Working on "A Never-Ending Puzzle": A Narrative Study Examining How Latina Collegians' Mothers Informed Their Meaning Making About Intersecting Identities

Abstract: Higher education scholarship has underscored how contextual influences within and outside institutional settings influence students' developmental journeys. A subset of research has examined how Latinx/a/o students broach questions of identity while in college and how families inform their development. Yet, little scholarship has investigated how Latina collegians uniquely experience familial influences given their multiple minoritized identities. Centering the stories of 12 Latina collegians, this narrative study explored how they made meaning of their intersecting identities as they entered and moved through higher education, with their maternal relationships as a central area of interest. We studied how Latinas described verbal and implicit messages from their mothers; we then analyzed how these participants discussed their meaning-making processes relative to those messages using the intersectional model of multiple dimensions of identity (Jones et al., 2013) as a framework. Findings revealed the following: (a) maternal figures' early influence on the recognition of one's social location and systems reinforcing their positioning, (b) meaning making in college that complicated what participants learned about their identities from their mothers, and (c) strategies Latina collegians used to reconcile maternal and other external influences as they moved toward living authentically. We provide implications for future research on Latina collegians' identity development, as well as recommendations for higher education and student affairs practice.