Ethnographic Interview Explores Upbringing in Mexico and Immigration to the US

Abstract

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 a fairly strict breakfast, lunch, dinner timeline, but it is much more loose of a structure in Mexico. Crystal told me that you would wake up have coffee (though for her family it was more “milk with a splash of coffee”) and a sweet roll, there would be a hearty but small breakfast around mid morning, and then around 2 PM you would have your main meal of the day. After that, around what the United States generally considers to be dinner time, you would have another coffee and a roll of some sort, and then after returning home that night you would have a small, more snack- like meal. For her family, Crystal said that they would usually have tacos for this late night meal. Her brother would concoct some sort of taco for the family, and each of them would have one or two. This was another difference she has noticed, that in America tacos have become a full meal, with rice and beans, and usually multiple tacos. She said that when she was growing up in Mexico, tacos were considered a snack. Another strong difference between growing up in Mexico and living here in the United States is how winter holidays are celebrated. She told me that when she was growing up in Mexico, they didn't really celebrate Christmas, they celebrated the feast of the Epiphany on January 6 more so. In the run up to the new year and Epiphany, they would also celebrate something called posadas, which included 12 days of caroling at 12 different houses, symbolizing the 12 days of the Virgin Mary trying to find a safe place to stay before Jesus was born. They would also celebrate Mother's Day, Father's Day, and Mexican Independence Day on September 15. She also noted that they did not and do not celebrate Cinco de Mayo, and she asserts that Cinco de Mayo is a "fake American holiday.” The other major holiday that they would celebrate is Dia de los Muertos, celebrated on November 1 and 2nd. Crystal said that she was able to move to be with her mother and some of her older siblings in Chicago in the mid 1970s. Her mother was more settled in Chicago, and she filled out the papers to allow Crystal entry and residency in the United States, so that when Crystal crossed the border in Texas, her papers were all finished and ready to go. She told me that her sister and brother-in-law drove down to Texas to pick her up and drive her back up to Chicago. But, her brother-in-law had to be at work in less than two days, so they only stopped once on the drive back up north. Crystal told me they stopped at a gas station and convenience store in Northern Texas to get gas and food for the road. However, even though it was 1971, the gas station they stopped at still had segregated doors and restrooms for white and any non-white people. This instance reminded me of Sherman Alexie’s chapter in Rethinking Multicultural Education, entitled “Why the Best Kids Books are Written in Blood.” In this chapter, Alexie discusses the idea of who is protected when we ban books or don’t teach about different cultural experiences (Alexie 93)? I was astounded to hear about the discrimination Crystal faced as a person of color, even nearly a decade after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, but to anyone who isn’t white, this experience is most likely hardly surprising at all. Who is being protected by not teaching about the lived experiences of those from other cultures? The people at the top of the power pyramid are the ones being protected. By not teaching, and therefore not acknowledging, the experiences of prejudice by people of color, white people, the ones who hold the most power in society, don’t have to confront their participation in a society that allows such awful things to continue. She told me that this was her first instance of facing racism in the United States, and she had been in the country for less than 24 hours. But, her mother had faced many instances of racism, prejudice, and stereotypes in the years that she had been in Chicago. When her mother moved to Chicago, her intent had been to work at a factory job to help her build her skills in speaking in English, and then she would test to be re-certified as a teacher in the United States. But after only a few months working in the factory, she was mugged on her way to work. She informed the police of what happened, but was told not to press charges against the man who had attacked her, as they were getting information on other criminals from her attacker. Her mother ended up never trying to get certified to teach again, and she became a housekeeper/supervisor for a wealthy family in the Gold Coast neighborhood of Chicago. In less overtly violent forms, in the 1960s, even in Chicago, the sidewalk was "only for white people.” Her mother would have to walk at the edge of the street on her way to work. Even when her mother remarried in the United States, her new stepfather refused to learn Spanish, so the whole family had to speak English while they were at home. This reminded me of chapter 23 of Rethinking Multicultural Education, titled “Keepers of the Second Throat.” Synthesizing Crystal’s experiences with chapter 23, I am reminded of the power that language has. Patricia Smith discusses in her chapter that denying language is denying one’s history, denying one’s power and agency in life (Smith 179). Even within her nuclear family,...