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In this article, Sofia Villenas describes her experience of being caught in the midst of oppressive discourses of "othering" during her work as a Chicana ethnographer in a rural North Carolina Latino community. While Villenas was focusing on how to reform her relationship with the Latino community as a "privileged" ethnographer, she missed the process by which she was being co-opted by the dominant English-speaking community to legitimate their discourse of Latino family education and child-rearing practices as "problem. " By engaging in this discourse, she found herself complicit in the manipulation of her own identities and participating in her own colonization and marginalization. Through her story, Villenas recontextualizes theories about the multiplicity of identities of the researcher. She problematizes the "we" in the literature of qualitative researchers who analyze their race, class, and gender privileges. Villenas challenges dominant-culture education ethnographers to move beyond the researcheras-colonizer position and to call upon their own histories of complicity and marginalization in order to move toward new identities and discourses. Similarly, she calls upon ethnograpers from marginalized cultures to recognize their position as border crossers and realize that they are their own voices of activism.
It is not easy to name our pain, to theorize from that location. (hooks,1994, p. 74)
Like a "mojado" [wetback] ethnographer, I attempt to cross the artificial borders into occupied academic territories, searching for a "coyote" [smuggler] to secure a safe passage.
(E. G. Murillo Jr., personal communication, 1995)
What happens when members of low-status and marginalized groups become university-sanctioned "native" ethnographers of their own communities? How is this "native" ethnographer positioned vis-a-vis her own community, the majority culture, the research setting, and the academy? While qualitative researchers in the field of education theorize about their own privilege in relation to their research participants, the "native" ethnographer must deal with her own marginalizing experiences and identities in relation to dominant society. This "native" ethnographer is potentially both the colonizer, in her university cloak, and the colonized, as a member of the very community that is made "other" in her research.
I am this "native" ethnographer in the field of education, a first-generation Chicana born in Los Angeles of immigrant parents from Ecuador. Geographically, politically, and economically, I have lived under...