with students by
phone or via Zoom and acknowledged she never knew what the next call would bring. Jane was
meeting with diverse students with a wide range of experiences:
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I meet with students who are first-time college students or about to transfer, who want to
get certificate programs, who are 80 years old and want to finish their degree. Sometimes,
I meet with students who are from very affluent backgrounds, and then we have students
that are from very low-income backgrounds.
Jane was suddenly helping first-generation students with what she calls “the basics of college”
and spending additional time checking in with students because she knew it was “a very intense
time” for them. Jane was happy to meet with students with a large spectrum of concerns because
of her own background as a first-generation college student and because she felt it was her
“professional responsibility to check in with students more since this was all so new.” Jane also
spent time connecting students with campus services since she wasn’t able to promote services
like their food pantry when she’d see students in the hallways of her building. During the
pandemic, Jane was very focused on making sure students knew that campus administrators were
“still there for them.”
Over the course of the pandemic, Jane’s career aspirations and professional outlook
changed. When Jane first started working in the community colleges, she wanted to become a
full-time counselor, but once she became a mother, she decided she did not want to do so while
her kids were young. At another point, Jane thought she would pursue an administrative-type
role such as being a director but realized it would not work with her priorities:
I used to do whatever you needed me at any time of the day. If you needed me to work 50
hours, I used to do that. I didn’t care. With this job, I do my day. That’s it. I’m done at
the end of the day. It’s an hourly position. When I’m done, I don’t have to think, and I go
back to being a mom.
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Jane’s professional aspirations are also influenced by her cultural identity. Jane believes
“being a Latina working mother is different than being just a working mother because there is a
history of cultural expectations.” Thinking back on her upbringing, Jane shared,
My mom is a housekeeper. She worked 5 days a week outside the home, hard labor, not
sitting at a desk, and would still come home to clean the house and cook a homemade
meal from scratch. Nothing canned, nothing microwaved, and the house was spotless.
How? And here I am working 2 days a week, complaining that my house is dirty, and I
don’t even cook. With that comes a lot of self-disappointment. I’m not meeting up to my
expectations, questioning, am I woman enough?
Since the pandemic, Jane has reinforced the fact that her priority is her family, and she will not
be looking for jobs with increased responsibilities.
About returning to campus, Jane shared that most people at her institution continued to
work from home in the fall 2021 semester. Outside of essential staff, her campus was “playing it
safe” and allowing for a slow return to in-person instruction and services. Though the pandemic
was difficult to navigate, Jane felt her department did “a pretty good job” supporting and
accommodating her. Jane believes “if institutions understood that, again, we’re not just working
mothers, but there’s a whole lot on our shoulders, and the weight, the responsibility that we carry
just from our culture is a lot…if working from home helps us manage that, then I think it would
be nice if they consider that.”
Alma: “I Burden Myself With Extra Perfectionism ”
Alma’s career has always been an important part of her identity. While she “gets stuff
done,” she noted that she is “not Type A. I’m not Type-A. I can’t be Type A anymore. I’m like
B- plus, A-minus type.” Alma works at a Hispanic-serving institution, and yet she is “only one of
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three Latinas with a direct line to the president.” Alma said her “presence is a revolution” and
that “people need to chill with their stupid stereotypes about Latina moms.” Prior to COVID-19,
she frequently traveled for work. Shortly after having her first child, her vice president made a
comment at a cabinet meeting about how she probably wasn’t traveling anymore now that she
was a mother:
I said, “excuse me?” I said, “I just got off a month-long trip, constant travel to different
meetings.” I was just baffled about these stupid, like antiquated assumptions that because
we’re moms, all of a sudden, we’re not committed to our profession, or the other way
around, that because we’re committed to our careers that we’re not committed to our
kids. Like it’s not an all or nothing.
Alma believes that for Latinas, there is a general belief that “if you have kids, that’s your whole
life,” and while she loves her children deeply, it does not mean she has to give up other parts of
herself. Alma admitted she has “never experienced so much sexism, and so much mansplaining”
until this role, and specifically since she became a mother. Because of these stereotypes and her
professional experiences as a Latina mother, she overcorrects at work:
I overcompensate because I don’t want people to believe those stereotypes. I burden
myself with extra perfectionism and the expectations that I put on myself because I know
that people are going to be looking at me like, “Oh, let’s see what she turns down because
she’s too busy with her kids.”
Alma shared that during the pandemic, her neighbor, and former colleague, told her, “Moms are
just getting paid to take care of their kids at home.” Alma immediately corrected her and told her
she was “working more than ever” and not getting paid to watch her kids at home. Because of
these stereotypes combined with the increase in work responsibilities, she has to be intentional
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about balancing her roles. Alma described these negotiations as a “harmony,” something she had
to navigate differently during the pandemic, and sometimes meaning she gave her children an
iPad so she could work or that she “won’t answer a stupid email on a weekend” because she is
busy being a mother.
Alma’s role involves mainly developing strategies to support students to degree
completion through academic advising, student success initiatives, and closing equity gaps. Prior
to the pandemic, she was seeing great progress on her initiatives, but she became frustrated with
the impact of the pandemic:
Well, all of that, most of that progress, we’ve gone back 10 years. Yep. So, there’s this
sense of like, oh my God, I’m so tired. How am I going to climb that hill again? How am
I going to take care of myself? How am I going to take care of my staff? That’s been
really a major piece of reflection for me in terms of before and after.
Alma’s job is difficult. She is “always on, 24/7.” During the pandemic, she felt like she had no
break between work and home. At times, it felt like she was the only one burning herself out for
her job:
I’ve been working 24/7 and developing strategies to help re-engage our students, and I
feel like it’s on my shoulders all the time, and maybe I’m self-imposing, but then I look
around, and I’m like, “Is anyone else doing something? Like, where are my colleagues
across the division?” I can’t do this by myself.
For Alma, it was not just about the increase in the volume of responsibilities, but the scope of her
role also changed during the pandemic. Alma described her job as “chaotic” and said she feels
she is living with her “regular job and her pandemic job.” She is aware of how this pandemic
impacted her students, staff, and herself. Alma believes “there’s no recognition of the pandemic
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in the lives of students” and finds it “bizarre.” Alma’s role includes reading the withdrawals for
serious and compelling reasons, and she saw that what her students were going through was
“horrible.” Alma felt conflicted trying to balance compassion and empathy towards her students
while holding them to the expectation that they push forward on their path to graduation. While
Alma is under “stress and pressure to mitigate the recognition of the pandemic in the lives of
students” at her institution, she hopes that administrators at her institution will “just let students
heal.”
Alma navigated these work responsibilities, including learning to lead a team remotely
from home, where she did not have a designated work space. Alma shared that her children
would “bombard her meetings.” At a certain point, Alma found it was easier to have her children
join her:
My kids would come and cry and crash my meetings and at some point, I thought, you
know what? Whatever. And I just had her on my lap, I would just sit her on my lap and
just continue on with my meeting, and I mean, as soon as I gave up that control, that’s
when things started honestly to get better.
Alma said that although her professional world is chaotic, her work-from-home environment did
allow some flexibility (Figure 12). Alma could do laundry, take her children to school, and
volunteer in their classrooms during the week.

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Figure 12
Alma and Her Daughter in a Virtual Meeting

While Alma saw some negative and positive changes in her work environment, one of the
harshest challenges was the amount of loss everyone experienced. She said, “We started having a
lot of people dying,” and shared that her own mentor passed away:
One of my mentors passed away. I think that has been one of the things the pandemic has
really taken away is the ability to grieve the people that we’ve lost. It’s been really
difficult. Like, we started losing faculty to the virus as well, losing students, and just like
not being able to come together as a community. It is really difficult. And sometimes, I
think with my mentor, I almost forget sometimes. It’s been really challenging to navigate
through that professional space. They were my main collaborator, and I can’t just pick up
the phone and say, “I’m having a really hard time with this decision. What would you do
in this situation?” So that’s been difficult.
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Alma believes that her institution’s focus on organizational effectiveness has hindered their
“connectedness and ability to heal.”
Alma shared that professionally, she is “sort of at a crossroads.” She is conflicted about
the future of student affairs and higher education but is committed to her role and her students.
She sees herself reflected in the students she serves and doesn’t see enough investment in their
success from administrators at her institution. Alma is continuously trying to find a balance:
There’s a lot of idiots and people who don’t care about our Brown and Black kids, you
know, and so I take a lot of ownership of that, but I am trying to make sure that I balance
that with not giving up my family as well.
Alma does not take her position for granted because “many times, women don’t even get
considered for promotions.” She described an example of how much effort she puts into her
work, sharing that, at the end of her pregnancy, she “worked up until 10 o’clock at night and then
gave birth at seven o’clock in the morning the following day.” Alma is grateful that her work and
investment have been acknowledged through leadership opportunities and promotions; however,
after the pandemic, she is questioning if higher education is still the best place for her. She still
loves what she does but is most concerned with living out her purpose:
I love living in my purpose. I know what my purpose is, and I don’t necessarily feel like I
have to be tied to an institution to do the work that I do. I am giving myself permission to
sort of see myself not necessarily attached to an institution and really more attached to
my purpose.
Alma has been questioning how she can still feel fulfilled if she ever chooses to change careers
or leave the institution and feels “real conflict” about the process. She described having an
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“existential crisis” because while she loves her job and the people she works with, she does not
know if she will ever “be brave enough to step out of higher education.”
Regarding her return to campus, Alma is on a hybrid schedule which affords her a level
of flexibility, but she also feels like the institutional response at her campus has been “all over
the place.” The decision to return in person was left up to individual departments. Alma shared,
It has been a shitshow. Faculty switch their modality just from 1 day to the next, and I
don’t blame them. Listen, I was in an in-person meeting. I did not want to be in an in-
person meeting. I was terrified. But last minute and in the name of academic freedom,
faculty decide to tell us, fuck you, and so that’s been really hard right as an institution
and steward of the university to really justify that to the students.
Alma’s institution was not discussing any changes for the following semester despite the
Omicron variant being on the rise. She shared that she was disappointed in the lack of leadership
on her campus, which made her question her own role: “do I stay and I’m complicit? Or do I stay
and try to change things, and at what cost?”
Liana: “If Anything, I Did Less ”
Liana has worked at different higher education institutions for the past 14 years. At the
beginning of the pandemic, she had recently finished a temporary supervisory role in her
department. She has worked in her current position for the past eight years, the longest she’s
been at any department at an institution. Previously, she had only stayed in an office for three to
four years. She admitted that the only reason she is still at her institution is “to finish this
master’s degree because of the tuition benefit.” Just before the pandemic, she felt like she had
outgrown her job but held off, not just because of the tuition benefit but because she did not want
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to “make life more difficult than it needs to be.” Liana shared that her campus made decisions
that did not make sense to her:
Senior admin pulled us into an auditorium to tell us how essential we are, as essential as
campus police, so we were required to continue working in person. Nothing about like,
PPE or anything, just that we’re there to help students, and we cannot allow for you to
work from home. I push papers for a living! We were all just losing our shit. And then
Friday, the school shut down, and I leave. Monday, they made me use my sick time
because I didn’t have child care. By Tuesday, they sent everyone home. So, I’m like, I
thought we were essential. What happened here?
Liana noted that as far as professional responsibilities are concerned, she reduced her
workload and stopped going above and beyond during the pandemic:
If anything, I did less. I’ve always been a fast worker. I’ve always produced more than
my colleagues, and I know that for sure because I was a supervisor once in this unit, and
I’ve supervised my colleagues. I know what they produce. I did what was expected of
me. I did the bare minimum. I’m not going to go above and beyond for them anymore.
She was adamant about needing to look for a new job once she earned her degree because she
firmly believes “the grass is greener on the other side. This is not the type of environment I want
to work in.” There are “no opportunities for progressions into different roles” in her office, and
the environment of the office itself is “not conducive to my well-being or the things that I got
into higher ed for.” Her previous institution “actually cared about your well-being,” and her
current role and institution were a “downgrade.” During the pandemic, when everyone was
struggling, she felt like her department was more worried about people “turning on their cameras
and being on teams than actually their family life, or their mental stability.”
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Liana herself experienced a lack of empathy during the pandemic. When her mother was
exposed to COVID-19 during the workday, her management’s reaction left her with “a sour
note.” She shared how the interaction occurred: “I sent an email saying I’m going. My mother
was exposed. Take the sick time that you want. I could care less. Their response (Figure 13) was
like “okay.” But it wasn’t like they actually cared.”

Figure 13
An Email From Liana’s Management

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Liana shared that this moment solidified her belief that higher education is “a really big
contradiction” because institutions “promote that they exist to serve students, but isn’t the staff a
part of that community as well?” She said that at this time, she just goes to work, keeps her head
down, and is planning for her and her daughter’s futures. She believes there are equity and access
issues in education and mentioned that there are “issues within the university, within student
affairs, and within the hierarchies of staff faculty.” She believes this pandemic “brought those
issues to the forefront for those who want to recognize them.” Currently, she is less concerned
with moving to a specific position or moving “up the higher ed ladder” and more concerned with
being “truly happy” with what she is doing. Her priority is to teach her child that “if you’re not
happy within yourself, whatever position or whatever title you have is not going to do anything
for you.”
Liana shared her frustrations about her campus leadership, saying, “this campus, like
think of the dumbest thing you could ever think of, that is what they are going to do.” In the fall
semester, her campus used a hybrid model, but her office was one of the first to return to in-
person services. Her daughter had not started school yet, and she had no child care, but her
campus was unhelpful:
They would not allow me to work from home every day until she started school. They
wanted me to use my personal time two days a week and work from home the other three
days, so I applied to use COVID leave and ended up having those 2 days off. For them, it
was better for them to pay me to do nothing those two days than for them to
accommodate my schedule for the span of July and August. This is how
unaccommodating my office is.
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Liana hopes that moving forward, her institution can be more empathetic and more focused on
well-being, equity, and supporting staff the way they support students and faculty.
Josefina: “It ’s a Train Wreck ”
Shortly before the pandemic began, Josefina was adjusting to what it meant to be a
working mom:
It was a rude awakening as somebody who was super into my job and very into my
career, and then I had these kids, and I was like, “whoa, society is not that cool with
working parents, especially working mothers and working mothers with other
responsibilities.”
Josefina stated that the “best thing” she did before 2020 was to transition into a job that was a
better fit for her and offered “a lot more balance” and a more supportive work environment that
celebrates people of color. Pre-pandemic, Josefina’s office was a place where she could be
productive “while being an adult.” Josefina appreciated that her office let her “be another person
who has these skills and things that people value, other than wiping noses.”
Once the pandemic forced her to start working remotely, Josefina’s physical workspace
was “actually a hot mess.” Her home office was a space formerly used as a pantry and a space
that was “never used as a family.” Josefina recalled,
In the middle of the pandemic, I finally had a breakdown where I was like, I need a
bookshelf, and I need to organize this because it’s a train wreck, and I can’t sit in this
room looking at it be a mess anymore, and I don’t know how long we’re going to do this.
Josefina said the hardest part was not knowing how long she would be working remotely. As an
hourly employee, she was suddenly working like a salaried employee. Josefina said if she “lost
three hours during the workday” because she had to attend to her children, she had to make up
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for those hours when her husband was home and able to be with their kids. Josefina was
suddenly “doing work around the clock” and seeing the work-life balance she had worked for
“slip away almost immediately.”
Josefina stressed that “for those of us who have kids in school, those of us who are
parents, we’re living this a little bit differently.” One example of this was when there was a
COVID-19 exposure in her daughter’s class, and the school called an emergency Zoom meeting
during the workday, causing “a little bit of a hectic scramble.” Josefina had to adjust her
schedule, talk to her boss about next steps, and make a plan for her family. She noted that the
other 20 families on the Zoom call had to do the same thing, showing how far-reaching the
impact of COVID-19 was on working parents and their workplaces.
Aside from sharing about her work environment, Josefina discussed the shift in her work
responsibilities. Josefina felt like she had to “very quickly learn about online learning and online
engagement and the online experience to be able to adapt.” Josefina’s department started hosting
events with “only like three or four students,” so they invested time and resources into deepening
their online engagement skillset. As they went through that process, Josefina learned that virtual
programming was not a priority for her students. She recalled thinking,
We might still get low engagement because we’re in a pandemic. All of a sudden, so
many of our students moved back home, sharing space with all their siblings, or they
didn’t have good internet access. I would sometimes get in Zoom, and, much like you
saw today, I would have family coming in and out. I’d be meeting with students and their
parents or siblings or cousins or nieces and nephews were walking around in the
background, or it would be loud, or some people were like, “my mom babysits my
sister’s kids, and now I’m home at my mom’s house, and little kids are everywhere,” and
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so at least for our student communities, these best online practices may not work for them
anyway.
Josefina also felt like one of her new work responsibilities was “managing up” to
administrators who were more removed from student experiences. She was trying to manage
senior administrators’ expectations of what staff jobs should look like and what the students’
needs were. This took up much of her time in the first few months, and she thought, “Stop! Stop
throwing money at this program. Let’s not do this. This is not what our students need.” Josefina
emphasized that “In retrospect, online learning is an amazing tool, and it’s an amazing
supplement to the work we do with students.”
Reflecting on her professional outlook, Josefina said her “personal and professional
worlds are just completely enmeshed. These two worlds that don’t necessarily get along so well,
and to have them overlapping is so challenging and isolating.” Being a working parent during the
pandemic made an already “incredibly hard” journey even harder. She contended that “saying
there is no such thing as work-life balance is unfair,” and she has reflected on how society can
look at work differently to be more supportive of working mothers. Despite the challenges,
Josefina is “grateful” for what she has learned in this process. She is proud of the way she has
advocated for her students and the ways she has been able to create boundaries for herself and
her family.
Josefina has been working in a hybrid model since the fall semester and said the return
was “odd” and “not smooth.” Her institution made a public decision to bring everybody back in-
person, full-time. However, each department made up its own policies, which led to disparities
across campus. Additionally, many of the students in her program were not ready to come back
and continued to mostly use virtual services. Josefina said,
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For every step forward we made at work with, like, communicating or accommodating
needs, we took a million steps backward. We were doing these fake processes. We were
pushing for in-person meetings. One of our executive leaders tried to have an all-staff
retreat early in August. It felt like very much zero to 60, like you’re not giving us an
opportunity to ease in. You’re not giving people a chance to get comfortable.
Josefina stated that her main professional priority is to put students first, which she believes is at
times in conflict with “the university’s priority of being a business.” She wishes her campus
leaders would show more empathy and care for working parents who need specific
accommodations. For her, a hybrid model is the closest she’s ever felt to having a family-
friendly work schedule. Josefina believes that sweeping policies that are equal are not always
equitable and need to be examined and re-evaluated.
Elvia: “It Was Insane ”
Elvia started her current position as an academic advisor approximately 6 months before
the pandemic began after a colleague encouraged her to apply because she is “very resourceful.”
Elvia had never worked in student affairs before, but she had been with the department for over a
decade as a student and in research roles. Elvia was also stressed about finding a job at her
current institution because she “needed to get hired within a year of being laid off” to keep her
15-year service benefit. When the pandemic began, Elvia was a “fairly new academic advisor.”
When her department went remote, she transitioned more quickly because she already had
remote access on her computer. Elvia shared,
Because I normally work in a cubicle and I do a lot of academic advising, when I started
my position, I kind of demanded to have an office. I asked for a laptop, and it was kind of
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unheard of because I was a new advisor, and I said, “I need this for privacy when I meet
with students in the conference room or in the hallway.”
Elvia was initially not worried about the transition to working from home because she felt
like she had what she needed, but that quickly changed. She could barely keep up: “It just blew
up during the pandemic. No matter how much I planned, every day is something new. Every day,
I have to be flexible and ready for a curveball and just like deal with it.” One example was the
degree requirements for the program in which Elvia works. The program has “a practicum
requirement, which is fieldwork,” that suddenly needed to be reimagined. As a new advisor,
Elvia was still learning her role, how to keep her graduation list, and what to expect because she
hadn’t gone through an entire academic cycle. She was also feeling overwhelmed because, in the
past, the program had one advisor for academic degree requirements and one advisor for the
practicum portion, and her new role was to advise on both requirements. This caused stress for
her and her students: “It was insane. It was insane.”
Elvia was “Zooming with students all the time. All. The. Time.” Elvia started to tear up
as she shared that her institution is one of the most expensive in the country, so she felt like
“because students pay a lot of money to be in this program [she] gave them 100%,” which meant
she had zero percent for anything else. Elvia knew her students were under much stress, and she
was the only one who could give them the answers. Elvia was a first-generation college student,
so she knows “it takes a lot for a student to ask for help,” and she felt like she had to be receptive
and responsive. Elvia was meeting with students to ease their stress and find a way to get them to
graduate on time.”
Elvia also expressed that student meetings looked differently for her as a working mother
because when she met with students, “there’s always children here, and they’re saying hi and
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wanting to talk.” Elvia continued to connect well with her students and to be transparent with
them:
I think in terms of my ethnicity, I connect very well with students, and we talk a lot about
being the first in our family to go to college and having this responsibility and how scary
it is to pursue a degree. Those are conversations that come up very often with my
students. And I feel because there’s that connection that they’re more receptive to me and
so like when things like that come up where my children are here. It actually doesn’t
bother me because that’s who I am, and I don’t think it bothers my students either.
Elvia stated that students did not just need academic support: “The regular issues were
rising, too, you know? Like personal connections. Some professors were just uploading
PowerPoint presentations and not meeting with students, and issues specific to the field of public
health.” Elvia experienced an increase in work responsibilities and a shift in working hours.
Elvia would work “until one in the morning because I would take breaks with the kids to make a
volcano with baking soda” before getting back to work. Elvia admitted that she puts extra
pressure on herself to make sure students get what they need. Elvia would take on emails past
working hours and respond to emails past midnight. Throughout the pandemic, Elvia created
healthier boundaries for herself. She decided she is “not meeting with students on Mondays and
Fridays unless it’s an emergency in order to catch up.” Elvia admitted that if a student is in
another time zone and can only meet after work hours, she will still accommodate them. Elvia’s
dedication to her students and decision to be “super accessible” resulted in her being a finalist for
student advisor of the year at her university. Elvia feels it is “sort of out of the blue” because she
is so new, but she knows that her students appreciate her, and she is grateful for the amount of
time she invests in their success.
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As Elvia thought about her professional outlook, she acknowledged that the combination
of being a doctoral student and being in her department since she was a student made it so that
her student identity is more prominent than her professional identity. While she feels “well-
connected and resourceful,” she believes she “is not seen as a colleague” in her department.
Elvia also shared that she is “okay” with her career at the moment because she is looking for
better opportunities. Elvia does not feel valued in her current position and does not feel she is
adequately compensated for what she does:
I don’t think that my work is valued and recognized by my faculty. I feel when that
opportunity comes to go somewhere else, I would take it because I feel like I do a lot, and
I’m not compensated financially for the work that I do.
Elvia stated that she stays for the students, and they keep her in the position. Elvia shared that
she knows the students value her: “They say thank you, and I know that they’re going to thrive in
their careers, and that feeds my soul, especially because it’s a career that I worked in and I love.”
Ultimately, the pandemic proved to Elvia that she is capable of handling more than she knew she
could handle and is now looking for opportunities that will pay her what she is worth.
Returning to campus, Elvia has been working in-person 1 day a week and working
remotely the other 4 days since August. Once her institution left for winter break, her department
kept the staff and faculty remote until the Omicron variant “calmed down.” Like other
participants, most of Elvia’s students continued to interact with her in a virtual modality. Her
department’s flexibility and her relationships with students keep her at her institution. She did
note that there are specific things her campus can do to better support working mothers:
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Latinas are not paid what they’re worth, and that affects their entire career because if you
pay me $20,000 less now, then compound that for the rest of my career, that’s a lot! Pay
me what I’m worth! Also, resources to help with child care would be great.
Elvia said that she has proven she can do more than what has been asked of her, and supporting
working mothers would translate to employee loyalty.
Chapter Summary
The pandemic caused changes in participants’ professional lives. In most cases,
participants’ work demands increased and in all cases the scope of responsibility changed
drastically. Participants were suddenly taking on tasks that were outside of their normal scope of
work such as conducting home visits, understanding best practices for online learning and
engagement, creating COVID-19 compliant policies, learning new technical tools, and generally
being available outside of normal working hours. Additionally, student affairs practitioners on
most of their campuses were required to come back before most other folks on campus meaning
they had additional challenges with the transition back to campus.
Participants shared feeling that their senior leaders were not always supportive of them
nor did they understand the challenge of navigating motherhood and their careers. Participants
conveyed that at times they experienced hostile work environments despite giving so much of
themselves to the profession. Participants acknowledged that once they normalized parenting by
including their children in meetings and letting go of some of the boundaries they were trying to
maintain between work and parenting, they experienced a sense of relief.
The women in this study experienced changes in work responsibilities, discussed their
work environments, and shared how they felt about their careers at the time of this study.
Participants also shared how their identities played a role in how they navigated their careers.
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Finally, participants noted their current outlooks on their careers and institutions. The final
chapter in this dissertation discusses the study's findings, offers recommendations for practice,
and provides concluding thoughts.

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Chapter Seven: Discussion and Recommendations
The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how the pandemic influenced Latina
mother-practitioners’ personal and professional lives. Testimonios and photos from the six
participants offer a snapshot of what life was like for them between 2020 and 2022. This study
was grounded in Chicana/Latina feminist epistemology (Calderón et al., 2012; Delgado Bernal,
1998), Anzaldúa’s (1987, 2012) borderlands concept, and cariño (Duncan-Andrade, 2006).
Testimonios and photo-elicitation were used to answer the research question: How have Latina
mother-practitioners in student affairs navigated their personal and professional worlds during
the COVID-19 pandemic? This final chapter will discuss the findings, offer recommendations
for practice, provide ideas for future research, and conclude with final thoughts.
Discussion
In this section, I will discuss some key insights from the study. I discuss centralizing
Latinas in research, review the research question, elaborate on the anxiety associated with the
pandemic, discuss the blurring of personal and professional worlds and the “great resignation,”
and close by offering my own testimonio.
Centralizing Latinas in My Research
The use of the research frameworks of Chicana/Latina feminist epistemology,
borderlands, and cariño and the methods of testimonio and photo-elicitation allowed me to
achieve the goal of centralizing Latinas and gathering meaningful data. This study’s guiding
framework allowed me to ask tailored questions to learn about the participants through an
identity-affirming approach. Chicana/Latina feminist epistemology was instrumental to this
study and an appropriate fit because it centralizes personal narratives, asks research questions
that are specific to the experiences of Chicanas/Latinas, and recognizes that Chicanas/Latinas
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lead lives that are different from the those of men and White women (Delgado Bernal, 1998). For
example, they contend with cultural expectations associated with womanhood, mothering, and
career. The concept of borderlands is woven into this study’s findings, namely how Latina
mother-practitioners consistently navigate multiple and sometimes competing roles, identities,
and spaces. Latina mother-practitioners navigate additional metaphorical borders such as
language and gender dynamics. Part of navigating borderlands comes with the negotiation of the
fragmented self (Anzaldua, 2012; Boyles, 2014) however, the pandemic disrupted what it means
to live a fragmented identity. Suddenly, there was no separation of identities and instead Latina
mother-practitioners had to be their whole selves in all spaces all at once. Finally, cariño made
collecting and analyzing the data more mindful. Connecting authentically with participants
allowed them to trust me as a researcher and share details that they may not have shared with
anyone else. For example, showing authentic care and an affectionate tone when participants
cried made the interviews a cathartic and reflective process.
Using testimonio and photo-elicitation as the main methodology clearly illustrated how
the pandemic affected Latina mother-practitioners. Using these methods in tandem provided a
picture of a day in the life of a working mother during the pandemic. For example, photos of
children playing while the participant was working and photos of participants multitasking added
to their narratives regarding how they navigated work and family life. Additionally, using
testimonio and photo-elicitation highlighted what participants found most symbolic. While a
photo of a pop-up pool may not seem symbolic of the pandemic to anyone else, it signified a
welcomed reprieve from being indoors for the participant who chose that as a meaningful symbol
of her experience. Finally, testimonio and photo-elicitation served as a reflection tool during data
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analysis. Examining the data allowed me to connect the participants’ narratives and photos to the
literature and my experiences as a Latina mother-practitioner navigating the pandemic.
Research Question
This study set out to answer the research question: how have Latina mother-practitioners
in student affairs navigated their personal and professional worlds during the COVID-19
pandemic? There are essentially three overarching ways these women navigated their personal
and professional worlds during the pandemic. First, they pushed through and did what they had
to do to survive and keep their families safe. Latina mothers have long needed to lean in to their
resourcefulness for the success of their families (Coba-Rodriguez & Jarrett, 2022). Cherrie
Moraga stated, “the passage is through, not over, not by, not around, but through” (Moraga &
Anzaldúa, 2015, p.xxxvi), and the participants in this study embodied that. When the pandemic
essentially turned their lives upside down, they moved through every challenge and obstacle,
often at the expense of their well-being. Second, they reprioritized as needed to keep their
families safe and give them the care they required. When competing responsibilities arose, such
as a child or parent who could not go back to school or work due to COVID-19 restrictions or
symptoms, they multitasked, left meetings early, and even took family leave to prioritize caring
for family (Bahn et al., 2020; Garcini et al., 2021). Finally, they leaned into their support systems
and sought outside resources to assist them (Guy & Arthur, 2020). The participants came up with
innovative ways to find support where they could, including forming “pods” with family, hosting
virtual book clubs, and even creating makeshift classrooms in a babysitter’s home. When they
realized their well-being was at stake, participants sought outside resources to help them manage.
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Cultural Significance of Mothering
While there are experiences and recommendations within this study that are universal for
working parents, there are gendered and cultural markers that are specific to Latina mothers.
Latinx homes are often intergenerational and mothering is typically non-exclusive with other
relatives contributing to care-taking (Segura & Peirce, 1993). For many Latinas, when speaking
about their family responsibilities, those obligations and responsibilities are inclusive of not just
their nuclear family, but also their family of origin. In some cases, Latinas are parentified during
their upbringing as they take on roles such as scheduling medical appointments, filling out
complicated forms, and translating for parents who do not speak English. That experience does
not end when Latinas become mothers themselves, as illustrated by the participants in this study.
Latina moms are also navigating additional cultural expectations of motherhood which are
sometimes at odds with how they have chosen to parent their children and manage their homes.
For example, taking on the majority of household tasks is seen as contradictory to feminist
ideals, however, the women in this study were still taking on all the tasks in their homes despite
identifying as feminists. Navigating the cultural expectations of mothering can also cause
distress and self-doubt when those expectations are not being met.
Mental Health and COVID-19
This study found that the COVID-19 pandemic upended the lives of Latina mother-
practitioners in student affairs and resulted in heightened anxiety. For several of the participants,
this was not their first time dealing with anxiety, but they felt the pandemic made it worse.
Several factors contributed to that anxiety, including fear of getting sick, self-doubt, and lack of
proper support systems.
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COVID-19 brought on fear associated with the virus itself. It has been overwhelming for
working mothers to navigate all of their roles while also attempting to keep their families
healthy. Additionally, Latina working mothers tend to have additional caregiving and familial
responsibilities. Caregiving can result in strengthened relationships, but it can also have negative
impacts such as stress (Patterson & Margolis, 2019). Many Latina mothers live in
multigenerational homes or frequently interact with elderly relatives (Patterson & Margolis,
2019; Segura & Pierce, 1993). During the pandemic, living in multigenerational households and
providing support to vulnerable family members increased the risk of being infected with
COVID-19 (Moore, 2021) and became another source of anxiety. As the pandemic evolves and
new variants develop, this continues to cause stress (Davis, 2022).
The changes in mothering, career, and life in general also caused self-doubt. Where the
participants felt confident in themselves and how they managed their households, the pandemic
threatened that confidence. For some participants, the doubt was related to their mothering and
what they were role modeling for their children, while for others, it was that they were not doing
enough or were not “woman enough.” There was also self-questioning about how participants’
mothering reflected their mothers’ parenting and household management approaches.
The pressure of navigating this pandemic without standard support systems was common
(Crook, 2020) and made it even more difficult to keep up. Having to practice social distancing
was a new experience for Latina moms, like me, who are culturally accustomed to being in
community and with extended family. The experience of practicing social distancing led to
stress, loneliness, anxiety, and depression. The negative mental health impacts on working
mothers led to figuring out novel coping mechanisms to navigate a new reality (Balenzano et al.,
2020).
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While the Latinx community still contends with the stigma of mental health and asking
for help (Fripp & Carlson, 2017; Hoet et al., 2020; Pérez-Flores & Cabassa, 2021), participants
in this study sought additional support to enhance their mental health and overall well-being.
Participants asked for help from family members, outsourced where they could, and also leaned
on professional help. Attending therapy and considering medication to address anxiety,
depression, and insomnia were just some of the ways in which participants adapted their help-
seeking behaviors during the pandemic
Blurred Lives
For millions of working mothers, the blurred lines of work and home became usual and
led to a shift in parenting styles. Prior to the pandemic, working mothers were intentional and
thoughtful about their parenting styles. During the pandemic, they were just trying to survive.
The shift in mothering identities is not unusual (P. H. Collins, 1994; Glenn et al., 1994; Mirick &
Wladkowski, 2018; Villaseñor et al., 2013), and neither is the expectation that women will take
on more household responsibilities during “the second shift” (Dugan & Barnes-Farrell, 2020).
This increase in anxiety, stress, and responsibility caused women to reduce their work hours (C.
Collins et al., 2020), question their careers, or leave the workforce altogether.
Several participants in this study illustrated how their roles were enmeshed through their
narratives and photos. Children joining Zoom meetings, at times on their mothers’ laps, relatives
asking questions at inopportune times, and having to leave work suddenly to attend to family
matters became routine. Prior to the pandemic, Latina mother-practitioners could choose how
much of themselves they shared at work and, conversely, how much work they brought home
with them at the end of the day. With the shift to remote work and school closures, those choices
became limited or evaporated completely. Latina mother-practitioners have not had the space
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and time to process, much less heal from, the trauma of the pandemic and are still just trying to
survive.
The Great Resignation
When the pandemic forced most institutions to close and move to a remote modality for
an undetermined amount of time, practitioners had to learn how to navigate their careers in new
ways (Stewart, 2020). Participants in this study began to question their careers and how they plan
to navigate their professional lives moving forward. The impact of the pandemic on working
mothers was swift. Women suffered more job losses and more barriers to remaining in the
workforce, leading to a “shecession” (Stewart, 2020). For working mothers, leaving the
workforce can be damaging, particularly in academia, contributing to the academic gender gap
(Dunatchik et al., 2021).
Two years later, U.S. workers are resigning from their jobs in record numbers (Guy &
Arthur, 2020). In student affairs departments everywhere, practitioners are experiencing burnout,
demoralizing work environments, and overall low morale (Schroeder, 2021). Latina mother-
practitioners, like many other student affairs practitioners, are conflicted about their careers and
futures in higher education. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted academia and disproportionately
harmed historically marginalized people (McClure, 2021), including Latina mothers.
As mother-practitioners return to a new sense of normalcy, they face similar challenges
as they did during the height of the pandemic. Having fewer options for working remotely,
navigating school policies for their children, fear of getting the virus, and shifting responsibilities
based on changing campus policies contribute to questioning whether student affairs is still a
viable career. Additionally, Latina mother-practitioners felt generally unsupported by their
campuses during the pandemic leading to hostile work environments and causing them to re-
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evaluate if higher education is the right career for them. Millions of practitioners of all identities
and backgrounds have decided to prioritize their well-being resulting in leaving student affairs
altogether (Pereira, 2021).
My Testimonio
Testimonios allow both the participant and researcher to experience “cathartic
epiphanies” (Reyes & Curry Rodríguez, 2012, p. 528). To align with the methodology, I offer
my own testimonio. My experience during the pandemic mirrors the participants’ experiences,
and several of this study’s findings resonate with me, especially that any separation between my
personal and professional worlds pre-pandemic quickly vanished. Multitasking and quickly
shifting among mother, wife, practitioner, and student became exhausting and emotionally
draining. I remember many times having my children in the same room with me while I tried to
have Zoom meetings or complete other professional tasks (Figure 14).

Figure 14
Two Little Princesses

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This photo symbolizes a common view during the pandemic: my children in front of the
computer in princess costumes while I sat a few feet away reading endless emails, supporting
students, and writing my dissertation. The constant feeling of living in borderlands and being
pulled in different directions was pervasive for me during the pandemic.
For months, I felt like I was drowning. My mental health suffered as my way of life
completely transformed, and the activities that sustained me pre-pandemic were not an option. I
felt isolated and was just trying to stay above water. Additionally, I worried about my children’s
learning and social development. Our family of four spent months indoors alone because of a
constant fear that if we interacted with other people, we would jeopardize not just our health but
the health of those we interacted with (Figure 15).

Figure 15
Four COVID-19 At-Home Tests

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When pandemic guidelines began to get lifted, and we started to go out into the world
again, the stress and fear persisted. Monitoring exposures, potential symptoms, and testing at
home became commonplace. Much like the women in this study, the last 2 years were a test of
my resolve, and I had no option but to push through and self-manage.
Despite the challenges of the pandemic, there were several silver linings. I spent more
time with my family than ever before and enjoyed watching my children be innovative in how
they adapted to this new way of life. Most importantly, I was able to slow down and reflect on
my personal values, where I invest my time and energy, and how I want to approach mothering
and my career moving forward.
Recommendations for Practice
I recommend four practices based on existing literature and the results of this study. First,
higher education institutions should implement family-friendly human resource practices.
Recognizing that women take on more responsibilities outside of the workplace and creating
more flexible policies, such as hybrid work options, make a difference in women’s ability to
remain in the workforce (Schroeder, 2021). Reconsidering wide-sweeping policies that impact
mother-practitioners negatively and implementing clear boundaries between work and home are
first steps towards supporting the success of working mothers (Bahn et al., 2020). The work of
student affairs practitioners is often excessive and respecting individuals’ full lives shows that
staff is valued as a part of the university.
Second, I recommend that student affairs departments treat and compensate women
fairly. The economic fallout of the pandemic is connected to increased maternal stress levels
(Grose, 2021). Latina working mothers are stressed over their compensation and not feeling
valued, and they feel disillusioned with higher education and student affairs. Hiring mothers,
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promoting them when they excel in their roles, and compensating them appropriately ensure they
feel valued and encouraged to stay in student affairs (Stromquist, 2015). It is not an equitable
practice to continue giving Latina mother-practitioners an abundance of work without
promotions and compensation. This is not a revolutionalry recommendation, but given the high
number of workign mothers leaving the workforce, it is worth reaffirming.
My third recommendation is for campuses to offer robust mental health support. It is not
enough to provide health insurance that includes mental health support. Providing easily-
accessible services on campus acknowledges the importance of mental health and highlights
institutions’ endorsement for seeking support as needed. In addition, allowing practitioners to
take mental health days, disrupting the stigma around mental health, and providing culturally
relevant mental health options are steps towards prioritizing well-being throughout the campus
community.
My final recommendation is for Latina mother-practitioners. During the pandemic,
support systems looked completely different. My recommendation is that Latina mother-
practitioners create and promote support networks amongst themselves. Networks of support that
acknowledge and celebrate intersecting identities would be especially when external support is
limited (Acker & Armenti, 2004). There is power in creating spaces for working mothers as part
of their campuses in new ways given the ways we connected throughout the pandemic.
Future Research
Research on COVID-19 is still being developed as the pandemic unfolds. The field is ripe
for more studies that consider the consequences of the pandemic, what the landscape of higher
education looks like because of it, and the lived experiences of individuals in academia. There
are gaps in research centered around Latinas, mothers of color, and higher education
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practitioners. Scholars should continue to center historically marginalized people in their
research as including diverse voices in research strengthens the academic community. Based on
the findings of this study, I have three specific recommendations for future research that would
further explore Latina mother-practitioners and COVID-19: (a) research on coping post-COVID-
19, (b) studies on the financial impact of COVID-19 on Latina working mothers, and (c) research
on support networks for Latina mother-practitioners. As COVID-19 evolves and moves closer to
being deemed endemic (Grose, 2021), its consequences will continue to be felt. A longitudinal
study on how Latina mother-practitioners cope throughout the pandemic would offer a clearer
picture of the totality of how they persevere. This study’s methodology and guiding framework
would be appropriate for such a study.
One of the consequences of the pandemic has been the negative economic impact on
individuals. A study on how the pandemic affected individuals financially, or the types of
financially motivated choices they made, could demonstrate the impact of COVID-19 on
personal budgets. Using quantitative methods to collect and analyze broad data on the financial
impact on Latina mother-practitioners would provide findings to augment qualitative data and
determine tangible implications for practice.
The final recommendation is research focused on support networks during and after the
pandemic. Given the challenges associated with accessing support networks, research on how
Latina mother-practitioners found support would be enlightening. Using focus groups as the
methodology would provide data on what struggles and triumphs mother-practitioners have in
common. Additionally, using platicas (casual talks or conversations) as the methodology would
be appropriate. The use of pláticas in research emerged because it is a more culturally relevant
way to engage with Latinx participants (Davis, 2022). Pláticas offer a more authentic way to
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build relationships and community (Fierros & Delgado Bernal, 2016) and legitimize particular
ways of knowing and being (Guajardo & Guajardo, 2013).
Conclusion
This study is uniquely situated within research about the pandemic as it centralizes Latina
mother-practitioners and uses a combination of testimonio and photo-elicitation. This study
shared the narratives of six mother-practitioners who navigated parenting and working from
home and was guided by Chicana/Latina feminist epistemology (Fierros & Delgado Bernal,
2016), borderlands (Calderón et al., 2012; Delgado Bernal, 1998), and cariño (Duncan-Andrade,
2006).
This study revealed how participants navigated their personal and professional worlds
during COVID-19. They faced many challenges over the last 2 years but found a silver lining in
many moments and had the strength to survive what many described as a “shitshow”. Latina
mother-practitioners add value to colleges and universities across the nation and should be
supported in the pursuit of living in their purpose.

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Appendix A: Interview Protocol
Participant Pseudonym:
Date:

Introduction
Hi, my name is Ally Delacruz Hong. Thank you for agreeing to participate in my study. I
am a graduate student at the University of Southern California in the Rossier School of
Education. I am conducting a study focused on mothering during the COVID-19 pandemic. I am
interested in how Latina mother-practitioners have navigated their personal and professional
worlds during the pandemic.
I would like to record our interview today to help ensure I have the most accurate
information. May I have your permission to record our conversation?
Today’s interview should take between 60 and 90 minutes. If you need to take breaks for
any reason, please let me know. I am conducting this interview from the perspective of a
researcher. Some of the questions I ask will be quite personal, and I want to assure you that I will
not make any judgments about your experiences or choices you’ve made. You are free to skip
any questions that you are not comfortable answering at any point during the interview.
This interview is confidential. I will use a pseudonym to protect your confidentiality and
will try my best to de-identify any of the information you share. I will keep the data in a
password-protected computer, the audio recordings will be destroyed once they have been
transcribed, and the interview transcriptions will be destroyed once the study is complete. If you
are interested, I can share a final copy of my dissertation with you.
154

Do you have any questions before we get started? I will now begin the recording, if that ’s
okay with you?

Interview Questions
I would like to start by asking you about life before the pandemic…
• Who makes up your family?
• What was life like for you before March 2020?
• What was it like for you to navigate your career before March 2020?
• What types of obligations was your family navigating prior to the pandemic?
• Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, what kind of support did you have in terms of
household responsibilities such as child care?
Let’s go back to early 2020…
• Do you remember when or how you first knew about COVID19?
• When did your institution start to respond, and how did they respond? How did that
impact you?
• Please share with me more about the time leading up to your campus moving to an
online modality; what was that like for you and your family?
• What kinds of decisions did your child(ren)’s school(s) make based on COVID-19
guidelines?
• How did this change throughout the pandemic, if at all?
• Can you please reflect and share how the first few days and weeks of that transition
were for you?
155

• How did your personal and professional responsibilities shift, if at all, in those first
few weeks?
• Let’s talk about the last 16–18ish months, so from the end of the Spring
semester/quarter until now…
• How did your work responsibilities change during the pandemic, if at all?
• Were there layoffs or furloughs at your institution or in your department/division?
• Did you experience a layoff or furlough during COVID-19?
• If yes to either question, how did this impact your ability to work and care for your
family?
• What kind of support did you have in terms of household responsibilities such as
child care?
• Please tell me a story or give me an example of a time when your identities of mother,
student affairs practitioner, and Latina intersected.
If the participant submitted a photo: Let’s talk about the photo you submitted. Can you describe
the photo? Why does this photo symbolize your pandemic experience?

If the participant did not submit a photo: Please tell me about a time during the pandemic when
you were keenly aware that you were navigating multiple roles simultaneously? Why does this
story stand out to you?
I have just a few more closing questions for you.
• What is life like for you right now?
• What is your campus doing in terms of in-person versus remote versus hybrid
instruction and student services?
156

• What is the school situation like for your child(ren)?
• What plan do you have for your children’s schooling moving forward? Is that
different from your current plan?
• How have the decisions made by your institution about fall semester impacted your
life?
• What do you anticipate navigating your personal and professional lives will be like
for you moving forward?
• In what ways, if any, can your institution better support you as a Latina working
mother?
• Are there any other examples or insights you would like to share with me? (RQ2)
Thank you for participating in my dissertation. My next steps are to continue collecting
data in order to find themes for my study. I might have additional questions for you after
reviewing our conversation. Would it be okay if I contact you for follow-up if needed? Do you
have any last questions for me? Thank you again for allowing me to interview you. I truly
appreciate it.

157

Appendix B: Pre-Survey Protocol
1. Do you identify as Latina?
a. Yes
b. No— Thank you for taking this survey. Unfortunately, you do not meet the
necessary criteria to participate in the study
2. Are you a mother working as a higher education student affairs practitioner?
a. Yes
b. No— Thank you for your taking this survey. Unfortunately, you do not meet the
necessary criteria to participate in the study.
3. Is your child/are your children school-aged?
a. Yes
b. No— Thank you for your taking this survey. Unfortunately, you do not meet the
necessary criteria to participate in the study.
4. What is your employment status?
a. Working full time
b. Working part time
c. I am not currently working— Last date of employment
d. Other, please describe
5. Did the COVID-19 pandemic cause you to work remotely for any amount of time
between March 2020 and now?
a. Yes
b. No— Thank you for your taking this survey. Unfortunately, you do not meet the
necessary criteria to participate in the study.
158

6. Further participation in this study consists of a 60 – 90-minute Zoom interview.
Participants will be invited to submit a photo for the study using the following
prompt:
“Latina mother-practitioners are living in what Gloria Anzaldua refers to as
borderlands due to the need to work, homeschool, and learn from home and in
remote environments. I invite you to submit a photo that symbolizes your
experience as a Latina mom and professional during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

*Submitting a photo is not a requirement to participate in this study. If you do not
wish to submit a photo, please be prepared to share a story about a time during the
pandemic when you were keenly aware that you were navigating multiple roles
simultaneously.

7. Are you interested in participating in this study and sharing your experiences as a
Latina mother-practitioner during the COVID-19 pandemic? Once your participation
is complete, a $25 donation to Casa de Esperanza will be made on your behalf.
a. No
i. Thank you for participating in this survey! Your time and insights are
greatly appreciated.
b. Yes
i. Thank you for your interest in furthering your participation in this research
study. The next steps will include a 60–90-minute Zoom interview and a
photo submission. Photo submissions and interviews are expected to take
159

place between September 2021 and November 2021, per your availability.
If you are interviewed for this study, a $25 donation to Casa de Esperanza
will be made on your behalf.
ii. Are you interested in continuing your participation in this study?
1. Yes, my email address is ________________________
2. I am no longer interested in continuing my participation.
a. Thank you for completing the survey. Your time is greatly
appreciated.

160

Appendix C: Recruitment Tools
Figure C1
Recruitment Post for Social Media

Recruitment email wording:

(Insert greeting),

As you know, I am a graduate student at the University of Southern California in the Rossier
School of Education. I am conducting a study focused on how Latina mother-practitioners have
navigated their personal and professional worlds during the pandemic. I am reaching out to ask
for your help with my recruitment efforts. If you know any Latina mother-practitioners who may
be interested in participating, could you please forward them my email and the attached
recruitment post?
Thank you for your consideration!

Warmly,
Ally Delacruz Hong
161

Appendix D: Photo Elicitation Protocol
As a part of the 60–90-minute interview, I am asking participants to submit a photograph
for the study. Using photos as a way to collect data contributes to the robustness of the study and
allows the reader to get an additional glimpse into what participants are sharing.
Photo Prompt
Latina mother-practitioners are living in what Gloria Anzaldua refers to as borderlands
due to the need to work, homeschool, and lead their lives in remote environments during the
COVID-19 pandemic. I invite you to submit a photo that symbolizes your experience as a Latina
mom and higher education professional during the COVID-19 pandemic
Additional Information
• We will take some time during your interview to talk about the photo you submitted.
• Feel free to take multiple photos up until the time our interview is scheduled.
• If there are people in your photo, please make sure we cannot see their faces.
• Your photo will be published in my dissertation. Please ensure there are no faces or
identifiable information such as dog collars or documents with names or addresses in
the photo. If the photo you submit does include identifiable information, I will blur it
out to protect your privacy.
• If you are unable to submit a photo, please prepare a story about a time during the
pandemic when you were keenly aware that you were navigating multiple roles
simultaneously.
• Feel free to contact me with any questions!

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This study examined the lived experiences of Latina mother-practitioners in student affairs during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic affected individuals in a variety of ways, and as people continue to grapple with its evolution, exploring the experiences of Latina mother-practitioners ensures they are a part of research related to it. Qualitative methods were used, namely testimonio and photo-elicitation, to tell the stories of six Latina mother-practitioners. This study is guided by Chicana/Latina feminist epistemology, borderlands, and cariño. The findings included that participants’ personal and professional worlds were completely blurred during the pandemic, the pandemic caused an increase in anxiety for participants, and that participants were conflicted about their futures in higher education. Recommendations for practice include centralizing historically marginalized people in academic research, implementation of family-friendly human resource practices, fair compensation for Latina mother-practitioners, and creation of support networks.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Hong, Alejandra Delacruz (author)

Core Title “It was a shitshow”: testimonios of Latina student affairs mother-practitioners navigating personal and professional worlds during COVID-19

School Rossier School of Education

Degree Doctor of Education

Degree Program Educational Leadership

Degree Conferral Date 2022-08

Publication Date 06/21/2022

Defense Date 05/25/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag COVID-19,Latinas,OAI-PMH Harvest,student affairs,working mothers

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Filback, Robert A. (committee chair), Bañuelos, Sheila M. (committee member), Espino Lira, Michelle M. (committee member)

Creator Email allydelacruzhong@gmail.com,hongad@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111345296

Unique identifier UC111345296

Legacy Identifier etd-HongAlejan-10777

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Hong, Alejandra Delacruz

Internet Media Type application/pdf

Type texts

Source 20220622-usctheses-batch-948 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu