We don’t know or understand how they (Puerto Rican, Mexican, or other Hispanic young people) are affected by cultural displacement or the conflicts they experience between their families’ cultural expectations and external values of American society. (Ooms, p.330)
We do know that Hispanics drop out of school much more frequently than whites and blacks; and among the major reasons cited are pregnancy, getting married, and home responsibilities. 6.9% of whites, ages 18 to 22, are dropouts for these reasons, 14.7% for blacks, and 19.6% for Hispanics. Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr. in his paper, “Burdens and Benefits: The Impact of Early Childbearing on the Family”, delineates some of the positive outcomes for young mothers studied in Baltimore and Philadelphia. Those young mothers who experienced higher degrees of educational and economic success benefited from consistent and long term (several years) familial support, remained in their parents’ homes during their pregnancies and following the birth of the children, had cooperative and collaborative baby-sitting and childrearing arrangements, and had remained single. The majority of the subjects in the studies were black, some white and some Hispanic. The experience for the Puerto Rican teenagers I have worked with, and certainly also for a number of black and white young mothers, contrasts sharply. We can generally predict that the Puerto Rican young mother:
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will not receive long term support from her immediate family
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will be expected to sever her ties with her family and assume more of a role with the baby’s father’s family
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will be expected to establish an independent household
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will be expected to care for her child herself
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will be expected to marry the father of the child.
For many of the families discussed in the Furstenberg paper, the child had a positive impact on the family, in some cases financially (increased welfare benefits), in some cases emotionally (avoiding the empty next for the maternal grandmother or bringing respite and a more positive focus to a troubled family situation). In contrast, since the Puerto Rican young woman moves away from her nuclear family and attempts to establish her own household, she reaps few benefits in terms of family; rather she will face the physical responsibilities of maintaining a household (cleaning, cooking, errands) as well as taking on the emotional problems of her husband—often a teenager himself or an older, unemployed, unskilled man. The Puerto Rican young woman may be esteemed for bearing a child, but will be required to conform to the traditional cultural norms. She will receive little or no help from family in her efforts to continue her education or to assert herself in other ways. Though some grandmothers and other relatives may verbally express support for her continued education, most likely they will not perceive fully the daily physical and emotional support she needs as she attempts to meet school’s academic and administrative demands.
