In this article, we attempt to map out the "in-between" space between global and cultural narratives that mediates women's educational trajectories. Case studies of women living on the U.S.-Mexico border make visible these spaces, sites of "practices of emergence": the practices that emerge from incommensurable economic demands and social prescriptions and produced in the act of social survival. In negotiating both global and cultural narratives, materially and ideologically, the occupants and ideas that inhabit these spaces are in constant flux, resulting in the reformulation of the notions of mothering, pedagogy, and place, resulting in variable educational outcomes for women. (Contains 8 footnotes.)