Well, I’ve officially taken the plunge into doing social science field research! A few days ago I completed my first two key informant interviews with two ‘comisariados’ (leaders) of two of the ejidos I’m working with for my project. And man has it been a tough learning experience! I feel like none of the classes I have taken on social science methods/field work, no matter how much we talked about doing interviews, etc., has fully prepared me for all of this. The one thing that my classes definitely prepared me for was the feeling of exhaustion that I felt after doing my first interview, and the feeling that I simultaneously completely failed and learned a lot.
During the first interview I decided to try to ask the
questions in Spanish (I had written them out in both English and Spanish) but I
was really nervous and I ended up fumbling a lot with easy words and getting
flustered overall. The interview got started off with some basic questions
(“How long have you been the leader of the community”, “How many people live in
the community?”, etc.) but then I asked a question about community wealth
“criteria” and how people in the community can tell if someone is wealthy,
which kind of caused some confusion. After that I felt even less like I knew
what I was doing and continued to fumble along to the end of the interview.
Then, when we were wrapping up, he asked a question of me
that completely threw me off guard. He asked, “So you’re doing your thesis on
this topic and with our community, and then what? What can you do to help us?”.
In the ICON program and in the anthropology and critical geography classes I’ve
taken we talk SO much about this issue (about not making promises you can’t
keep, about managing the community’s expectations, etc.) but all that classwork
and discussion in the classroom STILL didn’t prepare me for that question, and
I felt like a deer in headlights. It’s not like I haven’t thought a lot about
that in my head, but when actually faced with that question in person by a
community leader I felt that all my explanations and words that I had thought
up before just didn’t cut it. Ideally yes, I’d love to come back over the years
and work more with the communities to develop “bat-friendly” agave programs
that help both the bats and the communities, and I hope that my research is a
start to that. But my PhD work (probably) won’t have any immediate tangible
impacts/benefits on the community, and so explaining that hopefully in the long run this
work will be beneficial to them is really difficult. Also, I don’t want to make
promises that I (or anyone else) may not be able to keep. For example, maybe we can start developing
“bat-friendly” agave programs and create economic benefit to the communities by
selling/marketing their “bat-friendly” products for a higher price, but I can’t
guarantee that my work will lead directly to that (and quickly) or that that
kind of program would work in each community. So it’s one thing to say that’s a
possibility, but you have to make
sure you don’t come off as promising that
it will happen. I fumbled around a response to his question, but I wasn’t quite
satisfied with it, and I doubt he was either.
It was also my first time working with a translator, and my
translator (Ana) and I had only met a few days before so we were also still
getting to know how each other “works”. I decided when I got home from that
first interview that the next day I would try a different approach in which I
asked the questions in English and Ana would translate them. The second
interview went A LOT better. The conversation felt much more natural, and I was
able to not really use my interview checklist (the list of questions) as much
as the day before since I had already formulated some slightly different
questions based on our chit chat with the leader prior to the interview. I
think me asking questions in English instead of trying to fumble in Spanish
helped me a lot. Hopefully someday I’ll be able to do a full interview in
Spanish without needing a translator, but until then I think it’s best to do it
this way.
Overall, I’m feeling much better than I did after the first
interview. Doing cross-cultural social science field work with communities in a
foreign country definitely creates some unique situations and challenges, but
I’m optimistic that although there will definitely be more bumps along the way,
I’m slowly learning the ropes.
At a silo, a stone pit where the ejido members put the chopped leaves of the
agaves (magueyes) for about 15 days to turn into food for their goats (cabras).
The comisariado (leader) showing me how they scrape out the insides of the maguey
heart (aka "work the maguey") until they reach the white center (right photo),
at which point they leave the plant over a day or two to produce a sugary liquid,
agua miel (literally translated as "honey water") that they collect to drink.
The comisariado showing me how they use the maguaey leaves to wrap meat and
cook it for barbacoa (left), and how the flavor comes from the cuticle of the leaf (right).
According to him, if an agave isn't used to cook the barbacoa then it's not really barbacoa!
There were many agaves on the ejido land!
The drive through the Sierra Madre Oriental mountains
on the way to one of the ejidos.
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