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In a qualitative study of parents who were alienated from their adult children, the majority of the participants described the loss as traumatic, unexpected, unplanned, and ambiguous due to its uncertainty and imprecision. Numerous people also claimed to have faced social stigma. Professor Kristina Scharp of the University of Washington recalled an encounter with a woman who was divorced from her kids as follows:

I feel as though I must keep [the estrangement] a secret for fear of people treating me like a piece of garbage. What kind of nasty human being of a mother, like I am, could not have her children? They believe I’m either a drug addict, a mother who has abandoned her children, beats my children or has neglected them. There is a social stigma, and I like to think that

Parents who are alienated frequently experience “disenfranchised grief,” which is grieving that is neither socially or publically accepted. When even business meetings begin with exchanging memories of time spent with family over holidays, graduations, and vacations, you feel isolated, as though you can’t talk about it, and as though you can’t stop thinking about it (which contributes to social disenfranchisement).

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I am all too aware. My adult daughters and I haven’t spoken in over five years. My bipolar I disease, my alcoholism, my divorce, and all of our resulting post-traumatic stress disorders destroyed our relationships.

After experiencing a major manic episode brought on by a variety of circumstances, such as the dissolution of my 20-year marriage and my children’ estrangement, I was eventually diagnosed with bipolar I illness. After that, I fell into an uncontrollable despair that caused me to lose my job, become uninsured, file for bankruptcy, and start receiving Social Security Disability benefits.

I’ve been able to control my bipolar disorder well enough to resume working thanks to medication and counselling. But in many respects, it’s been similar to waking up from a nightmare only to find that you were dreaming it, and now you have to live with the consequences of your dreaming.

Even if they are still very much alive and merely don’t desire a relationship with me, I’ve had to mourn their loss. I’ve had to see kids enter college and complete their high school careers through peeks I can get on the infrequent social media posts that I’m not prohibited from.

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The stigma and unexpected incidence of these familial rifts are discussed by an alienated parent.

There seems to be a surge in the distance between parents and adult children. More than 25% of Americans are presently alienated from a family member, and more than 43% have gone through family estrangement once or more.

Since the statistics are based on pre-COVID data, which occurred before the strains of the pandemic and the political atmosphere widened already-existing fault lines in many families, they are likely low. According to some experts, the higher trend has been influenced by growing mental health awareness, increased political and cultural division, and acknowledgment of the negative impacts of toxic or violent familial ties on wellbeing.

Although it is common, alienation is rarely openly expressed because of cultural expectations and conventions that make it particularly stigmatising. Because of this, there are several common misconceptions regarding estrangement, such that it is uncommon, that it occurs suddenly, that there is a specific reason why people become estranged, and that it occurs out of the blue.

Family members may break up contact for a variety of reasons. Mental illness and substance misuse are significant causes of estrangement, in addition to abuse, toxic environments, and poor parenting.

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The great majority of Mexicans and Mexican Americans reside in a challenging environment. Despite having some Native ancestry, we live in a region known as “Nepantla” by Chicana philosopher Gloria Anzaldua, a liminal region between European and Native cultures that were forced to mix to create us.

The name “Nepantla” originates from the Nahuatl language, which was utilized as an Indigenous lingua franca for roughly a century after the Conquest by the Catholic Church and the government of New Spain. Nahuatl is currently widely spoken throughout what is now Mexico and Mesoamerica. Many Chicanx people, who are Mexican Americans, consider themselves to be the heirs of the pre-colonial Nahua heritage, and we have studied the language of one of our predecessors as we have done this.

I have followed Yásnaya Aguilar’s counsel as a researcher of Classical Nahuatl and used that language to better grasp the goals of my fellow Mexican American writers of speculative fiction.

Time was relative to the Nahuas (associated peoples include the Mexica/”Aztec” and Tlaxcalteca) prior to the Spanish invasion. Although there are past and future tenses in Nahuatl, there was no single word for past or future in the original dialect. It was distance that was important.

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Futurism in Mexico and America

The great majority of Mexicans and Mexican Americans reside in a challenging environment. Despite having some Native ancestry, we live in a region known as “Nepantla” by Chicana philosopher Gloria Anzaldua, a liminal region between European and Native cultures that were forced to mix to create us.

The name “Nepantla” originates from the Nahuatl language, which was utilized as an Indigenous lingua franca for roughly a century after the Conquest by the Catholic Church and the government of New Spain. Nahuatl is currently widely spoken throughout what is now Mexico and Mesoamerica. Many Chicanx people, who are Mexican Americans, consider themselves to be the heirs of the pre-colonial Nahua heritage, and we have studied the language of one of our predecessors as we have done this.

I have followed Yásnaya Aguilar’s counsel as a researcher of Classical Nahuatl and used that language to better grasp the goals of my fellow Mexican American writers of speculative fiction.

Time was relative to the Nahuas (associated peoples include the Mexica/”Aztec” and Tlaxcalteca) prior to the Spanish invasion. Although there are past and future tenses in Nahuatl, there was no single word for past or future in the original dialect. It was distance that was important.

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The term “Indigenous Futurism” was created in 2003 by Anishinaabe science fiction critic, editor, and academic Grace Dillon using this framework to analyse the works of Native authors in the US. Similar to Afrofuturism, it rejects assimilation and reconciliation myths and opts to forecast Indigenous peoples’ survival and resistance to genocidal oppression instead. Creators like Rebecca Roanhorse, Stephen Graham Jones, and Darcie Little Badger put Native lives, concerns, and culture at the centre of the present and the imagined future, pushing back against both ignorant and non-Native scholarly views that confine Indigenous culture to the distant past and non-urban geography.

Mexico City Futurism

Mexican author Alberto Chimal argues for the continuing development of Afrofuturism in his article “Mexafuturismo,” utilising its principles “to consider the reality of other groups who have been exploited and persecuted for ages.” He suggests a “Mexafuturism” in which authors could combine pieces that already critique Mexican racism to create works that debunk the “myth of Indigenous inferiority and submission, proposing different routes of transformation and development than traditional racist discourses, the veiled deferment proposed by neoliberalism and new contemporary fascisms.”

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Aboriginal Futurism

The term “Indigenous Futurism” was created in 2003 by Anishinaabe science fiction critic, editor, and academic Grace Dillon using this framework to analyse the works of Native authors in the US. Similar to Afrofuturism, it rejects assimilation and reconciliation myths and opts to forecast Indigenous peoples’ survival and resistance to genocidal oppression instead. Creators like Rebecca Roanhorse, Stephen Graham Jones, and Darcie Little Badger put Native lives, concerns, and culture at the centre of the present and the imagined future, pushing back against both ignorant and non-Native scholarly views that confine Indigenous culture to the distant past and non-urban geography.

Mexico City Futurism

Mexican author Alberto Chimal argues for the continuing development of Afrofuturism in his article “Mexafuturismo,” utilising its principles “to consider the reality of other groups who have been exploited and persecuted for ages.” He suggests a “Mexafuturism” in which authors could combine pieces that already critique Mexican racism to create works that debunk the “myth of Indigenous inferiority and submission, proposing different routes of transformation and development than traditional racist discourses, the veiled deferment proposed by neoliberalism and new contemporary fascisms.”

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