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Qualitative researchers: honoring people’s experiences does not have to mean repeating exactly what they say, or using their analysis without further context
It is our job as scholars to analyze within the contexts we consider to be most relevant (we have to make a case for these contexts and frameworks)
We, human beings, live life without always considering the broader context. That is the norm. We often take the explanations fed to us and map them neatly onto our lives, thereby missing lots of other important matters
For example, many immigrants I’ve interviewed say that they have never experienced racism or exploitation
Honoring their words and analysis means presenting this, but also explaining that they are comparing their experiences to pay rates in their home country (rather than comparing to people paid fairly in context here)
It is about trying to understand how their analysis makes sense to them and supplementing with other factors that, as we know from other research, also matter
Another example is when undocumented immigrants take responsibility for their own exploitation and instability
They of course have agency and they use that agency to seek survival against all odds. However, it is irresponsible to suggest that this agency is carried out equally for everyone
You absolutely have to account for local conditions, national policy, global economy, racist structures, legal limitations, settler-colonialism, patriarchy, etc.
As I tell my students, I could easily buy into neoliberal notions of worth and uphold a false idea of meritocracy to claim that even though I was an immigrant from a working-class background, I got a PhD solely through hard work
For a researcher to take my hard work as the only explanation (to “honor” my words) would miss the bigger, more important picture. Yes, I worked my ass off, but it would not have mattered had my family not attained legal status within a few years of our arrival
It is huge that my father had completed high school in El Salvador (which is a higher level of educational attainment than most Salvadoran immigrants), and that he had a union job that provided us with stability enough that my mom stayed home to care for us
This was crucial in a neighborhood where many of my cousins stayed home alone and joined gangs while their parents worked multiple jobs
It also matters that I’m a light-skin mestiza in a white supremacist country that made it more likely that teachers and counselors would not consider me threatening and would go out of their way to help me
In high school, I totally would have said that I was doing well because of my hard work and a researcher who repeated only that to honor my words would have produced a remarkably incomplete and problematic analysis
