'Doing Your Life': Narrative Intervention with Young Mothers as Storytellers

The familiar story about young pregnant and parenting Latinas relies on commonsense logic about the timing of reproductive lives. We explore young mothers' own sense making, captured in local vernacular through participants' digital story depictions, our fieldnotes of digital storytelling workshop talk, and participants' follow-up interview reflections about enduring judgment and doing their lives. In this article, we introduce the Hear Our Stories project and present key digital stories and related ethnographic material that serve as local exemplars of “doing your life.” Findings reveal ways participants negotiate value making about their reproductive lives. As a narrative intervention, digital storytelling helps to gain a firmer grasp on social worlds and to better understand inequality, while also engaging participants in a process that affords them the opportunity to shift from being a judged teen mom to co-creators of knowledge and change as strategic storytellers.