In Parenting Empires, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas focuses on the parenting practices of Latin American urban elites to analyze how everyday experiences of whiteness, privilege, and inequality reinforce national and hemispheric idioms of anti-corruption and austerity. Ramos-Zayas shows that for upper-class residents in the affluent neighborhoods of Ipanema (Rio de Janeiro) and El Condado (San Juan), parenting is particularly effective in providing moral grounding for neoliberal projects that disadvantage the overwhelmingly poor and racialized people who care for and teach their children. Wealthy parents in Ipanema and El Condado cultivate a liberal cosmopolitanism by living in multicultural city neighborhoods rather than gated suburban communities. Yet as Ramos-Zayas reveals, their parenting strategies, which stress spirituality, empathy, and equality, allow them to preserve and reproduce their white privilege. Defining this moral economy as “parenting empires,” she sheds light on how child-rearing practices permit urban elites in the Global South to sustain and profit from entrenched social and racial hierarchies.
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1. Parenting Empires and the Moral Economy of Privilege in Brazil and Puerto Rico
- 2. The Feel of Ipanema: Social History and Structure of Feeling in Rio de Janeiro
- 3. Parenting El Condado: Social History and Immaterial Materiality in San Juan
- 4. Whiteness from Within: Elite Interiority, Personhood, and Parenting
- 5. Schooling Whiteness: Adult Friendships, Social Ease, and the Privilege of Choosing Race
- 6. The Extended Family: Intimate Hierarchies and Ancestral Imaginaries
- 7. Affective Inequalities: Childcare Workers and Elite Consumptions of Blackness
- Epilogue
- Notes
- References
- Index
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