(53) on many issue fronts, including but not limited to child-rearing matters.
Fatherly displays of affection to and playfulness with children are confined to the home, since demands on men for public dignidad are so strong. Madsen's analysis is that the main message of childhood enculturation is the authority of the father in particular and male superiority in general. Among the greatest weapons a mother has against disobedient children is that she will "tell your father" (54).
These features of Mexican-American family dynamics are relevant to the present research because they are the dynamics and the culture that children bring with them to the public-school classroom. And the content of what they bring has implications for their experience as users of English, the mainstream culture's language. Hernandez, et al., cite social science research showing that Latinos are more allocentric, or group-oriented, and less individualistic and competitive than non-Latino Whites; sympathetic toward needs of others; familistic, or strongly attached to extended families; and socially close in personal situations. At the adolescent level, they posit a phenomenon of biculturality, wherein such features as familism may obtain in the family circle but may enco
...