Eliana (a pseudonym) is a 15-year-old Latina in the Pico-Union district of Los Angeles, a neighborhood known for drugs, gang violence, and crime. Eliana's family arrived in the United States from El Salvador 12 years prior, making ends meet on less than $10,000 per year. She is revered by local youth workers as a paragon of moral maturity, mainly through her efforts to link peers from high school with elderly patients in a local convalescent hospital. Eliana's "adopt-a-grandparent" program is a neighborhood success, providing infirm seniors with compassion and improved care. Our research interview takes place in her home, a 350-square-foot hotel room shared with her mother and brother. The room is tightly packed with two double beds, clothes, a hot plate, and small television set. During our conversation cockroaches scuttle about the floor and adolescent boys pound the door, making propositions in Spanish and English. The central significance of family in Eliana's moral development is unmistakable:
What kind of person would you ideally like to be? I would like to a person like my mom. She doesn't let herself go by what people think of her. She lets herself go by what she thinks of herself and she doesn't do like most people and judge people by what she sees; she judges them by what they think and the way they are. I want to be like her because sometimes I'm picky. I like to judge people without even knowing them, so I think that I would like to be more like by mom. She doesn't judge by just looking at them. She treats them well and talks to them and interacts with them.
Eliana's reflection makes intuitive sense to family practitioners and researchers. Yet her case represents something of a challenge to scholars in the field of moral psychology. The moral literature currently suffers from a paucity of studies on the family. Walker (1999Walker ( , 2004a) ) attributes the shortage to historical events associated with competing psychological