Empowering Undocumented Americans: Situating the Evocative and Sensual Qualities of Critical Arts-Based Research

• In Event: 46.025 - Creative and Critical Justice: New Approaches to Methodological Border-Crossing

Abstract

Objectives
Research has documented the ways in which students of Mexican origin are not succeeding academically in the same proportion as the rest of the US population. This process of educational failure occurs in the context of overt and more subtle forms of racism experienced throughout their schooling and everyday lives (Valencia, 2002). Undocumented Mexican students face even harsher educational challenges as they experience life in a post‐September 11th environment of heightened xenophobic US nativism. The purpose of the work underpinning this three‐year study is on several levels. Firstly, to acknowledge the counter‐stories and learn from the counter‐life‐histories of undocumented Americans of Mexican origin as they navigate across and between historical, socioeconomic, political and cultural boundaries, barriers and contexts. In this regard to study is about space and identity; 'ni de aqui ni from there' and the liminal borderland space they occupy between barriers and contexts. Secondly how critical arts-based research in education can function as a means to legitimise, empower and promote the voices of the educationally and socially marginalised; evoking an experiential and sensual means of feeling and knowing by which researcher and researched may co-recover, interrogate and enrich an anti-colonialist critique of the dominant social order

Theoretical framework
The study utilizes critical race theory (Ladson-Billings, 1998) as an interpretive approach to both situate and challenge a-historical, de-contextualized, and one‐dimensional explanations of Mexican‐American experience, resilience, and resistance. Tenets of performance ethnography (Denzin, 2003) and arts based education research (Barone & Eisner, 2006) are utilized to inform the performance aspect of the study.

Methodology
A life history approach (Wolcott, 1999) is used to engage in-depth and comprehensively with the perceptions of the undocumented American interviewees. Subsequently, an arts-based performance (Bagley, 2008) based method is used to tell and show the counter-historical narratives of the undocumented Americans through the use of dance, music, art-work, poetry and installation.

Data sources
The research is primarily grounded in the experiences, voices and perspectives of six undocumented American individuals who graduated from a community college in Arizona. The work subsequently draws on reflections and perceptions of both the artists engaged in the performance and the audience members who viewed its telling.

Results
The research in fusing Critical Race Theory (CRT), life history and performance, is able to show how a politicised qualitative paradigmatic re envisioning can occur in which counter-histories and counter-stories can be co-created into a powerful, evocative, and transformative arts-based performance text entitled Undocumented Historias.

Scholarly significance
The study reveals the ways in which an arts-based telling and showing allows researcher and researched to co-recover, interrogate and enrich an anti-colonialist critique in a far stronger evocative and sensual way that can be achieved through a conventional text-based academic paper telling.

Authors

• Carl Bagley, Durham University

• Ricardo Castro-Salazar, Pima Community College