Citizenship, beneficence, and informed consent: the ethics of working in mixed-status families

Abstract

This article draws from a 23-month ethnographic study conducted in mixed-status Mexican homes to detail the particular methodological concerns that arise when conducting research within these legally complex and vulnerable families. Specifically, the analysis illustrates when and why undocumented parents in one focal family asked the ethnographer to consider legally adopting their two young sons in an effort to obtain equal rights for both children and to mitigate the risk of family separation during deportation. The ethical issues of beneficence, informed consent, and reciprocity raised by this particular situation open onto larger methodological and ethical questions relevant to qualitative and ethnographic researchers working within immigrant communities.

Keywords:

• citizenship
• beneficence
• informed consent
• reciprocity
• ethnography

Acknowledgements

As ever, I am humbled by the generosity of the families who participated in this study and I am indebted to them for the lessons that I learned during our everyday encounters. Django Paris and Maisha Winn first provided me with the opportunity to explore these methodological concerns in a chapter published in their 2014 edited volume Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities. Members of the 2011–2012 Institute for Research on Women Seminar at Rutgers University provided invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of this article. I am grateful to Jen Hofer, founding member of Antena, for her close reading and valuable commentary regarding the transcripts presented here. The insightful suggestions made by the reviewers and editors of this journal have strengthened this manuscript; I thank them for their careful attention.

Notes

1. All proper nouns used to describe the study location and participants are pseudonyms.

2. While the families referred to me colloquially as translator, many language justice activists note an important distinction between acts of interpretation and translation. An interpreter facilitates communication through spoken language, while a translator does so through written language. The distinction is significant because of the different skill sets, audiences, and purposes involved in each activity (Antena, 2014). Throughout this article, I use the families’ term – translation – when noting their requests for my help. I differentiate between my role as an interpreter or translator when I describe those interactions in which I served as one or both. I use the term translation to explain my analysis of the audio data transcribed into Spanish and English.