The importance of incorporating the researcher’s reflexivity into an ethnographic approach has been widely recognised (Smith, 2002). A reflexive ethnographer has the capacity to ‘direct one’s gaze to one’s own experience [to make] possible to regard oneself as ‘other’’ (Behar, 1996; Coffey, 1999; Foley, 2002; Hollway & Jefferson, 2000; Lather, 1991).
The methodological implications that reflexivity represents in ethnographic research are related to the researcher’s critical gaze to the self-other relationships in the fieldwork in order to make more accurate interpretations (Foley, 2002, p. 144). The researcher is aware of the limitations of his/her own interpretations and makes them explicit in the overall research process. The subjectivity of the researcher is crucial when conducting ethnographic research, especially when trying to overcome the traditional notion of the researcher as the one who has the authorship and knowledge for interpreting the ‘passive’ or ‘naïve’ participants’ perceptions of reality (Foley, 2002). A reflexive researcher is ‘a living, contradictory, vulnerable, evolving multiple self who speaks in a partial, subjective, culture-bound voice’ (Foley, 2002). I tried to bring my own
subjectivity to the research process and make explicit my own assumptions. I reflected on my own preconceptions and assumptions that I have been developing, not only during the process of research design, but also as part of my personal history.
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Some feminist ethnographers (Foley, 2002, p. 145) consider that bringing the
researcher’s subjectivity into the research process is one of the benefits of conducting critical ethnography. When formulating my doctoral research proposal, the idea of including my own personal background into the research process seemed an appealing and easy task. However, after coming back to my personal and familiar circumstances in Mexico, the task of defining my own identity and my own social position turned out to be a rather contradictory, and sometimes painful, process. Having lived in the USA and UK for almost four years, it was clear that my ‘way of seeing’ things had changed. I grew up in a middle-class family, with both parents working, and I attended private schools all my life. During my primary and secondary education, I went to a religious school for girls in a conservative and a strongly catholic state of Aguascalientes, Mexico. My childhood was spent in a mainly middle-class neighbourhood. My mother is a high school teacher and my father was a salesman. During my high school years, I actively volunteered in social projects in my hometown within impoverished
neighbourhoods. Those experiences made me feel uncomfortable with both my privilege and the injustices I saw. I started developing feelings of ‘class uneasiness’ (that I still have).
When I finished high school, I decided to volunteer as a teacher in an indigenous
Raramuri community in the south of the state of Chihuahua. The living conditions in the community were of extreme poverty, the only public service being a multi-graded primary school. Despite my lack of professional preparation in pedagogical matters at that time, I became an idealistic and energetic young teacher in an indigenous primary school. Although unconsciously and very well intentioned, I reproduced the role of the coloniser: teaching in Spanish to a group of twenty children whose first language was Raramuri and introducing western medicine to solve health problems. I was recognised, after a few months, as a moral leader within the indigenous community. After those two years of heart-breaking experiences in Agua Amarilla, I never imagined that I was about to start a long path of academic study, along with an endless process of scholarships and grants applications.
I received a full grant to start a bachelor degree in Educational Sciences at a private upper-class University in Monterrey, while I also taught History at a local secondary
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school to meet my living expenses. Having lived in a community in extreme poverty conditions, the college experience within a privileged context was a shock. I now also see that the social capital that I had built within impoverished backgrounds (the knowledge and experiences within impoverished contexts, my formal education, my skill to learn English, the language of power, and the development of my oral and writing skills, as well as my social networks), worked in my favour in the form of an on-going upward mobility, while the colonised, indigenous peoples in Agua Amarilla did not have the opportunities that I was able to access. I found myself surrounded by a significant social network of privilege within the Mexican state with the highest income per capita, where there was very little interest in questioning social inequalities. It was as if I was living in a different country. While the Zapatista movement in Chiapas (south of Mexico) was taking a strong stand in many social spheres, at my university (north of Mexico), the movement was a criticised as revolutionary and extreme. I found myself working with NGOs and other universities within the state of Nuevo Leon to support the Zapatista movement, facing the repression of the government and university authorities.
Now that I can take a retrospective view, I see my life split between two worlds: privileged and unprivileged contexts, academic and grassroots work, governmental projects and NGO projects, international and local interventions in education. I see my life path full of experiences and perspectives that made me feel simultaneously an expert in nothing but with an ever-growing commitment to challenge inequality in my country, especially within indigenous contexts. However, more than ever, I have come to recognise that I have a mind-set of a coloniser, and that the only way I challenge this way of thinking is by working closely with the colonised, embedded in their projects and needs, in order to unlearn the mainstream beliefs and values constructed during my four decades of life.
My circle of privilege did not end in Monterrey. I got a full scholarship to go to Harvard, and then to Cambridge, and my enormous social network of colonising privileges just kept growing. I always thought that it was possible to maintain a broad perspective by moving into two different worlds: the coloniser and the colonising, Mexico, and the United States and Europe. My commitment has always been with my country and with my people, I always wanted to come back to Mexico to work at a
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grassroots level, but why then do I need a PhD degree to do it? At that time, my intuition told me that it was within academia that I could be of more help, that by working within an institution, I would have the support to do further research, a
platform to denounce inequalities, and the ability the make proposals of change. Now, I see my role as a bridge or as a translator of the voiceless. I can see that my skills can be of help in attracting both attention and resources from privileged circles, which might be otherwise indifferent to. My educational credentials open up doors with donor agencies, government officials and academic circles. My experiences are valued as having a first-hand knowledge of what is happening within minorised contexts. I have a difficult duty to be loyal to those voices and needs and I have learned to build
interdisciplinary and multi-ethnic teams to advance the development and implementation of educational proposals.
I have learned so many lessons along the way. The most important of all is that in Mexico, issues of class, gender, and ethnicity are rarely problematised in the field of education. The second lesson is that even though I have a very strong political
commitment to marginalised groups, my own social and cultural identity affects the way I see the world and how I choose to conduct a research project. I conducted this research project as part of my PhD with the help of my supervisor and other academics in
Mexico, whose ideas helped me to develop as an independent researcher; however, I realise now that research must be done collaboratively, by privileging the voices, methods, and approaches of those who have identified the research problem. Now my current research includes indigenous peoples, like Ana, a Mixteca student who is about to finish her degree in Educational Sciences and other new indigenous scholars like her, who together are conducting a project similar to the one I conducted for this thesis. She has visited the same schools, asked very similar research questions, but has adopted a different approach, utilising a more collaborative, critical, and decolonising process. Once my research is complete, it would be interesting to undertake a comparative analysis in order to investigate the individual approach (which is promoted by most universities) versus a collective approach to educational research.
This thesis has been the result of a long process of personal and social self-reflection. It has been almost a decade since I wrote my first draft, when I had returned to Mexico after several years of professional studies overseas in USA and the UK. On revising my
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drafts for the final version of this thesis, changes in my own paradigms were evident, leading me to become highly critical of my own work. I can see that I needed to
understand more deeply the complexities of the diversity of Mexican identities and I can see now, more clearly than ever, that indigenous peoples in my country need to be recognised and valued by the mestizo population. There is no way to help overcome the poverty and marginalisation they are experiencing if we, as the dominant society, are not conscious of the discrimination and racism that we exercise in our daily lives. This thesis will always be a work in progress. This is a humble product that tries to make visible my deep indignation with the situation that was revealed through listening to the indigenous children’s voices in urban schools in Jalisco. It is my deepest hope that this will go some way to promoting debate and reflection among different social groups, in order to come up with local and citizen-based strategies to battle the unequal
relationships that we are reproducing within our own people.
3.4 Participant observation and interviews
Two main research methods were chosen for this ethnographic study: participant observation and interviews. In ethnography, these differ little (Behar, 1996; Coffey, 1999; Valenzuela, 1999). Both require a great deal of rapport and well-developed research and relational skills. Any interview is also observational. Both methods took different forms when applied to different age populations, as will be explained in more detail in the following sections. I used participatory methods of data collection, and looked at children’s voices through the lenses of critical and decolonising theories, to try to understand the processes of identity formation within children’s narratives.
Participant observation was a constant method during the research. I observed lessons, playground interactions, civic ceremonies, teachers, family meetings and any other special occasions in school life, in an attempt to observe interactions, attitudes, and conversations related to the ethnicity of the students and their families. I also visited the children’s neighbourhoods on several occasions, just on informal walks, to talk with their parents at their homes or to visit personnel from the government offices, such as DIF.