Dangerously important moment(s) in reflexive research practices with immigrant youth

Abstract

As a white, working middle‐class adult queer from the Southwest USA, my subjective relation to the Mexican (im)migrant, poor, working, straight adolescent boys in California participating in my study was tentative, politicized, controversial, and surveilled from both social and individual lenses. Our relationships were also mutually caring, loving, supportive, stimulating, and challenging. Our ethnographic encounters carried with them some long‐standing and dynamic social narratives that surround relations between and across groups of relative privilege and oppression. These narratives produced ‘ethically important moments’ wherein I confronted microethics of research practices that remained largely under‐theorized and misunderstood in methodological literature. By critically examining my reflexive processes and practices within one of these moments, insights into the workings of social narratives about race, class, and sexuality are revealed that can potentially assist future researchers as they confront the politics and microethics of working within and across the intersectionalities of oppression and marginalization.

Keywords:

• ethics
• reflexive research
• immigrant youth

Notes

1. As the LEME project has evolved, students have matriculated into college, and I moved to Iowa as an assistant professor, our engagement has increased in its modes of participation. Particularly, we have used online and digital‐distance technologies such as social networking websites (e.g., Facebook), email, web‐based office management tools (e.g., Googledocs) and online synchronic communication technologies (e.g., Skype™) to enhance and sustain our ethnographic engagement.

2. The term ‘undocumented’ is used to signify students' immigration status. These immigrant students entered the USA from Mexico as children without legal documentation.

3. ‘Queer’ as a signifier has been used by queer theorists and activists to disrupt the normative assumptions around sexuality that static binaries such as gay/straight perpetuate. To dis‐identify is a post‐structural/postmodern exercise of power to resist the categorization and stagnation of one's sexuality into any discrete discourse (see Butler 1993; Sedgwick 1990; Thomas 2006 for more information).

4. Pseudonyms have been used in place of students' actual names.

5. Confianza is often translated from Spanish into English as ‘trust’. In this instance, it is a cultural expression of trust within long‐standing reciprocal relations. For more information about the confianza developed and practiced in the LEME‐PAR, please see Gildersleeve, Gómez, and Rodriguez (2009); Gildersleeve and LEME (2009); Gildersleeve (2010).