Community Caretaking, Collective Parenting, and Othermothering: Diasporic Family Building in the Western American Military

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Using materials and archives associated with Black US Army laundresses stationed at Fort Davis, Texas, in the 1860s–1890s, this paper will investigate how the practice of parenting intersected with a broader focus on public caretaking in the African American community. Adoption, communal parenting, and seasonal fostering were utilized by Black families living in the American West as a means of forming kinship and community ties across military rank, bloodlines, and geographic divides. When considered in the context of Reconstruction-era racial uplift movements, early Black suffragist politics, and the trauma of Jim Crow legislation, collective parenting might best be understood as a performance of new kinds of citizenship, revolutionary love, economic independence, and bodily autonomy denied members of an artificially displaced Black military population.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37349.0