Grief in family and cultural context: learning from Latino families

The following article offers an integrative theory of family development in sociocultural context, which critically examines the goodness of fit between the grief experiences of culturally diverse families and prevailing North American grief practices. This model suggests that many Latino families, even when they are themselves from a variety of national backgrounds with somewhat different sociopolitical histories and cultural practices, offer an approach to death and grief that can enhance developmental outcomes in family bereavement. These qualities include a focus on family and extended family relationships as developmental resources; an appreciation of the spiritual and psychological continuity between the living and the dead; and an appreciation of the need to keep working on relationships, even after a death, so as to create new, more optimal shared understandings of family past, present, and future. The bereavement story of the Ruiz family, who migrated from rural Puerto Rico to the United States, serves to illustrate the ways that integration of Latino family experience into mental health models of grief can help expand understanding and improve bereavement outcomes for all families.