On a crisp morning this past fall, cooperatives from around the world set up shop in an Austin, Texas, church for the annual Women and Fair Trade Festival. While most of the vendors were veterans of collective organizing, one group of single immigrant mothers used the festival to debut their food cooperative, Cooperativa Posada.

Three Mexican women — Silvia, Elideth, and Erika — and a Guatemalan woman named Hilda spent a near-sleepless night preparing dozens of their distinct regional varieties of tamales, some wrapped in corn husks and others in moist banana leaves. Nebat, the lone Ethiopian member of the cooperative, prepared some luscious, dark, traditional Ethiopian coffee by roasting the beans on a metal plate over an open flame, then grinding them by hand.

The products of their labor were not only nourishment for the festival attendees (who lined up for a taste), but also an attempt to raise the awareness — and donations — needed for their cooperative to succeed. On a broader level, the tamales and coffee represented the mothers’ efforts to create an opportunity for self-sufficiency, to foster collective economic empowerment, and to forge a path forward for themselves and their families.

All the Cooperativa Posada members currently live or have lived at Posada Esperanza in Austin, a shelter for homeless immigrant mothers and their children. The shelter houses 16 families, most of whom are undocumented immigrants or asylum seekers from Latin America and Africa who have fled violence and dire economic circumstances.

While Posada Esperanza has provided refuge for their families, these women remain victims of poverty and have histories of degradation. In many cases, their dignity has been chipped away over time by the combination of abusive partners and societal marginalization, and now they are trying to learn a sense of self-worth all over again — or for the first time in their lives. Many understandably yearn for more: a way to feed and support their children, to have a sense of security and comfort — modest desires by most standards.

Their identities as women, single mothers, and immigrants present a combination of barriers to supporting their families. Of the estimated 5.4 million undocumented women living in the United States, those who find illegal employment are among the most underpaid workers in the country, according to the Center for American Progress. The Migration Policy Institute found that, in 2013, nearly 30 percent of single mothers, whether immigrant or native-born, were in poverty, compared to 21 percent of single immigrant fathers and 16 percent of single native-born fathers.

Elideth, one of the cooperative’s founders, illegally crossed into the United States after leaving her home in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. She asked to not be fully named because of her immigration status. “I want to have money and to be able to rent a quiet apartment to be with my daughter,” she says of her 1-year-old, speaking — as did the other Mexican co-op members — in Spanish.