Disrupting the social by centering the self: Life coaching and the politics of marriage, motherhood, and adult sociability among Latinx and Latin American women

This article examines how life coaching, as practiced by Latinx and Latin American coaches in the United States, yielded new audiences and forms of sociability and provided conceptions of parenting as a contested practice, as defined in this special issue, for women who did not have children (either by circumstance or choice). These life coaching practices measured personal transformation in terms of how effectively individuals changed the inner linings of the self, manifested a desired outcome, or cultivated social and fictive kinship networks. Using a case study ethnographic model, the article follows the life of a middle-aged Puerto Rican woman and two life coaches with whom she worked. Considering the Latin American origins of life coaching, I introduce the main interlocutors in this ethnographic project: life coaches Gloria Rodriguez and Ester Fried and Camila Zamora, a childfree middle-aged upper-middle-class Puerto Rican woman who sought life coaching. Moreover, I identify tenets across life coaching modalities while tracing Camila's path from seeking a romantic relationship to expanding social capital and access to valuable upper-class, cosmopolitan child-centered spaces. Thus, Latinx and Latin American life coaching contested parenting by undermining an individualistic parent-child bonding while privileging the cosmopolitan practices, lifestyles, and social capital that upper-classed urban parenting yielded among adults, whether they had children or not.