Why First-Gen Latines Often Have An Insecure Attachment Style

At 4, Viviana and her mother immigrated from Colombia to Miami. Living in a multi-generational home with her grandparents, she didn’t get to spend as much quality time with her mother, who worked hard and often as a waitress, mostly depending on tips to keep the family afloat financially. Both Viviana and her mom experienced the trauma of displacement — loss of community, the disorienting shift to an unfamiliar language and culture, the difference in bureaucratic systems, and the draining pace of work many immigrants must endure if they want to survive. 

As both mother and daughter adapted to their new realities, Viviana learned English and, like many Latine kids before her, became the family translator, exposing her to situations that weren’t always suitable for children. This stressful and precarious environment resulted in a close relationship with her mother, but as she became her mother’s community and dealt with her violent streaks, it was also tumultuous. According to Viviana, this childhood experience led to her disorganized attachment style. Now living in Baltimore, Viviana is working on amending how she attaches herself to others.

Through a mix of talk therapy and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, she’s delving deep into her family background to learn how to be in a relationship in a secure way. “I was a lot to my mom, like I was her admin assistant plus her best friend,” Viviana tells Refinery29 Somos. “But she was also gone a lot of the time. So I developed this attachment style where I was close to her, but then when she was home, she was also really violent, but she loved me a lot.”

An adult with a disorganized attachment style, sometimes referred to as anxious-avoidant attachment style, struggles to trust people. Often in relationships, their behavior is inconsistent and chaotic. Typically, this attachment style develops when one’s primary caregiver is both a source of love and fear throughout their childhood. In adulthood, Viviana found herself emulating her mother’s hot-and-cold behavior in her own romantic relationships. “I'll be really into somebody and when they're really into me, I'm like, ‘Okay, you need to go away, please,’” she says. “The moment they go away, I'm like, ‘Wait, please come back. Love me.’ And then I'll do anything to keep their attention. I see it with my mom, too. I wanted to be close to her. But when I got close to her, that's when the belt would come out.”

While studies about Latine people and attachment styles are few and rare, the ones that do exist indicate that Viviana isn’t an outlier among the Latine community. One study reveals that family separation and parental deportation may derail the development of a healthy attachment system and another concludes that insecure attachment style may arise if one migrates early in life. Anecdotally, I spoke to around 20 Latine folks who disclosed insecure attachment styles and their connections to their family’s immigration history. Whether the crossing itself was traumatic or not, the act of migrating and establishing a family within the United States brings up many situations where a lack of belonging can result in attachment trauma. Latine families deal with it the best they can — but oftentimes, they either distrust or don’t know to seek mental health treatment when things get hard. 

For licensed therapist Valerie Labanca, who often works with Latine patients at Octave in Pasadena, California, most of her Latine clients have insecure attachment styles: anxious, avoidant, or disorganized. Labanca founded and leads a Latine-specific group of bilingual therapists at Octave who serve the Latine population through a culturally competent approach. She is also the daughter of Uruguayan immigrants who came to the United States looking for a better life. “[With Latine clients], I have seen a gamut between anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, and disorganized attachment,” Labanca says. “Those are the three main insecure attachments that stand out when we're talking about immigration, but it depends on the story.” 

According to Labanca, immigration can reorganize families in a myriad of ways that might result in insecure attachment styles. For example, Labanca has clients whose parents came to the U.S. first to get settled. This commonplace arrangement leaves many Latine kids feeling as though their parents abandoned them, even though their parents’ intention was to save them from some of the hurdles. Other clients developed their attachment styles because of the violent situations back home that force them to navigate a significant amount of trauma. Labanca says Latine clients will often struggle with a fear of abandonment because of these conditions. Whether the attachment is anxious, avoidant, or disorganized, the reality is that Latine people with insecure attachment styles will struggle with the vulnerability necessary to have in-depth, long-term relationships.

Everyone I interviewed — people who are aware and working to change their attachment styles — were Latina women in their 20s and 30s. This isn’t uncommon in the mental health field more generally where women are likelier to seek help than men. But in the context of Latine communities, it’s perhaps due to machismo and marianismo that Latina women are more readily able to speak on how patriarchal customs made them feel like outsiders and affected their attachment styles. Many of them mentioned that their failure to accept the gender roles their families imposed on them also contributed to their insecure attachment styles. For Nataly Quintero, whose mother is Salvadoran and father is Colombian, it was more than just contending with the generational trauma that her parents passed on to her, it was also feeling like she was “too much” — too outspoken and too loud — to fit in with her family.

This reality became clear when her mother told Quintero to serve her dad at a family barbecue. She refused, explaining that her father was fully capable of getting his food himself. As the only daughter, Quintero had a conversation with her mother about why her two brothers weren’t tasked to do the same for their father. “I do really feel like there's a lot of generational curses that I'm breaking because I had to then have a conversation with my mother about gender roles and she was very confused,” Quintero says. “I tried to explain to her that we are a generation that doesn’t want to do this, and that doesn't mean I'm ‘too much.’ It just means that I don't have to serve other people, so I do very much feel like I am breaking generational cycles.” 

This ends up being a role many women take on in their own families. “When I look at my caseload, I would say probably 80% of it is female. So it is really important for us as providers when we see men coming and seeking treatment to really appreciate their courage to do so because it is outside of what has been the norm.”

Both Quintero and Viviana have been working to change their attachment styles in therapy; they both feel hopeful that they can become better equipped at being vulnerable and maintaining healthy relationships. Attachment styles are not permanent, and Latinas are taking matters into their own hands to learn how to heal and love better. Through therapy, journaling, meditation, and taking some space from their families, both Latinas say they’re in a much better place today after doing work on themselves. 

“I really believe attachment styles can be changed,” Viviana says. “I feel very hopeful about it, and I feel like I have gotten so much more securely attached because I have really focused on my relationship with myself. Before, it was very much like I needed other people to prove that I am lovable, but the more I focus on my values, my hobbies, who I am, what I want to contribute to the world, and how I want to show up every day, [the more] life-changing [it’s been.]”