Students as Citizen Researchers : Giving Voice to the Community
By VICTORIA MARTINEZ
Victoria Martinez is the Executive Director for the Sangre de Cristo National Heritage Area in Colorado and a multi-passionate social scientist.
My work involves utilizing the history, culture, traditions, and environment of a place in which people reside. By acknowledging historical trauma and oppression people can then deal with it. People can then be open to how it may be impacting community health, social capital, the economy, access to food, local education, well-being, and much more.
Place Based Learning is a practice that informs, inspires, empowers, and initiates healing. I’ve learned that the work of increasing equity starts with place and the people in that place, before it can move on to other work such as building capacity or economic development. Creative Strategies for Change have a beautiful saying that is essential to their work, “empathy before education.” To me this means allowing people to discover and express their voice, culture, heritage, and history before pushing them to learn new skills or giving them new tools. I call it the “must do” work before the “need to do” work. Specifically I use visual tools and oral storytelling.
I live in a small town in southern Colorado. There are many towns like mine, all over Colorado and all over the United States. What makes my home interesting, especially from a researcher’s perspective, is that the population is 85% Hispanic. In the surrounding Conejos County, where my town is located, it’s 56% Hispanic.
When I found that out, my researcher’s curiosity really kicked in. My mind returned to my grandmother’s stories of Hispanic farmers, who lived in lively towns, and held colorful community gatherings. However, I wasn’t seeing that anymore. What I was seeing, is that very few Hispanics knew the cultural stories, few still owned the surrounding farmland, and even fewer Hispanic youth actually speak Spanish. The most surprising statistic I came across was the median income for Hispanics is only $23,000 compared to the white median income of $50,000.
Well, at that point my curiosity got the best of me, I began to use collaborative visual ethnography and the power of traditional storytelling to research what might have caused those changes and income difference. As I delved into the qualitative research the stories pulled me in deeper and deeper. The deeper I went the more I realized that the effects of past losses due to discrimination and racism were still being felt today. I began to ask, how can we stop the cycle of loss for this generation of Hispanics?
It was then that I decided to involve high school and middle school students in my research. Together with my students we set out on a qualitative research journey using visual sociology. We interviewed elders in the community and surrounding areas. At times my students and I laughed together, other times we cried together, a few times we even grew angry about what we were hearing. Then we took action together. We analyzed those stories in order to find any common themes or patterns. Then we began sharing those videos with our community along with our findings.
The work became a form of social justice as the elders and community members we spoke with used their voice to share with us their indigenous knowledge, cultural traditions, shared meanings, and the stories of historic trauma in the region that have contributed to current social issues and injustices. What we discovered was that my student’s great grandparents only spoke Spanish and they struggled to survive in a newly established United States that demanded they speak English. That generation of Hispanics never crossed the border, the border crossed them. They were Mexican, and then suddenly after the Mexican-American war, without ever moving, they had become Americans. It was a different form of forced relocation. Many of them lost their land because they couldn’t negotiate or understand the new laws written in another language and because those who could, took advantage of them.
Due to that struggle an entire generation made sure their children could speak both English and Spanish. But then my student’s grandparents were punished for speaking Spanish in school and some were fined for every word of Spanish they spoke, an entire generation was silenced from speaking their native language. As a result, their grandparents chose not to pass the Spanish language on to their children. It was an effort to protect them from the shame they experienced in speaking their own language. Now my students have not only lost their language and the culture that surrounds that language, but they lost the stories that explain an unspoken generational pain that still haunts their community, a pain from a historical trauma my students didn’t even know had happened.
What I learned in working with youth is that when you engage them in stories that capture their interest they learn quickly, they outperform your expectations, and they have the power and influence to make the message go viral. My students have told me that this research has empowered them to reclaim their cultural identity, heritage, and language. Allowing these young Hispanics to research their own history and share the untold stories with the rest of their community has started a cultural healing that has been a long time in coming.
Stories are the backbone of any person’s identity. They are the backbone of any culture.
If we are to be a whole and healthy person, or if we are to have whole and healthy communities we need to know what our story is today and we need to understand what our stories are from the past, in order to create a better story for our future. My research allowed us to hear the untold stories of discrimination, to see that the lasting effects of that discrimination have been widespread, and to finally see the world from the storyteller’s perspective.
There is always more than one side to every story. But history has been told by the victors and therefore much has been left out, and silenced. It’s time to tell the whole story.
We need to train people of color to use sociological and ethnographic research methods, such as visual methods, to investigate our own cultural heritage, to tell our own stories within the entirety of their cultural context, and retell our countries history from the perspective of those who have lost much. As we tell our stories, we become empowered to reclaim our own cultural identities. From that place of empowerment we can then began to reshape our future, our community’s future, our children’s future. This form of collaborative social research is done in the community, is for the benefit of the community, and is performed by the community.
Sharing both the wonderful and the painful stories with other races, ethnicities, and cultures helps us all to see each other as fellow human beings we can really listen to each other. It also validates that the painful experiences took place. That simple validation is a step toward understanding and community cultural healing.
Stories have the power to bypass the boundaries of skin color and connect people at a deeply human level. Our country is a melting pot of different cultures and any step toward understanding those other cultures can put us on a journey toward the cultural healing that our country is in desperate need of.
About the Author: Victoria Martinez is the Executive Director for the Sangre de Cristo National Heritage Area in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. The Sangre de Cristo National Heritage Area is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization promoting, preserving, protecting, and interpreting its profound historical, religious, environmental, geographic, geologic, cultural, and linguistic resources. Victoria is a multi-passionate social scientist and a San Luis Valley native who brings a wealth of leadership experience and knowledge to the Heritage Area’s programs through her work in the local communities and non-profits. She has served with other nonprofits at all levels including programming, fundraising, and executive leadership levels. Victoria shares her thoughts and writing on her blog, Rethinking Rural Women.
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