Conclusion
PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH AND THE POLITICS OF SOCIAL CHANGE
We have been working since the beginning toward a vision of positive change.
—Baudelia
Just because [teachers] have more power or more education doesn’t mean we parents can’t make changes.
—Ofelia
I return to the questions I opened this book with: How do low-income Latina housewives and low-wage workers come to think of themselves as agents of change, as partners in movements for social and educational justice? What capacities do they animate in their struggles for change? And a further question, of interest to academics aligned with people in struggle: what research processes and practices might support and expand these capacities, and thereby contribute to social change? In recent years, the fields of anthropology and education have seen a resurgence of interest in engaged and activist research, research that explicitly aims to support social-change efforts. While anthropologists throughout history have sought to use anthropological research for social-justice purposes—from the antiracism of Boas to the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s—the past ten years have seen a more widespread and concerted movement among students, academics, and practicing anthropologists to reclaim public engagement as the core of the discipline’s mission.1 The inauguration of the “Public Anthropology Reviews” section of the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association in 2010 recognizes new forms of scholarship that broaden and redefine the audience for anthropological work, the methods of knowledge production, and its goals, in an effort to deepen the discipline’s public impact. A recent edited volume on activist scholarship supported by the Social Science Research Council (Hale 2008) reflects, and calls for, increased institutional support for this work. In education, growing numbers of scholars seek openly to lend their research to the efforts of underserved communities to achieve greater educational equity and justice, and call for others to do the same.2 In 2007, the Council on Anthropology and Education voted to revise its bylaws to reflect its commitment to advancing “anti-oppressive, socially equitable, and racially just outcomes to educational problems through research using anthropological perspectives, theories, methods and findings.”3
It has become increasingly recognized that engaged research—openly political, change-oriented research—is both theoretically defensible and at times ethically necessary (Speed 2006; Hale 2006; Hernández-Castillo 2006; Lipman 2005; Scheper-Hughes 1995). But this new commitment, in turn, generates thorny questions and challenges for researchers who find themselves torn between competing loyalties. Not the least of these questions is, who is to define the desirable changes research should promote when there is friction and disagreement within the communities we aim to support? What to do when the changes themselves provoke conflict with other actors wearing the mantle of progressive social change? In short, what does it mean to align oneself with a political struggle, a social movement, or an organized group when these entities are fractured with their own politics and inequalities?
In this Conclusion, I reflect on some of these challenges in light of the experience of Madres Unidas and attempt to extract some lessons for activist researchers in anthropology and education. I begin by distinguishing participatory research as a method from other models of activist research by highlighting differences in the role of the researcher, the construction of knowledge, and the kinds of changes that each model seeks to promote. Participatory research, as a model that elevates uncredentialed, unelected community members to the status of researchers and change agents, runs the risk of conflicting with many powerful institutional players—policy makers, reformers, community organizers, and university researchers—who have traditionally maintained the right to lobby for change. I argue that these conflicts and the politics they reflect offer activist researchers new theoretical insights, as well as new possibilities for supporting social change processes. Using the experience of Madres Unidas, I submit that participatory research among the least powerful actors is uniquely suited to uncovering and disrupting relations of domination and inequality within social movements and expanding the capacities of the least powerful actors to enact change in their own right. A Latina feminist lens helps illuminate and explain the kinds of changes such research promotes and their contribution to larger social-change processes. No doubt other changes are possible, and this discussion is in no way meant to endorse one model of engaged research over another. Rather, I hope to fill what I see as a gap in the literature on activist research in which social change is defined rather narrowly as policy change, and to highlight other kinds of changes that play equally important roles in the quest for a more just and humane social order.
Activist Research and the Everyday
While the terms “activist research” and “participatory research” have been used in different ways to mean many different things, some recent writings on activist research together reveal a policy-oriented model of activist research, which I contrast with participatory research processes. In the policy-oriented activist research model, researchers lend their research products and expertise to the service of marginalized groups seeking specific, winnable policy changes. Participatory research, by contrast, emphasizes a democratic research process that aims to transform relationships between “researcher” and “subjects” and expand the capacity of participants to make changes in their own lives and communities. The two models differ in who does the research, what is considered appropriate to research (what counts as knowledge), and the goals or hoped-for outcomes of the research.
Anthropologist Charles Hale (2006) defines activist research as “a method through which we affirm a political alignment with an organized group of people in struggle and allow dialogue with them to shape each phase of the research process, from conception of the research topic to data collection to verification and dissemination of the results” (97). He distinguishes this from cultural critique, the most common form of politically engaged anthropology, in which anthropologists incorporate into their writing an awareness and critique of power relations, but leave their field methods basically unchanged. The main difference he sees between the two is in loyalty: while cultural critique is loyal to the academy, and produces products meaningful primarily to an academic audience, activist research has “dual political commitments” to “the space of critical scholarly production” and to an organized group in struggle (104). There is an inherent tension between these loyalties that, in Hale’s view, produces vibrancy and theoretical innovation.4
For Hale, cultural critique is a luxury of the academic, and is at times at odds with the demands of an organized group in struggle. Drawing on his work in support of indigenous land rights in Nicaragua, he argues that disenfranchised communities who are seeking new rights from the state will have little tolerance for cultural critiques produced by well-meaning ethnographers. They need, instead, an objective and infallible social science in order to advance their interests in the public sphere. Accordingly, he suggests that activist researchers more willingly embrace positivist research methodologies in the service of marginalized groups, even as they subject these methods to critique. In his research, research products including computer-generated, geo-referenced maps representing the territories indigenous communities claimed as their own, ethnographies showing the basis for these claims, and expert testimony in the Inter-American Human Rights Court were the key tools in the struggle for indigenous land rights.
Hale’s work is emblematic of a growing trend in activist research in which the researcher plays the role of mediator or broker between disadvantaged community groups and legal bodies such as legislatures, school boards, and human rights courts, and tailors his or her research products to these powerful governing bodies. In an example of this from education, Pauline Lipman (2005) and her university colleagues produced maps showing the intersection of gentrification patterns and school closings in Chicago to aid African American community organizations in their efforts to fight school closings in their neighborhoods. In both Lipman’s and Hale’s work, researchers put specialized knowledge to work in the service of organized groups in struggle. The conditions of knowledge production—what counts as research and who does the research—are not changed. Indeed, there is a growing willingness among activist researchers to capitulate to reigning definitions of knowledge in order to advance the interests of powerless groups in the policy realm.5 Wrestling with Audre Lorde’s famous dictum, “The Master’s Tools will never dismantle the Master’s house,” Hale concludes, “ultimately, there may be no way to begin casting off the Master’s tools of our trade, except by putting them to use in radically alternative ways” (2006, 112). This conclusion precludes the possibility of activist research that draws upon the forms of knowledge production utilized by everyday people in the struggle for social change.
Another typology of collaborative research illustrates this trend. Foley and Valenzuela (2005) describe a continuum of activist research from least to most direct involvement in political action, offering their own work as case studies representing opposite ends of the continuum. On one end, Foley writes cultural critiques and attempts to make them more collaborative, accessible, and politically useful by involving community members in their editing and revising, among other things. Foley focuses his innovation on textual strategies that affect the final research product, while not significantly redefining the research process. At the other end of the continuum, Valenzuela became directly involved in the legislative process in Texas in an attempt to influence educational policy for Latino students. Drawing on her own expertise and research on Latino students, she helped author a bill for a more just assessment approach, based on multiple measures of academic performance, as an alternative to the state’s standardized test. In this case, community members were not involved in shaping the research process or product, but Valenzuela worked to defend their interests in the legislative realm.
Foley and Valenzuela assert that “the most politically active form of action anthropology emphasizes direct involvement in political movements, court cases, and aggressive organizing activities,” of which Valenzuela’s work is a prime example (2005, 224). However, even in this model of activist research, it is the researcher’s knowledge production that is key to the change process, not that of community members. This continuum of activist research, even at its most politically active end, maintains a separation of roles between “expert” researcher and community members who must rely on this (others’) expertise in their struggles for change.
In all of these examples of activist research, the possibilities for change come not from how research is conducted but from how it is used, and knowledge production remains firmly in the hands of the expert researcher. As Hale says, anthropologists allied with people in struggle must “generate the kinds of knowledge they ask and need us to produce” (2006, 115, emphasis added). The underlying assumption that research, or knowledge production, is separate from action for change prevents us from seeing other possibilities in activist research: how “ordinary” people also produce knowledge that is useful in struggles for change, and how the research process itself could be an important arena for making change.
Although activist anthropology for public policy plays a vital role in the struggle for social justice, a wide range of feminist scholarship cautions against the presumption that public policy channels are the best way to enact democratic social change, or that social movements themselves are always democratic. Feminist scholars have critiqued the focus on legalism represented in this model of activist research (see Brown and Halley 2002; Brown 1995; Speed 2006). In focusing on short-term legal goals, these scholars point out, activist researchers may neglect to examine the ways their own scholarly production might reinforce structures and discourses of domination. Jennifer Bickham Mendez (2008) specifically questions the tendency of activist scholars “to frame information in order to make it more palatable to decision makers,” arguing that such a move sacrifices the “counterhegemonic potential of subjugated ways of knowing” (148). In her critique of rights-based activism, feminist political theorist Wendy Brown (1995) raises the concern that, in seeking redress or recognition from the state, leftist activists (and, by extension, activist scholars aligned with them) reinforce the power of the state over all other realms of social relations where inequality is reproduced. If we believe that only the state has the power to make necessary changes (through the distribution of rights and resources), we neglect the way power operates in everyday life, and we do nothing to expand the capacity of ordinary citizens to confront relations of power and domination in their own lives.
Participatory research responds to these critiques, as well as other critiques of positivist social-science research methodologies, by radically altering who does the research and what counts as research, as well as to what purposes research is put. In contrast to the researcher-as-broker between the powerless and the powerful, participatory research, in the words of Budd Hall (1993), “attempts to put the less powerful at the centre of the knowledge creation process; to move people and their daily lived experiences of struggle and survival from the margins of epistemology to the centre” (15). Although uses of participatory research have also been plagued by conceptual fuzziness, Budd Hall’s definition highlights key features that most uses of the term have in common: the participation of nonexpert, less powerful people as researchers, and a focus on everyday life as the starting point for all research and action for change. Similarly, Peter Park (1993) defines participatory research as “a means of putting research capabilities in the hands of deprived and disenfranchised people so that they can transform their lives for themselves” (1). Participatory research originated in the global South as a challenge to Western models of development and research that were seen as contributing to colonization, and remains much more well known outside the United States (Nabudere 2008; Hernández-Castillo 2006). The earliest network of researchers to assemble from Latin America, Africa, and Asia in 1977 defined participatory research as “a research process in which the community participates in the analysis of its own reality in order to promote a social transformation for the benefit of the participants, who are the oppressed” (Francisco Vio Grossi, cited in Nabudere 2008, 67).
While participatory research shares the goal of social change with policy-oriented models of activist research, it defines change more broadly (or more specifically, perhaps) to include anything that participants need to change in order to realize their full humanity. In the long term, participa-tory research seeks both personal and structural transformation (Maguire 1993, 157). In the short term, it “presents people as researchers in pursuit of answers to questions of daily struggle and survival” (Hall 1993, 17). Reason and Bradbury (2001) write, “A primary purpose of action research is to produce practical knowledge that is useful to people in the everyday conduct of their lives” (2).
But the focus on “practical knowledge” or “daily survival” should not be taken to exclude the possibility for critical analysis. On the contrary, a closer look at the tenets of participatory research, informed by the perspectives of U.S. third-world feminist theorists, illustrates how everyday survival and cultural critique are linked in the struggle for full humanization. Participatory research is closely linked to processes of conscientization (conscientização) articulated by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1970/2005) in which a chief goal is the development of a critical conciousness in order to transform reality. Participatory research dissolves the distinctions between expert researcher and oppressed community members and between theoretical reflection and action for change, posing research and action as two parts of the same process, praxis, for social change (Fals-Borda and Rahman 1991; Nabudere 2008). As participants develop critical awareness of the historical and material conditions that limit their lives, they are moved to change them. Returning to Charles Hale’s distinction between activist research and cultural critique, it may be true that disenfranchised community members have little need for cultural critiques written by ethnographers. But they can and do practice their own cultural critique, and participatory research views this as an essential step in the struggle for liberation.
Cultural critique is not the luxury of the privileged, or those who have no immediate need for change. According to U.S. third-world feminist and de-colonial theory, it is an act of survival on the margins of society. Chela Sandoval (2000) gives the example of the concept of “split consciousness” articulated by third-world thinkers such as W. E. B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and others. These thinkers, she explains, “see what they do as they do it from the dominant viewpoint as well as from their own, shuttling between realities, their identities reformatting out of another, third site” (85). This “third site,” key to U.S. third-world feminist thinking, is “an interstitial site out of which new, undecidable forms of being and original theories and practices for emancipation are produced” (ibid). In this analysis, the movement between realities and perspectives—movement of thought, perception, and being—“is recognized as fundamental to advancing survival” (ibid). Freire, too, recognized the “duality” of the oppressed, who bear within themselves at once the identity of the oppressed and their oppressors (1970/2005, 48). For Freire, this was fraught with the possibility of false consciouness, the idea that the oppressed may so internalize their domination that they cannot see any other way of being, unless it is to mimic their oppressors. Freire and other third-world thinkers warn against the romantic notion that the oppressed will always critique or resist domination.6 However, because it is only through critical consciousness that they can overcome the contradiction of their divided selves, cultural critique is the ultimate vocation of the oppressed.
The contribution of U.S. third-world feminist theory is not to suggest that marginalized people are inherently radical, but that the margins can be a space for radical resistance (hooks 1990), that the experience of marginalization generates a unique and privileged knowledge base for activism. As the stories of Ofelia, Carmen, and Amelia show, the quest for healing and wholeness, for self-realization, necessarily entailed critiquing and dismantling the structures in their everyday lives that sought to define them as less than. As they did so, they led the way for teachers to create change at the school. Bringing a third-world feminist perspective to bear on participatory research processes helps us understand the creative and critical capacities that have enabled women of color to survive over the centuries, the tools with which they have sought their own liberation, as tools in the struggle for social change, given, as Audre Lorde once wrote, “we were never meant to survive” (Lorde 1978, 31).
Participatory research thus shares the insight with third-world feminism that the tools oppressed people use to survive and overcome the limitations imposed on them are the best tools with which to wage the struggle for social transformation, because, for the oppressed, survival—sobrevivencia in Latina feminist thought (Trinidad Galván 2006)—and transformation are merged in the struggle for full humanization. Ruth Trinidad Galván writes, “La sobrevivencia is what lies ahead and beneath plain victimry, our ability to saciar (satiate) our hopes and dreams in creative and joyful ways” (2006, 163). Expanding on this concept, Sofia Villenas (2006a) defines it as the “will to act and intervene in the world with simultaneous joy, tragedy, tradition and innovation” (660). This insight also allows the fusion of inquiry and action, of critique and activism, what Charles Hale and so many others see as diametrically opposed, as complementary elements of sobrevivencia. For Freire, these processes respond to core human drives: “Human existence cannot be silent … To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it” (1970/2005, 88). The ability of the oppressed to think and do for themselves is critical to Freire’s analysis of conscientization, which poses critical thinking as a fundamental right of all human beings. This is why, for Freire, the oppressed must lead the struggle for their own liberation, because it is only in critically analyzing and acting on their reality that they become fully human. “Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence,” he writes. “To alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects” (85).
With this in mind, I can reflect on the ways in which Madres Unidas made use of cultural critique as a key element of their transformation and intervention at their children’s school, and the insights this afforded me, the academic researcher, that would have been unavailable to me as a lone ethnographer. To be sure, the mothers in Madres Unidas did not need to conduct research in order to develop a critique of the role of parents in the reform: they had a rich critique already from their own experience. What Madres Unidas provided was the opportunity to deepen and extend this critique by providing a venue for being together, a counterspace, in which they could collectively explore their experiences, inquire into the experiences of other parents, and analyze these experiences together in light of broader patterns at the school. I brought a set of research methodologies and tools for analysis that helped them sharpen and systematize their inquiry, which they welcomed. As Baudelia wrote, “He aprendido muchas técnicas y métodos de investigación que anteriormente ignoraba, y ahora forman parte de mi conocimiento y experiencia” (I’ve learned many research techniques and methods that I never knew before, that now form part of my knowledge and experience). Later, she reflected that “research” also lent credibility to their experience: “Una de las funciones de la investigación es que es científica. O sea, que no es una suposición. Que tú puedes decir, ésta es la verdad porque tengo los datos, puedo demostrar lo que yo estoy diciendo” (One of the functions of research is that it is scientific. That is, it’s not a supposition. You can say, this is the truth because I have the data, I can prove what I’m saying). So, in addition to deepening their critique, the process of research lent legitimacy to their critique and allowed it to be heard at their children’s school and beyond.
But to what extent was their critique their own, and not due to my influence? I am often asked this question when I present on our work at academic conferences, and certainly other professionals in the small schools movement believed that the Madres’ critique and resulting actions at the school were my responsibility. Professionals so often want to know, “How much could they have really done without you?” By way of answering this question, I can offer what I could not have done or learned without them. And in this recognition I am not alone among activist researchers; as Hale writes in the introduction of his new volume, “whatever we contribute, as activist scholars, to struggles with which we are aligned, we are apt to learn much more from these struggles” (2008, 22).
Deconstructing Community, Social Justice, and Autonomy in the New Small Autonomous Schools
Cultural critique, according to Charles Hale (2006), consists of “the energetic deconstruction of powerful ideas, institutions, and practices” that affect the lives of subordinated peoples (102). As a doctoral student enrolled in courses in anthropology and seminars called “Sociocultural Critique of Education,” I certainly brought this critical lens to my fieldwork in the small schools movement and was highly sensitized to relations of power between teachers and parents at Whitman Elementary School. However, collaborating with the women who formed Madres Unidas brought me down avenues of critique I could never have imagined as a lone ethnographer. As I have argued throughout this book, contesting controlling images of Latina mothers that rationalized their subordinate roles in reform was at the heart of Madres Unidas’ process, and the mothers were naturally highly attuned to these images. Owing to their social location, they were also uniquely poised to deconstruct other “powerful ideas” in the small schools movement, such as “community,” “social justice,” and “autonomy.”
The teachers at Whitman Elementary School planned to create a “community school” with a “social-justice theme” even before they brought parents into the conversation. But it was the mothers in Madres Unidas who raised the questions “What does it mean to be a ‘community school’?” and “Who do we mean by ‘community’?” The most obvious example of interrogating the concept of community was the Madres’ decision, initiated by Baudelia, to interview parents of children who did not get into the new school, to learn their perspective on the school’s founding and the student selection process. This was something that quite simply would never have occurred to me to do, because I did not know these parents and was unaware of their exclusion. Nor, as we have seen, were teachers aware of these parents. Baudelia, as a member of the community who had worked closely with some of these parents during the early phases of organizing, was acutely aware of their absence in the new school and chose to invite their critique by granting them interviews, at great risk to herself, because she realized they might find her to blame for their exclusion. As Baudelia explained one of these interviews in a conference presentation, “Yo dejé que ella se desahogara, porque yo me sentía culpable, me sentía muy mal” (I let her vent, because I felt guilty, I felt very bad). These interviews, as we have seen, were pivotal in the Madres’ developing critical consciousness.
This example of a research activity that emerged organically from the mothers’ unique social location illustrates the potential of research to contribute to positive change and yield critical insights into social processes that would have been otherwise inaccessible to an outside researcher. Baudelia’s explaining that she let the mother desahogarse, or unburden herself, indicates her awareness that the opportunity to share their experience of exclusion could be healing for these parents, a form of testimonio. The word desahogarse has connotations of recovering or feeling better, after one has unloaded. Of course, the Madres also took action on these testimonies by inquiring about the waiting list and advocating for parent participation in future admissions decisions. The perspective of the excluded parents made all of us aware of the consequences the school’s admissions decisions and mistakes had on the community, consequences that were felt unequally by parents and teachers and, as the Madres informed teachers in their presentation, “brought resentment to the community, to the people who organized the meetings, and resentment to the school.” The findings underscored the harm in definitions of “community” that did not take into account historical relationships among parents and neighbors in the school community.
The school’s professed “social-justice” focus also raised questions for the mothers and invited their critique. As described in chapter 2, in early conversations with teachers about the new small school, Baudelia did not understand what they meant by “social justice” and questioned them about it. When they responded with an answer that did not satisfy her, she had asked, “But aren’t we also going to talk about us, about what we think, about what we want for those children?” With this question, Baudelia challenged a conception of social justice that did not take into account parents’ experiences of injustice or their own hopes and dreams for their children. Madres Unidas would continue to critique the concept of “social justice” throughout their research. During one group conversation I tape-recorded midway through the year, Baudelia expressed hope that their research could hold the school accountable to its social-justice goals, specifically by recognizing the mistakes they had made that had harmed parents and the community. “Hablan de justicia social, ¡qué se haga!” (They talk about social justice, they should practice it!), she exclaimed. Ofelia drew laughs from the group when she responded, “Yo creo que el error de ellas fue también poner tanto, hacer énfasis en tanto en la justicia social, ¡y no la implementan en nada!” (I think that [the teachers’] mistake was to put so much emphasis on social justice, when they don’t implement it anywhere!” Agreeing, Carmen said, “Mejor no dijeran de esto” (It would have been better for them not to say it).
Conversations like this, expressing the mothers’ running critique of “powerful ideas,” led to research activities to further explore these ideas, which yielded surprising insights. The Madres decided to explore the social-justice theme with students. In the two student focus groups, they asked students if their teachers had talked to them about social justice, and what they understood by the term. These conversations were particularly poignant and revealing. In both student focus groups, students at first claimed not to know what “social justice” was. The question on social justice drew blank looks, shaking heads, and questions of “What’s that?” from the children. But with some prodding and coaxing from the parent-facilitators, and help from each other, students gradually revealed a complex and insightful understanding of the term. In the bilingual student focus group, talk of Cesar Chavez was a springboard to a discussion about rights, and students linked social justice to the efforts of oppressed people to defend their rights. Through learning about people like Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King Jr., students were learning that the actions of people could change the world. One student explained, “Those men [Chavez and King] tried to do something with the community that was fair, something wasn’t right and they tried to correct it.” Following this discussion, the students were asked whether they had a better understanding of “social justice” now, and they all responded that they did. After reflecting a bit, one boy said, “Pienso que es que personas tienen derechos, cada persona tiene derecho de hacer lo que él quiere hacer, si quiere decir, eres un niño inteligente, y tú no te dejan hablar, la gente no va a saber las cosas bonitas o buenas que estás diciendo” (I think it’s that people have rights, each person has the right to do what he wants, and if [for example], you’re an intelligent boy and they never let you talk, people are never going to know the beautiful and good things you have to say). In her reflection on the student focus group, which she shared with the teachers, Ofelia wrote, “Esta entrevista me hizo pensar diferente, hoy me siento, contenta pienso positivamente. Hoy siento que todos los sacrificios que como padres hemos hecho para lograr esta escuela ha valido la pena … Mi mayor satisfacción es ver a estos niños contentos” (This interview made me think differently, now I feel happy, I think positively. Now I feel that all the sacrifices that we as parents made to achieve this school were worth it … My greatest satisfaction is to see these children happy).
This is an example of a case when the mothers’ critique led them to inquiry that brought them closer to the teachers’ understanding of a powerful idea, thereby countering the charge of reformers and some teachers that the mothers’ critique was wholly disruptive. On the contrary, I argue that participatory research, in enabling the mothers to explore their critique, contributed to the democratization of school-reform discourses and rendered meaningful the powerful ideas and practices of educators that had otherwise excluded parents. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the exploration of the concept of “autonomous schools.”
The official name of the policy passed by the Oakland School Board was the “New Small Autonomous Schools” policy, and this term was baffling to many parents. “Autonomy” was a powerful idea that became salient in the daily life of the school and that the mothers interrogated through their research. As Ofelia observed in our end-of-year group evaluation, when recalling their most striking findings, “Descubrimos que la mayoría de los padres no sabía qué es una escuela autónoma, no sabían el significado de autónoma” (We discovered that the majority of parents didn’t know what an autonomous school was, they didn’t know the meaning of autonomous). Here the other mothers cut in, laughing: “¡Ni nosotras sabíamos!” (Neither did we!), and Ofelia agreed, “¡Ni nosotras mismas! ¡Lo aprendimos!” (We ourselves didn’t know! We learned it). When the mothers discovered that “autonomy” was a politically loaded term that could be used against them, as when the principal told parents they would no longer have the right to transfer their child from an English-only to a bilingual program or vice versa because this was an “autonomous school” (described in chapter 4), they decided to explore it in their interviews.
When the Madres asked parents in the focus groups what they understood by autonomy, they were often met with blank stares. The following excerpt from a focus group illustrates some of the confusion around the word:
Amelia: ¿Ustedes como padres saben que esta escuela es autónoma? [Silencio]
Jessica: ¿Qué será eso? [Risa]
Teresa: Específicamente, ¿qué es autónoma, porque muchos no sabemos?
Baudelia: ¿Nadie puede explicar ni tiene una idea … ?
Maria: Algo relacionado con la universidad.
Angela: No, ¡eso es la Universidad Autónoma de México! [Risa de todos] A eso le suena.
Amelia: Do you as parents know that this is an autonomous school? [Silence]
Jessica: What is that? [Laughter]
Teresa: Specifically, what is autonomy, because many of us don’t know?
Baudelia: Nobody can explain, or has an idea … ?
Maria: Something to do with the university.
Angela: No, that’s the Autonomous University of Mexico! [Laughter from the group] That’s what it sounds like!
In this same meeting, the parents went on to offer their ideas that autonomy implied freedom and more rights for parents. One mother said, “Puede uno trabajar aquí como entre familia” (You can work like you’re among family here). Others suggested, “Tiene uno más derechos” (You have more rights) and “Los padres tienen el derecho de opinar y de expresarse” (Parents have the right to express their opinions). Often, parents would insist that Baudelia or the facilitator explain the meaning of autonomy to the group. Baudelia, always careful to explain that this was just her understanding of the term and not necessarily the right answer, would offer an example of one way UCS was autonomous. In this way, discussion of the term provided an opportunity for collective reflection and self-education.
The discussion of autonomy in the teacher focus groups provided a revealing counterpoint. As explained in chapter 4, the issue of autonomy came up in both teacher focus groups before the parents asked about it. In the English teachers focus group, when asked what they understood by “autonomy,” the teachers had spontaneously burst into laughter. Teachers’ feelings around “autonomy”—chiefly, their resentment that they did not have any—gave the mothers valuable insight into teachers’ views of their roles in the school and their expectations of the reform that might have rationalized the exclusion of parents. The promise of autonomy, we learned, constructed teachers as entitled to control over school design by virtue of their professional expertise, and parents, by extension, were problematic infringements on this autonomy.
At the end of the year, as part of our group evaluation process, I asked the mothers to write out their answers to a series of questions about the research, which we then discussed together in a videotaped group evaluation. One of these questions asked them to explain what they now understood by “autonomous school,” and whether they thought UCS was one. Their responses revealed how far their thinking had come. Amelia wrote, “Yo entiendo que una escuela autónoma es cuando toman sus propias decisiones aunque pertenecen al distrito pero el distrito les ofreció ser una escuela autónoma. UCS no lo es porque las maestras se sienten traicionadas o burladas por el distrito” (I understand that an autonomous school is when they make their own decisions even though they belong to the district, but the district offered them to be an autonomous school. UCS is not because the teachers feel betrayed or mocked by the district). Ofelia wrote, “Entiendo que son padres, maestros y directora trabajando juntos. UCS no creo que sería un modelo de autonomía, puesto que a los padres en muchas ocasiones no estamos enterados de lo que pasa o se hace” (I understand that it is parents, teachers, and the principal working together. I don’t think UCS would be a model of autonomy, given that parents in many cases are not aware of what happens or what is done). More cutting still, Carmen wrote, “Creo que ya he aprendido lo que significa esta palabra. Pienso la UCS es autónoma sólo en lo que más les conviene, no cumplen todo lo que la palabra encierra” (I think I have finally learned what this word means. I think UCS is autonomous only in how it benefits them, they don’t fulfill everything that the word encompasses).
There is no doubt that participatory research enabled the mothers to deconstruct powerful ideas in the small schools movement and to identify how these ideas were often used to exclude, rather than include, the very people the movement was meant to serve. This illustrates the role of Madres Unidas as a counterspace, a place to interrogate dominant representations of “parents,” “community,” and “social justice” in the reform and support alternative interpretations based on the lived experiences of Latina mothers. It may be that the greatest contribution of this methodology to the theory of activist research lies in exposing the risks of any movement or method that depends on some people (professionals) representing the interests of others (in this case, Latino parents and families) in the struggle for change. No one was better positioned to interrogate the construction of “community” and “parents” by educators in the small schools movement than the parents themselves, the ones who were being framed and depicted in Incubator meetings and teachers’ lounges and School Site Councils and positioned strategically in public actions to leverage policy change, and in whose name these new small schools were claiming to stake out a better future. As long as the reproduction of power unfolds in the construction and dissemination of controlling images, as well as in the stately halls of policy making, contesting these images will be at the heart of the struggle for social change.
Confronting Relations of Domination and Inequality within Social Movements: Participatory Research as “Nuisance”
If cultural critique by professional ethnographers is of little use to marginalized groups advancing their interests in the public sphere, cultural critique by marginalized groups may be of even less use to professional reformers and organizers advancing their interests in the public sphere. As Madres Unidas began to take their critique public, and to use their new knowledge to make change at their children’s school, the group began to encounter its most serious opposition from organizational leaders in the small schools movement, who communicated to us in multiple ways that our research threatened the success of the reform. And here activist researchers must face an inconvenient truth about participatory research: it may not be welcome within the social movements we aim to support. This realization was surprisingly slow to dawn on me. As an idealistic graduate student, I had begun my fieldwork convinced that my research could be useful to both Latino parents and the organizational leaders of the movement whose endorsement I sought. Well into my research and steeped in the power politics between the partners in the reform, I stubbornly continued to believe that we were working for the same goals and that organizational leaders would eventually embrace Madres Unidas’ work. My reluctance to recognize the gravity of the conflict we faced or its real causes caused me undue stress and prevented me from gaining some important insights into the politics of social-change movements.
It is critical for activist researchers to recognize that even the most progressive social movements can and do reproduce patriarchy, racism, and other structures of social inequality (hooks 1989; Naples 2003). To the extent that our thinking about activist research is limited to the tensions between academia and activism, between the demands of scholarship and the demands of action, we neglect to examine the delicate politics within communities and activist movements, and may find ourselves walking into a land mine. As Bickham Mendez (2008) observes, “Communities and organizations are not homogenous, nor are they free from internal conflict, power struggles and contradictions” (153). Ethnographers seeking to lend our work to the interests of disenfranchised groups need to be attentive to these power struggles, and sensitive to the multiple ways our work might intersect with, reproduce, or disrupt them. What this means for our alliances may be different for each researcher, and is ultimately a personal, moral decision. At the very least, this recognition cautions against activist ethnography that uncritically engages only the most powerful actors in social-change movements: community organizers, reform leaders, district and school administrators. Had I continued as a single ethnographer, accountable primarily to movement leaders rather than to the Latina mothers who allowed me into their confianza, I would have missed the “hidden transcripts” of resistance (Scott 1990) that animated and sustained the mothers’ engagement in the reform, and my ethnography might have unwittingly contributed to their silencing. Because I made the decision to join with the mothers, and to facilitate whatever inquiry and action they wanted to undertake to improve their understanding and position in the reform, I came face-to-face with the barriers they encounter in their own efforts for change.
In the first year of my research, when I engaged in more traditional ethnographic fieldwork—the lone researcher observing and describing—organizational leaders embraced my research enthusiastically (in the case of BACEE) and tentatively (in the case of OCCA). But once I began working closely with the Madres as coresearchers, the protests from organizational leaders grew loud and frequent. In addition to the occasions described in this book were many other conversations with BACEE and OCCA staff in which I found myself “disciplined”—chastised, warned, or lectured—by senior organizational staff who felt that my work (or the work of the Madres, which was still seen as my work) was interfering with theirs. When Madres Unidas voiced their critique of exclusionary politics at the school, the partners told me that anything negative we exposed would be used to blame the new small schools movement and could potentially bring it down. When Madres Unidas made an arrangement with teachers to open a parent center at their school, organizational leaders told me that we had “crossed the line” from research to implementation and were “setting them [the parents] up for failure” because they didn’t have the resources or the know-how for long-term sustainability. We should focus on research, they said then, and leave the reform to the experts.
I began to see a parallel in the reactions that Madres Unidas drew from the school staff and the rebukes I drew from the organizational partners. In both cases, the powerful actors questioned the right and ability of uncredentialed, less powerful actors to enact change, and suggested that such undisciplined and uncoordinated efforts for change would imperil the larger reform currently being carefully directed by their expertise. Further, in both cases, they questioned our intentions and framed us as troublemakers. In multiple ways, organizers and reform leaders communicated the message to Madres Unidas that the success of the reform depended on forming a unified front in which there was no room for conflict or critique. They had come this far by delivering a single message to the public, loud and clear. Inequality was the problem; new small schools were the solution. To point out inequality in the new small schools, at a time when the future of the new small schools was still uncertain, was unacceptable. If we could not produce a research report highlighting successes in the new small schools, our findings were not welcome.
And what of these concerns? Are they not legitimate? It is certainly true that policy channels have shamefully little tolerance for nuance in the implementation of reforms, and that conservative forces are too ready to seize on any negative findings to eliminate programs for the poor: bilingual education is a case in point (see Crawford 2000; Faltis and Hudelson 1998). But here is where it becomes important to distinguish between policy and other kinds of changes that research can and should promote. If my end goal was to protect the new small autonomous schools policy and ensure the resources for its full implementation, I might have done well to listen to the partners and redirect my research to meet their goals. This is the policy-oriented model of activist research that holds such currency in anthropology and education today. But for this to come at the cost of silencing the mothers’ critique—asking them to tolerate their oppression, to deny their full humanity for the sake of greater policy victories—is a trade-off that should make us all think twice.
Bell hooks writes, “Domination is not just a subject for radical discourse, for books. It is about pain … Even before the words, we remember the pain” (1989, 4). Looking back on our discussions around Ofelia’s kitchen table, I can say that the mothers were suffering physical and emotional pain. Several times as they described their experience at the school they were at the point of tears. At times the frustration and desperation were so great that the pain became physical, as when Amelia and Baudelia complained of headaches or stomachaches that they would develop during meetings at the school or in interactions with school staff. If nothing else, our Friday meetings were a healing balm, a chance for the mothers to realize “they’re not crazy.” From a Latina feminist perspective, this personal healing is integral to the struggle for social change. A Latina feminist or mujerista lens places importance on the means of achieving change, and highlights the need for a research process that supports womanist ways of being in community, based on wholeness and confianza. Valuing wholeness means acknowledging the need for healing and for relationships that support our emotional, spiritual, and mental well-being as prerequisites for collective action.
Ultimately, I believe that the changes that Madres Unidas made possible contributed more to further the goals of democratic participation and community empowerment—stated aims of the small schools movement—than they hurt them. While OCCA organizers claimed that the Madres were sowing conflict at the school and alienating other parents, the mothers’ expanded leadership roles in the school after our research ended suggest just the opposite: that they held considerable respect and moral authority among other parents. Near the end of our research, Ofelia was elected to the School Site Council, and the following year she was elected president (succeeding Baudelia, who had completed her term). Ofelia and Carmen were both selected to serve on the school’s English Language Advisory Committee, and both also served as parent representatives on a hiring committee to hire new teachers for the school. Amelia continued to be a volunteer coordinator for the parent center for the year following our research.
All of the mothers testified that the skills they acquired through the research served them well in their continued quest to develop themselves personally, professionally, and intellectually. Baudelia, eloquent as usual, expressed her gratitude in this way: “Yo creo que los conocimientos es el único que podemos decir, ‘Esto es mío.’ Porque el dinero se acaba. Los papeles se van. Pero lo único que me queda es el conocimiento y esto es lo único que yo puedo decir, ‘Es mío’ ” (I think that knowledge is the only thing that we can say, “This is mine.” Because money runs out. Papers disappear. But all that I’m left with is knowledge, and that’s the only thing that I can say, “It’s mine”). Ofelia wrote, “Aprendí muchísimo. Porque ahora puedo entender mejor a las demás personas. Aprendí a escuchar diferentes opiniones, a no enojarme tanto cuando alguien hablaba y yo no estaba de acuerdo. Aprendí a reconocer algunos de mis errores” (I learned so much. Because now I can understand other people better. I learned to listen to different opinions, to not get so angry when I didn’t agree with someone. I learned to recognize some of my own mistakes). Surely these new learnings contributed positively to the building of community at UCS. As we have seen, Carmen and Amelia dedicated themselves to helping other parents with new motivation and the empathy that can only come from having recently made the leap from isolation to engagement, from fear to confidence, and from self-doubt to social critique.
Through Madres Unidas, low-income Latina immigrant mothers were able to claim a place for themselves at their children’s school and in so doing assert their right to belong. They rejected the school’s terms for their involvement and defended their right to implement their own vision of community. It should come as no surprise that the new roles they carved out for themselves challenged some educators’ expectations for parent involvement in the new small schools or provoked disapproval from other “experts” in reform. What Madres Unidas sought was the right to define their own identities and participate in their children’s school from a place of wholeness, agency, and self-determination. Had the conditions existed for this before, a movement for new small schools would have never been necessary.
In its potential to unearth oppressive formulations of power and identity that stand in the way of full humanization, participatory research offers its greatest insights into social change. Participatory research contributes to the conditions that allow marginalized people to express and act upon their social critique and claim their own subjectivity. In this way, the same processes that garner new theoretical insights about relations of domination and inequality are the processes that also contest these relations. The Madres’ understanding of their research best explains this double-edged sword. As Carmen wrote in an end-of-year reflection,
Por lo que hemos encontrado en la investigación de UCS puede haber beneficios y ventajas para los niños, los maestros y toda la comunidad, siempre y cuando se haga un plan de acción … Para los maestros: El que nosotros estemos bastante involucrados en las cosas de la escuela es más apollo para ellos, los que lo quieran ver de ese modo, o si no también puede ser un estorbo.
From what we have learned in our research on UCS there can be benefits and advantages for the children, the teachers, and the whole community, if and when there is an action plan … For the teachers, the fact that we are considerably involved in the matters of the school is more support for them, those who wish to see it that way, or if not, it could also be a nuisance.
Carmen’s assertion that their research could be seen as a “nuisance” by some teachers reveals her awareness of the inevitable presence of conflict in this method: any change is necessarily a disruption, or an obstruction, of the way things were. This “double consciousness”—her ability to consider at once the perspectives of disapproving teachers and her own, and to navigate between and around them—is a fundamental feature of the Madres’ resilience, or sobrevivencia, in the ongoing struggle for parents’ rights in the school.
The experience of Madres Unidas suggests not that we glorify or un-critically endorse popular knowledge (see Nabudere 2008, 67), for the Madres needed participatory research to unlearn much of what they had learned about their roles as Latina mothers, but rather that the perceptions and experiences of subjugated peoples form a privileged starting point for both analysis of and action against injustice. It is only when the least powerful actors shape their own roles in reform that the imprisoning contours of the roles others have assigned to them are laid bare. Ofelia, reflecting on her new position on the School Site Council, expressed this best:
Para mí estar en el SSC no ha sido fácil. Me he enfrentado a muchas cosas que no me gustan. Siento que la escuela, el SSC, utiliza a los padres, no les da voz, los utiliza, sólo porque en el distrito les exigen que el comité debe tener padres … La escuela a lo mejor piensa que los padres no tenemos ideas, o no sé qué es el problema, pero no quieren escuchar la voz de los padres, quieren hacer lo que ellos dicen, como ellos dicen, y yo pienso que están en un error … No sólo porque ellas tienen poder o más estudios, pensar que los padres no podemos hacer cambios.
For me, being on the SSC has not been easy. I have confronted many things I don’t like. I feel that the school, the SSC, uses parents, it doesn’t give them voice, it uses them, just because the district requires the committee to have parents on it … The school probably thinks that parents don’t have ideas, or I don’t know what the problem is. But they don’t want to hear the voice of the parents, they want to do what they say, how they say it, and I think they’re making a mistake … Just because [the teachers] have power or more education doesn’t mean we parents can’t make changes.
With this testimony, Ofelia expressed both her critique of the roles prescribed for parents by teachers and the idea that teachers have a privileged claim to change processes because of their professional status or training.
The notion that low-income, uncredentialed, and unskilled (not to mention non-English-speaking, noncitizen, racially brown, immigrant) women could have an equal claim to shaping processes of school and community change that affect their lives defies the perceived wisdom of our knowledge society (Gaventa 1993), and not surprisingly provokes consternation from professionals who have traditionally controlled these processes: people who, in Ofelia’s words, “want to do what they say, how they say it.” Nowhere was this more apparent than in our meeting with the principal and coaches at UCS, described in chapter 6, when Martha burst out: “Isn’t this research over?” This was quite possibly the most upsetting experience of my research. I felt that the Madres and I had worked hard to cultivate positive relationships with the principal, the BACEE coaches, and OCCA, and that we were finally working in collaboration. With Martha’s outburst of accusations, all of that seemed shattered. Martha shouted at me about the parents as if they weren’t there. I felt personally humiliated, as if I had lost face, as if it was my face (or my ego) that was at stake! Although I managed to continue the meeting calmly, I felt afterwards that I was ready to give up. I told myself I would never sit through another meeting like that one, or endure being yelled at in that way, again.
But one by one I debriefed with each of the mothers who had been present. Amelia told me her head started hurting so badly during the meeting that she couldn’t think straight. She got a headache, she said, because she was so angry. Each of the three mothers expressed similar feelings of shock and helplessness. Baudelia, who called me at home later that night, wanted to apologize for not having been able to speak up to Martha in the meeting. She said she felt like someone had dumped a bucket of cold water over her and she was too stunned to reply. It was in talking to Baudelia and the other mothers that I realized I couldn’t walk away. If the anger and hurt that I felt was crippling, the pain was much more theirs. And they could not walk away.
In spite of all the roadblocks, as the preceding chapter detailed, we went on to have a successful presentation at the school, which was an empowering experience for Madres Unidas. The warmth with which the presentation was received by the staff was gratifying and validating to all of us. But our shared experience of being attacked beforehand taught me an important lesson. If I stayed, it was not because I could ever claim that my work (or our work) was making a difference. It was not because I could win the approval of OCCA or anyone else whose approval mattered. My role was simply to be with the mothers in struggle—to hear them out, back them up, and share in some of the pain they experienced so that they would have a little more strength and wholeness for their journey. Activist research is, finally, an exercise in solidarity. And in solidarity with the Madres, I realized something they knew all along: the struggle for change is not undertaken for recognition or rewards, or because it feels good; it is a like-it-or-not necessity. You do it because you have no other choice. And then, your faith and your relationships with your compañeras see you through. In her kitchen one winter afternoon, as she taught me how to make chile verde and I recorded our conversation, Ofelia ended her interview with these words: “Y seguimos todavía … aunque a veces nos sentimos que ya no podemos más, pero seguimos adelante. Nosotras seguimos adelante” (We continue still … even though sometimes we feel we just can’t go on anymore, we keep going. We keep going).