Parenting styles and embodied corporality: violence, memory, embodiment, and performativity in mazahua families

Abstract

This article analyzes how parenting styles among Mazahua families in San Felipe del Progreso, a municipality located in the northern region of the State of Mexico, generate and sustain violent practices. These practices are inscribed on the bodies of children and adults, persisting as embodied memory and performativity throughout their lives. Using a qualitative methodology based on genealogies, participant observation, and life histories, the study documents the intergenerational transmission of authoritarian, neglectful, democratic, and permissive parenting styles, emphasizing their emotional, physical, and symbolic impacts. Furthermore, the article explores how the body becomes both a repository and a living archive of violence (Gómez Sánchez & Bruno Rosas, 2025), while memory enables the recollection and reconstruction of childrearing experiences (Pérez-Taylor, 2012) from the perspectives of gender and Mazahua culture. The analysis also draws on the concept of embodiment, understanding both memory and the body as sites where violence is inscribed and experienced. From this perspective, parenting emerges as a performative field in which structures of domination are not only reproduced but also contested and resisted.