Public benefits, recognition, and the same old materialist conclusion: a lyric essay

In this lyric essay, the author uses auto-ethnographic inquiry to re-contextualize a qualitative study of Latina parents' experiences of safety net services, benefits, and programs. That study concluded that at the heart of service use was ambivalence about dependency; at the heart of ambivalence about dependency was the desire for recognition. The purpose of this article is to express and explore that finding intersectionally, i.e. in the context of gender, race, and class. The author deliberately avoids narrative coherence, yet relies on Axel Honneth's theory of recognition as an orienting framework.