Date of Award

2026-08-01

Degree Name

Doctor of Education

Department

Educational Leadership and Administration

Advisor(s)

Isela Pena

Abstract

This autoethnographic study examines how motherhood, faith, and borderlands identity shaped persistence throughout my journey as a Chicana mother-scholar in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Grounded in Borderlands Theory and Chicana Feminist Epistemology, the study centers lived experience, testimonio, spirituality, emotion, and embodied knowledge as legitimate forms of inquiry. Data included reflective journals, personal memory work, and selected family contributions. Through iterative narrative and thematic analysis, I organized experiences chronologically, coded recurring patterns and critical incidents, tested candidate themes across sources, and interpreted the resulting themes through the study's theoretical and scholarly literature. Four interconnected themes emerged: living in nepantla through borderlands identity; faith as a sustaining force; motherhood as a source of strength and knowledge; and persistence as a collective process. The findings demonstrate that doctoral persistence was neither linear nor solely individual. It developed across a lifetime through migration histories, cultural identity, caregiving, marriage, family sacrifice, faith communities, mentorship, and institutional navigation. Motherhood functioned not simply as a challenge to academic participation, but as an epistemological and leadership lens that shaped advocacy, decision-making, compassion, and scholarship. Faith operated as a meaning-making practice and sustaining resource during uncertainty, family crisis, and transformation. The study calls on doctoral programs to provide institutional supports for caregiving students and calls on institutions to honor spiritual ways of knowing rather than treating them as separate from scholarly life. Ultimately, this dissertation offers a counterstory that affirm a Chicana mother-scholar's lived experiences, cultural identity, maternal wisdom, and faith as legitimate sources of knowledge, reframing persistence as relational, culturally situated, maternally informed, and spiritually grounded

Language

en

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Size

206 p.

File Format

application/pdf

Rights Holder

Alejandra Salgado-Hernandez

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