'If I was a different ethnicity, would she treat me the same?': Latino parents' experiences obtaining autism services.

ABSTRACT

This article reports on an ethnographic study with 12 Latino families of children on the autism spectrum related to obtaining autism services in Los Angeles County. Using critical discourse analysis of interviews, observations, and records, we consider the experiences of the Latino families in relation to 1) A discursively constructed 'autism parent' subject position that mandates 'fighting' service systems to 'win' autism services for children, originating from White middle-class parents' socio-economic resources and social capital; 2) A neoliberal social services climate that assumes scarcity of available resources and prioritizes austerity in their authorization; and 3) A media and institutional 'cultural deficit' discourse that attributes disparities in autism services for Latino children to their parents' presumed culturally-based 'passivity.' We argue that parental discourse about fighting, or not fighting, for autism services is engendered by a tension between a parental logic of care, and the logic of competition of the economic market.