Reports of Illegal Activities by a Research Participant: Disordering Meaning-Making in Reflexivity Through Mexican American Studies

• In Event: Disrupting Qualitative Inquiry: Possibilities and Tensions of Educational Research

Abstract

In an educational project, when Maya Montanez, a young Mexican American woman, reported her involvement in four types of “illegal” practices, the traditional researcher reflexivity exercise had to be realigned to its purpose of questioning inequitable power relations. The practices involve a guage (an unlicensed after-hours speakeasy), the smuggling of goods (la fayuca), dumpster-diving, and undocumented migrant status. As such they might be dismissed or condemned from a white androcentric and middle-class perspective, whose power is validated through law and tradition. However, the perspective of disorder in Mexican American Studies (MAS) disrupts the biases of dominant ideology and its views on officialdom, propriety, and citizenship. MAS signals the inherited and legendary practices as disorderly maneuvers in the interruption of whiteness. The political interests behind whiteness and the stratification of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in socio-economic hierarchies are exposed. Providing an interdisciplinary academic and socio-political intervention, the presentation discerns between enforced inalienable rights set against presumed rightless status of people of color.

Author

• Rosario Carrillo, The University of Arizona