One
“Recording Everything I Say”
Over the past decade, scholars of immigration have theorized the importance of citizenship throughout the lifespan and across generations. Ethnographers of citizenship have argued for a view of belonging as processual. From this perspective, claims to citizenship are shaped by multiple phenomena at once: nation-state criteria that define who belongs to the polity, public beliefs about inclusion and exclusion informed by contemporary racial and geopolitics, and fluid and ongoing transnational relationships between communities.1 Sociologists studying the impact of immigration status on individuals’ livelihoods have shifted our view of citizenship status itself. Instead of thinking of it as a static category, we now know that state-sanctioned authorization to reside in the United States can be obtained or lost throughout a person’s life, along with a sense of belonging or exclusion.2 Rich interdisciplinary portraits of immigrant students and youth in the United States have demonstrated the persistence of what is now known as the immigrant paradox: that immigrant children’s and adolescents’ health, behavioral, and academic “developmental outcomes become less optimal” the longer they live in the United States.3 The experiences of young adult immigrants are now more deeply understood within a transnational and intergenerational framework; scholars speak of an “immigrant bargain” in which U.S.-born children of immigrants are socialized to make good on the sacrifices that their parents made by achieving social and economic mobility.4
In the important and growing literature on youth and children in mixed-status families, there are many accounts of why researchers select one particular nationality or place or generation to study. However, it is rare to find researchers explaining why they have chosen to work with children and youth of a certain age and not another. This kind of decision matters because whom we include in our studies tells us something about whom we think we can best learn from. An example of a usefully clear methodological statement about the selection of a particular age group for their study can be found in Learning in a New Land, where the authors write: “To understand the experience of immigration over time, we chose to work with youngsters old enough to have developed, prior to migration, a firm sense of belonging to their country of origin. They were also old enough to articulate and reflect on their changing experiences of immigration.”5 This helpful methodological explanation makes explicit the researchers’ beliefs about the relationship between age and understanding of immigration status.
Studies of immigration are invariably informed by tacit ideologies regarding childhood and development, and in the absence of a critical discussion about methodology, we risk repeating mistaken assumptions about childhood as a time of ignorance. I chose to work with children aged ten and eleven because they were on the threshold of an educational transition from elementary to middle school during which I imagined that questions of immigration status and educational opportunity would be especially salient. The ethnographic approach that I used is particularly suited to studying children. As a language socialization researcher, I began with the assumption that they are active participants in everyday interactions in which they are learning about citizenship while also displaying their knowledge indirectly.6 (Children—and sometimes even adolescents—can find it difficult to answer direct questions like “what is a passport?” or “what does it mean to be a citizen?” Yet they often recount the significance of papers, borders, and immigration status when describing the lives of people they love. “I can go to Mexico but my sister can’t,” a six-year-old once told me, “because she doesn’t have papers.”7)
In order to learn from children growing up in mixed-status families, we need to tackle the enduring question of whom we consider capable of reporting on lived experiences and therefore whose realities are represented in the social science literature. This chapter models a way of writing about methodology that gives equal attention to the study’s procedures and outcomes. My argument is that methods and findings go hand in hand. In order to appreciate how much children know about citizenship, we first need to understand how they shaped this very research project. Because Catalina, Pita, Aurora, Hazel, Tere, and Jenni participated in this project, they also influenced the study’s methodology in ways that made clear that they understood the significance of what I hoped to learn. In this sense, their co-construction of methods was also a finding about their sophisticated and metalinguistic understanding of citizenship’s significance. In addition, as they navigated conversations with peers about the study’s methods and tools, the students raised questions that highlighted important ethical dilemmas as they unfolded. By shaping the ways in which I studied citizenship and childhood, they revealed just how much they knew about what citizenship was and why it mattered.
Studying the language socialization experiences of children from mixed-status families requires both a real-time alertness to speech as it unfolds and a method for recording children’s talk that allows the ethnographer to listen to their words after the exchange has ended. Although it was fairly straightforward for me to set up a camcorder in the families’ homes, it was much more challenging to record the subtleties of speech and silence during the fluxes and flows of the school day.8 Figuring out a way to record school-based interactions is difficult because they can be at once deeply meaningful and painfully ephemeral for researchers; exchanges happen so quickly, and the locus of attention can shift so rapidly, that one rarely finds the opportunity to reflect on and analyze what children say in real time. In what follows, I will describe in detail my methodology for studying children’s speech and silences.
My goal in recording children’s talk throughout the school day was to gain insight into how they understood citizenship in their own words and in a variety of contexts: responding to teachers during curricular activities and also talking among their peers. I wanted Catalina, Pita, Aurora, Hazel, Tere, and Jenni to feel a sense of ownership and agency in the data-collection process itself, so I chose recording devices that met two criteria: portability and familiarity. The devices needed to be portable so that they could travel with the girls throughout the school day. This immediately discounted audio recorders that need to be set on a tabletop for recording (such as Olympus recorders), which are still widely used in sociolinguistic and anthropological research. The devices also needed to be familiar so that I could enlist the focal students in the recording process and minimize their discomfort while wearing them. I decided on Apple iPods with the Voice Memo application because they resemble smartphones and were therefore familiar to the children—especially to children living in families in which transnational communication is often facilitated by the use of mobile technologies like telephones and tablets.9
In addition to the iPod touch, I equipped the girls with microphones to improve the quality of the recordings and with carrying cases to facilitate wearing the devices throughout the day. The iPod touch includes a built-in microphone that can capture ambient sound in classrooms but is less adept at isolating individual voices within multiparty exchanges surrounded by background noise. I purchased lapel microphones that would be better at recording the voice of the focal student wearing it while also being sensitive enough to record exchanges with others near the microphone. This helped me to ensure that talk could be recorded as children engaged in everyday schooling routines. In addition to having high-quality recording devices, I also needed the students to be able to take the devices with them as they traveled through their school day while minimizing their distracting presence. I purchased an off-white cotton carrying case with a strap that could be worn across the torso. I chose cases that resembled purses I had seen some students wear to school. As we will see, the excitement and novelty that they experienced wearing the carrying cases also involved managing new levels of scrutiny and questioning from their peers.
I have detailed these recording strategies because they enabled two integrally important facets of data collection and data analysis. The first was to record long stretches of talk that included students’ participation during structured classroom activities as well as long stretches of child-led talk with peers and adults during transitions and noninstructional time. This allowed me to listen later to the ways in which the children negotiated peer questions about the study and the ways in which topics broached during class time echoed throughout the rest of the school day. Second, I was able to repeatedly listen to the recordings and understand the significance of children’s silences as well as their discomfort. As a result, my analysis attends to those significant silences that I theorized in the introduction.10 This includes student silences that went unnoticed during dense, multiparty schooling interactions but that became perceptible to me after listening again to the audio recordings. This also includes moments of verbal silence that were accompanied by the production of other sounds communicating the children’s inquietud, such as tapping or fidgeting that might indicate anxiety. I only began to hear the silences and attend to inquietud after multiple passes at coding recorded data over time.
The Belmont Report is a core reference text used by government agencies, colleges, and universities to evaluate whether a researcher’s application to launch a particular study should be approved. This text serves as a resource for institutions charged with determining what counts as human subjects research, who qualifies as a researcher, and what risks and benefits a research project poses to its participants. The Belmont Report was compiled by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research and published by the Federal Register of the U.S. government in 1974. The commission was charged with reviewing the bioethical principles violated during the Tuskegee syphilis experiments conducted over a span of forty years by scientists employed by the U.S. Public Health Service. As a result of the investigation, the authors of the Belmont Report concluded that a set of ethical guidelines was needed to ensure that biomedical and behavioral scientists could prevent such abuses from being repeated. The authors describe the report as “a statement of basic ethical principles and guidelines that should assist in resolving the ethical problems that surround the conduct of research with human subjects.” Since 1974, university and research-based entities have created structures and systems for reviewing researchers’ plans to guarantee that they adhere to a set of rules pertaining to “informed consent, risk/benefit assessment, and the selection of subjects of research.” University-based institutional review boards (IRBs) lean heavily on the Belmont Report to develop trainings, templates, and rubrics meant to guide research design and implementation today.
The report, along with the accompanying policies that have been encoded in university research practices, function at two levels: first, to protect the university from the liability associated with researcher misconduct in the field; and second, in theory, to help researchers resolve ethical dilemmas that can be anticipated before beginning their studies. However, the goals of protecting institutions from litigation and fostering authentic relationships between researchers and communities are often in conflict. For example, the IRB expects that ethical dilemmas in research can be accounted for, prepared for, and thus prevented before data collection begins. I have found time and again that this emphasis on resolving ethical issues before entering the field is insufficient. How can researchers know what ethical dilemmas may arise in the field, let alone resolve them, before beginning data collection?11 So many of these dilemmas are relational; in other words, they arise only once researcher/participant relationships begin to take shape in real time during fieldwork. I share Eve Tuck and Monique Guishard’s concern that the procedures established by IRB “represent a system of a priori checks without attempting to balance or disrupt asymmetrical power relationships in scientific inquiry.”12 For researchers working to redefine hierarchical relationships in order to center the voices of those not traditionally considered experts (in this case, children from mixed-status families), the framework of the Belmont Report can be problematic. It presumes that researchers can anticipate and solve ethical dilemmas without ever interacting with the communities they intend to learn from. By listening closely, we can hear the ways in which children themselves raise questions of research ethics that should shape our fieldwork.
I organize the remainder of this chapter into three sections, building on the ethical principles proposed in the Belmont Report: Criteria for Inclusion, Risks, and Beneficence. I present the data in this way not because the children used these technical terms but because the concerns and desires that Catalina, Pita, Aurora, Hazel, Tere, and Jenni expressed align so closely with these categories—dimensions of the research process that institutionally affiliated researchers are asked to anticipate and address before they obtain approval to begin their studies. By organizing the data in this way, I am better able to show how these children taught me important lessons about conducting principled ethnographic research in mixed-status school settings.
Criteria for Inclusion
One month into making my weekly visits to Ms. Daniela’s fifth-grade class, I began asking Catalina, Pita, Aurora, Hazel, Tere, and Jenni to wear the iPods during the school day. Four girls wore the recorders at any given time. All of the children in the classroom had assented to being recorded, and their parents had also signed consent forms to participate in the study. However, now that the project was underway, some of the students wondered why these six girls got to wear iPods while they did not. The Belmont Report calls this an issue of “justice”:
Who ought to receive the benefits of research and bear its burdens? This is a question of justice, in the sense of “fairness in distribution” or “what is deserved.” An injustice occurs when some benefit to which a person is entitled is denied without good reason or when some burden is imposed unduly. Another way of conceiving the principle of justice is that equals ought to be treated equally. However, this statement requires explication. Who is equal and who is unequal? What considerations justify departure from equal distribution?
The children raised the issue of “fairness of distribution” when they asked me to account for who would wear the iPods and who would not.13 Ms. Daniela set aside some time for me to talk with the entire class about the project. Without using the formal language of our university IRBs, I wanted to address students’ concerns about the criteria for inclusion in the study. I thought it was important to reiterate these criteria now that everyone was becoming more accustomed to the presence of these devices in the classroom.
The challenge was this: Could I talk about participation in the study without disclosing any of the children’s or family’s immigration status? This conversation—and the ones that followed among the children themselves—exemplified many of the very questions that my study sought to answer regarding who broaches the topic of citizenship at school, how is it broached, and when. I opened our conversation with the following explanation:
Yo sé que hay preguntas y les voy a explicar exactamente qué está pasando. Soy profesora en una universidad en New Jersey que se llama Rutgers University. Y allí yo preparo maestras que quieren ser maestras de ESL. Right? De inglés como segundo idioma. Y parte de mi trabajo es dar clases y hacer estudios, proyecto. Y el proyecto que estoy haciendo en P.S. 432, en la clase de Ms. Daniela, con ustedes, es un proyecto que se trata de la experiencia en la escuela de las niñas inmigrantes o hijas de padres inmigrantes. Y el enfoque de este estudio son mayormente niñas con familias o de México o de Centroamérica. Kay? So, eso explica un poco por qué cuáles niñas tienen la grabadora, cuáles no, y por qué.
I know that there are questions and I’m going to explain exactly what is happening. I am a professor in a university in New Jersey that’s called Rutgers University. And there I prepare teachers that want to be ESL teachers. Right? Of English as a Second Language. And part of my work is to teach classes and do studies, projects. And this project that I’m doing at P.S. 432, in Ms. Daniela’s class, with you all, is a project about the school experiences of immigrant girls or daughters of immigrant parents. And the focus of the study is primarily on girls with families from Mexico or Central America. Kay? So, that explains a little about why which girls have the recorders, which don’t, and why.
In order to maintain Catalina, Pita, Aurora, Hazel, Tere, and Jenni’s confidentiality, I emphasized my role as a teacher educator over my role as a scholar of citizenship. Although the majority of the children in Ms. Daniela’s classroom were the children of immigrant parents from Latin America, not all of them had been classified as English learners. Mentioning ESL teachers and English learners helped to explain why some of the students wore the iPods while others did not.
In smaller group settings, children tended to ask Catalina, Pita, Aurora, Hazel, Tere, and Jenni directly why they were wearing iPods. In these moments, the focal student had to decide whether and how she was going to talk about immigration and citizenship as it related to this project. Even when I used proxy terms for referencing the criteria for inclusion for a large group—I talked about language and country of origin—the girls who were themselves undocumented understood their participation in the project as linked to birthplace. However, they were cautious about sharing this information widely. On the first day that she agreed to wear an iPod, Aurora’s device recorded the following conversation. The transcript below begins as Aurora and her peers were waiting in line to leave their classroom for lunch. In these forty seconds, Aurora drew her peers’ attention to the microphone and talked with Catalina about whether she might have a chance to wear one too. The interaction exemplifies the children’s meta-awareness of the project (its purpose and methods and implications for them as children). Here, they show each other (and us) what they understand about what it means to be a participant in this project.
1 Aurora:
>Está grabando toda mi voz.< Like every conversation?
>It is recording all of my voice.< Like every conversation?
2 Catalina:
Por qué te está grabando toda la conversación?
Why is it recording all of your conversation?
3 Aurora:
Porque ella quiere investigar de qué, qué hacemos.
Because she wants to investigate that, what we do.
4 Catalina:
Ohh::::↑
5 Aurora:
TÚ. >fuiste nacida aquí<? o °°fuiste nacida en tu país?
YOU. >were born here<? or °°you were born in your country?
6 Catalina:
Mi país.
My country.
7 Aurora:
°°So . . . todas las que no fueron nacidas aquí van a tener esto. Para ver cómo somos nuestras vidas así. Mkay↑?
°°So all those that weren’t born here are going to have this. To see what our lives are like. Mkay↑?
8 Student:
>Qué es< eso:::?
>What’s< this:::?
9 Aurora:
Na::. Tú qué? Que no te importa.
Na::. You what? It doesn’t matter to you.
The first thing that Aurora told her peers about the iPod was that it was recording everything she said. In turn 1, she identified what was being recorded—“toda mi voz” and “every conversation”—in both Spanish and English. While she spoke hurriedly, she did so in two languages, as if to ensure that all of her bilingual peers could understand this important point. Catalina was particularly interested in Aurora’s explanation, so she asked Aurora why I was recording every conversation, responding with a knowing “oh,” as in “I get it!” (turn 4), when Aurora explained that I wanted to find out what they do. In that moment, Aurora felt compelled to explain who they was. In other words, she wanted to explain to Catalina precisely whose experiences I wanted to learn more about. As we saw above, I had already described the criteria for inclusion in terms of studying the lives of girls whose parents had migrated from particular countries. Aurora, like all the girls in the study, knew that I was specifically interested in the experience of students from mixed-status families.
At a normal volume, then dropping to a whisper in turn 5, Aurora asked Catalina if she was born here or in her country. In this classroom, asking if someone was born in her own country was tantamount to asking her to reveal their immigration status. As we will see throughout this book, the children knew that revealing immigration status was a highly personal and potentially risky proposition. Aurora’s approach made her a sensitive co-researcher as she conducted a quiet and careful interview with Catalina to determine her eligibility for the study. It also revealed how intimately she understood the driving questions of this study: whether children grasp the significance of nationality and immigration status. The hushed, hurried nature of this brief exchange gives us insight into the verbal and nonverbal cues that the girls used to communicate the sensitive nature of this topic. Catalina responded with equal discretion, and Aurora found an opportunity to align with her on the basis of a shared experience of being born in Mexico. In turn 7, Aurora counted herself and Catalina among those students who “weren’t born here” and who would also be asked to wear the iPod during the school day. When, in turn 8, another student approached Aurora to ask about the microphone, she gave a quite different response. She shut down any exchange by moving away quickly and punctuating her speech by emphasizing the hard vowel sounds na, tu, que, and ta, almost as if she could dispel his question with a clap of her hands or the sound of her voice.
Risks Posed by the Study
In order to obtain IRB approval to conduct research with human subjects, researchers are asked to anticipate possible risks to children and adults associated with their participation. The Belmont Report defines risk as “a possibility that harm may occur.” Over time, I have come to articulate two possible risks to participation in my ethnographic studies: first, the potential loss of confidentiality or privacy if raw data revealing children’s real names or identities are lost or breached; and second, the discomfort people may experience when being shadowed during their everyday lives. Although naming these risks has satisfied the IRB committee members reviewing my applications to conduct research, I don’t believe that any researcher can anticipate all possible risks before beginning to spend time in the field. This is especially true for this study, where one of my goals was to learn about how children understand their own sense of risk and responsibility. Time and again, my research participants have made clear the risks and benefits posed by my research in ways I could not have known before starting fieldwork. By listening closely to the girls in this study, I learned about what they needed in order to mitigate the risks they associated with talking about their citizenship status.
Consider the following conversation about honesty and confidentiality that took place during one of our first grupo de análisis meetings. During our discussion, Aurora took the lead on establishing a set of norms and agreements:
Lo que a mí me agrada es que aquí todas somos honestas. Y decimos- Oh, eso no lo contará, oh no. Oh, no mi mamá consiguió papeles- y todo eso. Porque mí me choca a veces que los niños dicen- ¡Ah, sí, yo tengo papeles!- y todas esas cosas porque. ¡Ay! Están presumiendo de todo lo que tienen.
What I appreciate is that we are all honest here. And we say “Oh, they won’t share that, oh no. Oh no my mom got papers” and all of that. Because it bothers me that sometimes kids say: “Oh yeah, I have papers!” and things like that because. Ugh! They’re showing off all the things they have.
Aurora identified a number of steps for mitigating the risk of feeling ashamed or judged. The steps included calling for honesty, requesting that we agree not to share anything disclosed in this group, and asking that no one brag about having papers. She knew firsthand what it felt like to be judged for being undocumented.14 This wasn’t the only time Aurora would recount being teased. On another occasion, she reported, “A veces los niños, [dicen] eso que:—¡Ay! yo tengo papeles y tú no. Lero-lero!—Cosas así dicen” (Sometimes the children, [they say] that “Hey! I have papers and you don’t. Na-na!” Things that they say). “Lero-lero” is similar to the English “na-na-na boo-boo,” often heard sung in teasing sequences followed by the phrase “you can’t catch me!”
Aurora’s comments created an opening for the girls in the group to talk about what they needed from one another (and from me) in order to share their experiences. Catalina vouched that I could be counted on to be a nonjudgmental presence. She explained: “Yo estaba hablando de eso con Ariana y ella me dijo que no le importa” (I was talking about that with Ariana and she told me it doesn’t matter to her). This turn of phrase—“no le importa”—is significant here because of its double meaning. On the one hand, she knew that having (or not having) papers mattered greatly to me because it was the subject of the study; on the other hand, Catalina was also asserting (and in so doing, asking for me to confirm) that their immigration status did not matter in how I perceived or judged them.
Once we established the norms for our group conversations—that no one would brag or be judgmental, and that we would maintain confidentiality—Pita, Aurora, and Catalina went on to discuss their immigration status openly. After sharing that she was born in the United States but that her mother and brother were born in El Salvador, Hazel circled back to a discussion of risk. For Hazel, the risk was not solely personal; instead, talking about immigration, border crossing, and status also threatened her family members’ safety because they could be detained or deported. Hazel returned to the significant ethical implications of these questions of speech and silence, sparking the following exchange.
1 Hazel:
Hay muchas personas porque um. Que >se meten en problemas porque<. Uno le puede decir a a::lguien que usted. Usted cree::: que they like. They not gonna tell nobody. Pero después dices no::-
There’s a lot of people that um. That >they get into trouble because<. Someone could tell so::mebody that you. You thi:::nk they like. They not gonna tell nobody. But after you say no::-
2 Ariana:
Mm::::
3 Hazel:
-pero algunas veces lo dicen. And I HOPE >none of you not gonna tell< NO::body.
-but sometimes they tell. And I HOPE >none of you not gonna tell< NO::body.
4 Aurora:
I don’t tell °anyone. A veces se me olvida.
I don’t tell °anyone. Sometimes I forget.
5 Jenni:
°>A mí también<
6 Pita:
Mm::hhm
7 Ariana:
Pero es cierto. Todo lo que hablamos aquí es en confi::anza:::?-
But it’s true, everything that we talk about here is in confi:::dence:::?-
8 Jenni:
Y de la °cámara.
And for the °camera.
Imagining a scenario in which a person got in trouble because someone else shared their immigration status (turn 1), Hazel issued a strong directive: “I hope none of you are not gonna tell nobody.” Lowering her pitch, Hazel’s three negative constructions—none, not, and nobody—emphasized the prohibition against breaching the confidentiality of the group.
As if to reassure her that these forms of punishment would not befall her or her family, Aurora quickly confirmed that she would never tell anyone. As an added assurance, she explained that she sometimes went so far as to forget what we talked about in our group. Two others rushed to agree in turns 5 and 6. In a way, Aurora offered up the most honest appraisal of the situation: total amnesia would be the only way to guarantee complete confidentiality. I jumped in to reiterate the ground rule that I heard the girls articulating: that everything we shared in the group would stay in the group. In retrospect, my contributions in that moment were both affirming and tentative. I reiterated the idea of confidence, but I posed it as a question, as if I wasn’t quite sure that we were all in agreement just yet (turn 7).
Interjecting another dose of realism, Jenni added that while we could agree to the norms in situ, the camera data were still being recorded and would ultimately exist beyond the confines of this conversation. Jenni’s slow and deliberate emphasis on each syllable, coupled with her mention of the camera in a near whisper, added gravitas to her closing point and underscored the importance of our collective confianza (trust). I took this as a serious reminder of my responsibility as a researcher to uphold my commitment to keeping their data confidential and to facilitating a dialogue in which we were all accountable to one another. The weight of this conversation was understood by all of us. From a young age, Pita, Hazel, Jenni, Tere, Aurora, and Catalina were clear about the risks and vulnerabilities involved in our work together, and they took the lead in establishing the terms for our collective accountability to one another.
Beneficence: Social Capital or Researcher Surveillance?
The Belmont Report defines beneficence as a researcher’s “obligation,” which is encoded in “two general rules”: “(1) do not harm and (2) maximize possible benefits and minimize possible harms.” During early visits to P.S. 432 and to the families’ homes, I explained the indirect benefits of the study: the more I learned from Catalina, Aurora, Pita, Hazel, Tere, and Jenni, the better prepared I would be to teach teachers about immigrant students’ experiences and knowledge. In the language of university IRBs, there were no direct benefits to the participants. However, during these conversations that formed part of the process of obtaining informed consent, adults shared their own beliefs about how my presence could benefit them. Ms. Daniela was happy to have another experienced educator present to think through pedagogical dilemmas and work alongside her students. The parents believed I could connect them with resources—primarily legal and academic—that could help their families, and they were eager for me to help broker their relationships with school and state authorities. Throughout these early visits, the girls and I chatted and built rapport, but they did not explicitly articulate their position about why they wanted to join the project.
When I began audio recording during the school day, the girls expressed pride in being recorded while also articulating some of the risks they associated with it. In a sense, pride and anxiety were inextricable. The focal students were honored to be among a chosen group of children whose voices mattered enough to be shared with an imagined community of teachers and adults. However, they also worried that they might have said things that adults would not approve of. Within the first few weeks of recording, I responded to these concerns by establishing a dynamic and ongoing process of assent. Instead of deciding that they had agreed in advance to constant recording, we developed a policy together in which they could decide when and where not to wear the iPods. I was prompted to do so by Catalina, Pita, Aurora, Hazel, Tere, and Jenni who sometimes would—timidly at first—tell me that they preferred to remove the microphones during particular activities (at the start of recess, for example). In order to normalize and encourage their own decision-making about when to wear or remove the recorders, I began to ask them if they preferred to continue or cease recording at key turning points in the day.
As the following example shows—taken from peer interactions during the transition to lunch and recess—the focal girls and their peers had a heightened metalinguistic awareness of the role of the recorder and its purpose. The exchange begins when Ms. Daniela announced the transition to lunch and recess. She first charged Aurora with bringing everyone’s science notebooks from their homeroom to the science classroom after lunch. After a brief negotiation about when Aurora would pick up the books—she preferred to do so after lunch so that she didn’t have to remember to bring them back from recess—the students continued to line up and talk as they exited the classroom and entered the hallway. Overhearing that Aurora would be returning to the classroom at some point during lunch and before science class, Tere asked Aurora to please bring her a pencil, which students were forbidden to have during the lunch and recess period.
1 Tere:
°°>When you come back get a pencil for me<. ok?
2 Aurora:
Hm?
3 Catalina:
When um cuan >cuando vengas para atrás<? Me traes↑ un lápiz.
When um whe >when you come back<? Bring me↑ a pencil.
Tere had a sketch pad and loved to draw in her free time, so she wanted Aurora to bring her a pencil so that she could pass the time engaged in her hobby. Whispering and talking quickly as if that would help her voice go undetected by the iPod, Tere asked for the pencil. The children often overheard one another, so when Aurora made clear she hadn’t heard Tere’s request, Catalina repeated it for her in a parodic tone and in a taunting voice invited Aurora to “have a conversation” (turn 5). Aurora warned Catalina against talking about breaking the rules because this (the recorder) was recording everything she said (turns 4, 6, and 8).
4 Aurora:
Con cuidado . . .
Be careful . . .
5 Catalina:
>Ok. Hh: let’s h: have a. a conversation<. No, I’m just kidding. Uhh
6 Aurora:
-°porque esto me está grabando todo °°lo que digo.
-°because this is recording everything °°I say
7 Catalina:
Se::cr:::et. DhHhh::::
8 Aurora:
No digas nada.
Don’t say anything.
Catalina picked up on Aurora’s warning, suggesting that they had better watch what they say because they were being recorded. She introduced the idea of a secret in a mock Spanish register that could evoke either a young person up to no good or an older authority figure who might uncover that child’s covert actions (turn 7).15 The concept of the secret recurred at many other points throughout the study, with the girls asking me at times not to listen to or share specific moments in recordings because they had said something they wished hadn’t been recorded (for example, “Ms. Ariana, please don’t listen because I said a secret”). Their concerns about my hearing secrets can be seen in multiple ways. One interpretation suggests that they were concerned about what I might do with this information, perhaps fearing that I would relay it to other adults or punish them for it. Another interpretation is that this confession was an invitation to me to account for what I would do with the recordings; it was a conversation starter about the role the girls themselves could play in data collection and analysis. The children wanted to be sure that they weren’t going to be unjustly punished by virtue of participating in this study and assenting to be recorded.
As the class moved into the hallway, Aurora began to interact with other peers from within her class and from other fifth-grade classes in the school. She once again drew attention to the iPod, at first relishing in its novelty and then in the fact that she was in a special position as the first among her peers to wear it. When Kevin bumped into her, Aurora scolded him for nearly dropping it and reiterated that it was still recording everything they said (turn 11).
9 Aurora:
Casi la TIras. Sigue grabando . . . TODO.
You almost DROPped it. It keeps recording . . . EVERYthing.
10 Kevin:
Oh Auro-
11 Aurora:
Graba to.do. lo que to.do lo que se hab-
It records ev.er.ything we ev.er.ything that is s-
12 Juan:
Oh↑ GEE:::
13 Aurora:
-la
-aid
Students from other classrooms began asking Aurora what she was wearing, and Aurora continued to repeat in both Spanish and English that the device recorded todo (everything). A moment later, Juan and a number of other students yelled within range of the microphone, interrupting Aurora’s thought and escalating the intensity (turn 12).
Juan asked Aurora about the iPod in turn 14; exasperated by all of the attention, she responded with a groan expressing her exhaustion with the ongoing topic (turn 15).
14 Juan:
What is tha::::t?
15 Aurora:
Agghh. It it records everything we::’re sa::::ying.
16 Kevin:
But . . . for what?
17 Aurora:
Para ella escuchar todo. °TO::DO::
For her to listen to everything. °EVE::RY::THING
As Kevin—the assigned door monitor for the class—opened the door and the students began filing down the stairs, he finally asked the question that must have been on everyone’s mind: why was I recording? In one breath he asked and answered his own question, turning to me and saying, “Para ver si uno dice malas palabras (To see if anyone says bad words). Right, Ms. Ariana?” Kevin, who was the only child who addressed me directly in that exchange, laughed as if he didn’t believe me when I replied, “No, qué va” (No way). These last statements, while delivered lightly, were an opportunity for Kevin to test out possibilities. He was waiting for me to confirm or deny his assertions in a public peer space regarding the purpose of the recorders and recordings. These moments reminded me that I straddled various orbits of authority as an adult ethnographer spending my days with children, and that they actively wondered whether my recordings would somehow get them into trouble.16
The concerns expressed by Aurora’s peers clarified that the onus was on me, the researcher, to justify my presence and the presence of the recording devices in their lives. I took their concerns seriously. In keeping with the work of ethnographers Shirin Vossoughi, Danny Martinez, and Arshad Ali, I believe researchers need to listen closely to participants’ metalinguistic awareness of the ways in which our data-collection methods affect their social positioning. Like these researchers, I work alongside students that experience the daily effects of state surveillance. This has led me to believe that researchers using recording technologies should be aware of how their practices interact with histories of surveillance and social control. In the absence of such awareness, our research methods can reproduce social inequity even as we intend to ameliorate it.17 I experience this not as a burden but as a possibility. Shifting power relations in our everyday work may open up new ideas and forms of solidarity that were not possible before.18
This chapter—this entire study—questions the dichotomies between ignorance and awareness, as well as speech and silence, that endure in educational research on children from mixed-status families. I have chosen to devote the first chapter to methodology to emphasize how the research process and the study’s findings are inextricable. The participation of the girls in shaping data collection revealed how much they already knew about citizenship. Moreover, I have argued that questions of beneficence and risk are not knowable in advance but, like citizenship itself, must be understood as processual. The guiding principle of language socialization—that we learn to use language through language use—has methodological parallels once we consider that what we know is inextricable from how we learn it. Against this backdrop, we can see that our beliefs about whom we consider to be knowledgeable experts shape the ways that we listen and observe, which in turn determine the conclusions that we draw from our research.
We have already come a long away from the idea that children growing up in mixed-status families are ignorant of the meaning of immigration status. From playground taunts to complex worries about confidentiality and surveillance, we have heard directly from children who demonstrate that immigration status is an integral part of understanding themselves and their childhood contexts. In the chapters and interludes that follow, we will continue to see just how pervasive these concerns are and how sophisticated children become as they encounter these ideas across home and school settings.