Ethnographic Interview Explores Upbringing in Mexico and Immigration to the US

Sample Ethnographic Interview #2 For my ethnographic interview, I was able to interview a fairly distant relative by marriage, let’s call her Crystal. Our interview took place over the phone on a Tuesday afternoon. I felt good about how the interview went, and how I conducted it. I was able to glean a lot of information from our time talking, and I did my best to let her guide the conversation. However, my primary obstacle was that she was less willing to continue the conversation in a direction she felt important, or allow herself to provide a narrative of her experiences. I would try to ask frequently if she had any more thoughts or insight about what she had described to me, but she responded every time with “no, just ask me more questions and I’ll answer whatever you want to know.” While I prepared many questions for the interview, I didn’t necessarily prepare many follow-up questions, as I wanted to be sure I wasn’t unintentionally steering the conversation. So, I ended up having to come up with most of my follow-up questions on the fly, something I might try to be better prepared for in any further ethnographic interviews. Crystal was born and grew up in Tampico, Mexico, where she lived with her three sisters and two brothers for the first six years of her life, being raised by her grandmother. Her father was no longer in the picture, because her mother had divorced him in the early 60s. However, her mother had been a teacher in Mexico, but divorce was still extremely, severely frowned upon in Mexico at this time. When Crystal's mother divorced her abusive husband, she received a letter from her schools administrator, firing her, and saying "only actors and prostitutes get divorced.” This same, however prejudiced, principle also applied to pretty much any other profession open to a working woman in Mexico in the 1960s. So, this is what brought Crystal’s mother to immigrate to the United States, specifically Chicago. Crystal remained in Mexico with her grandma and her siblings, and when she was six they moved to Salamanca, Mexico. There she went to school, and she described to me that she had a very safe and supportive childhood. She told me that there was a curfew at 10 PM for children, but there was an almost unspoken curfew of 9 PM for everybody. She said unspoken, but she just meant that it was an informal curfew. At 9 PM every day, she said everybody would stop in their tracks at exactly 9, face eastward and pray, as the Pope in Vatican City would be giving a blessing at the same time each day. She said that once the prayer was finished, all the shops closed down, all the restaurants closed, and everybody went home. For her family, this meant that everybody came home and her brother, who likes to experiment with cooking, would make them dinner. Crystal told me that she always felt extremely safe in her community in Salamanca, and she said that she felt the 10 PM curfew for minors was more "to prevent them from getting into mischief rather than to protect them from any criminality that might have happened at night.” From what she told me, I learned that her lived experience growing up in a suburban neighborhood in Mexico goes completely against the stereotype of residing in Mexico nowadays. Sure, circumstances have changed since Crystal immigrated to the United States, but the current stereotype is that Mexico has never been a “safe place” by American standards. One of the biggest daily cultural differences between growing up in Mexico and living here in the United States, I learned, is the schedule of eating. Here in the United States there is