Privileged and Undocumented: Toward a Borderland Love Ethic

Abstract

In this chapter, I further explore my positionality, moving from the personal to the academic as I discuss the tensions of what it means to be a “deserving” native researcher. In this way, I present my conceptual framework from which my writing stems and offer a theoretical situatedness as researcher. I begin by experimenting with the meaning of a borderland love ethic as a theoretical framework that centers on nurturing our strength to love in spaces of contention, tolerance of ambiguity as a revolutionary virtue, and humbly beginning anew again and again. Drawing from an extended interview with a participant of a larger study about undocumented students, I describe our positionalities with respect to privilege and undocumented status as the central foci. I use my own dilemma of understanding and reconciling my position as a once undocumented immigrant to a now hyperdocumented (Chang, Harvard Educational Review, 81(3), 508–520, 2011) native researcher, studying undocumented people, to work through the possibility of a borderland love ethic. Relying primarily on the theoretical works of Anzaldúa (Borderlands: La frontera—The new mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), Darder (Teaching as an act of love: Reflections on Paolo Freire and his contributions to our lives and our work. In A. Darder, M. Baltodano, & R. D. Torres (Eds.), The critical pedagogy reader. New York: Routledge, 2003), and hooks (All about love. New York: First Perennial, 2000). I ask how we as scholars enact love in our research amidst our seemingly contradictory positions of oppression and privilege. I contend that one possibility is by employing a borderland love ethic that embraces ambiguity, rejects binary positions, and humbly acknowledges our constant state of arriving, both as researchers and participants.

This article was originally published in 2015 and is reprinted with permission given by the publishers (Chang 2015).