The traveling researchers’ sisterhood: Four female voices from Latin America in a collaborative autoethnography

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a collaborative (auto)ethnography that has emerged from the meeting of four academic researchers working with and from the heart in various Latin American contexts. Design/methodology/approach – Our “I’s” have mingled with our very varied participations in different themes, latitudes, and disciplines – health, education and psychosocial approaches. We have worked, variously, in both English and Spanish. At the core of this piece are our own biographies, motivations, senses, academic dreams, international contexts, and the injustices and suffering felt in our bodies. Findings – We seek to reflect from our experience of traveling as young researchers and as women with Latin souls. Through our stories, we show how crossing cultures as part of our research and work gives us both a privileged position but also the constant stress and questioning that goes beyond the intellectual and appears in our embodied experiences of interculturality. Research limitations/i...

about things that are not usually said, and in ways that are uncommon in 'the academy'.We work in departments where numbers are often crunched and standard deviations are often analyzed.We walk a fine line, therefore, between the catharsis of talking it all out for our own sakes and for the shock value of being the little boy in the 'Emperor's New Clothes' that says the unsayable.And, somewhere between these traps, there is our true purpose: to write interpretive autoethnography because it allows us to take our work further into both theoretical insights and to produce/promote social justice from and within/without academia.
We are four young(ish) women interpretive [auto]ethnographers.We all understand our work as methodologies of the heart and hope (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011) and we seek to fracture the traditional academic discourses that splice our writing from our humanity (Pelias, 2014).Further, while all of us travel extensively as part of our academic jobs, and we all work bilingually, three of us also live and work, at least part of the time, outside our 'home' countries.
(But what is 'home' when one crosses borders so often?This is the kind of question we ask ourselves in our long e-conversations.)On the one hand, then, we have plenty in common.However, our stories are substantially different both from one another and, we hope, from the 'standard boring writing of the academy' (Sparkes, 2007: 541).
In this paper, we offer four texts that tessellate to describe our understandings of crossing cultures.Mily writes about women's expected roles in Latin American society and about the humanization of health care there.Phiona analyses culture-crossing as an embodied, felt phenomenon from her perspective as a gringa in majority-Indigenous Guatemala.She makes the observation, accessed through analysis of her own kneejerk reaction to a fellow gringa's 'white (wo)man's burden' discourse of 'helping', that crossing cultures is as much about moving between paradigms as it is physically moving in space.Pame then describes, in her woman-of-color Latin American voice, and in a sensate way from her body, how she IS writing in the USA as a foreign, Latin American woman of color about foreign Colombian women of color living in her border town in Chile.Finally, Michelle discusses the importance of contextualizing research and difficulties that arise when writing in foreign languages.

*** Mily's voice: Women, caregivers, and suchlike
We give you a school in a country that is not yours When I was little, those words made me angry.I never wanted that future for myself, but also I did not know any other possibility in my humble neighborhood, invaded by the horror of brutal dictatorship and social inequality that persists even now in my beloved Chile.
My heart beats stronger and I prefer to sleep en route from Santiago to Frankfurt.I dream about a poor little girl travelling to the Old World, to present her research constructed of the dreams and the lives of others, my kidney "patients".I am a nurse by choice, although this is a subjugated profession that reflects the patriarchy, being predominantly female.It is a profession where low self-esteem mixes with sacrifice and service, that is to say, the "no power" of femininity (Del Valle, 1993).
It's been several years since that first research presentation overseas but every time I travel I feel the same things: a strange mixture of pride and fear, the anxiety and excitement of knowing, discovering new people, and feeling that, despite the differences, as humans we are joined from the depths of our being in love, solidarity, and compassion.
In my travels I meet and share ideas with many people but I always feel more comfortable with Caribbean people and South Americans, like myself.Above all, I feel at home with Latina women or those with a Latina soul.I wonder if qualitative research has a woman's soul, or maybe even a Latina soul, the soul of women from the global South?I think so.Qualitative research has the soul of passionate, laughing, caring women who sing and dance and listen and discuss.It has the soul of community-building women.I build knowledge within a paradigm that is not common in health studies.A biomedical paradigm predominates there.We speak in terms of depersonalization.As Le Breton puts it, "The disease is not perceived or treated as the effect of personal adventure of a man inscribed in a society at a given time, but as the default anonymous function or organ " (1994:200) We don't discuss people, only bed numbers or body parts: 'the liver in bed 10' or 'the hernia in bed 15'.This is a paradigm that forces us to evaluate everything through numbers: bed occupancy rates, costeffectiveness, utilities.It disconnects us as human beings.
I build knowledge from the heart to humanize healthcare, so that my students don't forget we are people who care for others, so that my patients feel their voices are heard.I also build knowledge so that I can see myself in others, to heal my wounds, and to empower my health community of patients and caregivers.I want to support them and change the world, each of our worlds.As Ron Pelias writes, 'I feel like a body that invites identification and emphatic connections, a body that takes as its charge to be fully human ' (2004:1).
Every person, every family, every community is a world that can change from inside by working on how we are as human beings.When we understand that frontiers are only red lines on maps, that the races are just colors of the same skin, and that beliefs just ideas, we can see each other and build upon our subtle differences, but above all from our similarities.In my travels I observe, and I observe myself: I do ethnography and [auto]ethnography.I think, but mostly I feel and dream, that our qualitative research -often handmade and entirely without authorization-as women, as Latinas, as travelers, can become a way in which we, the little people, can become great in integrity and humanity.*** Phiona´s voice: Feeling my way through interculturality Crossing cultures is not only an intellectual process.It is not even mainly intellectual.It is thoroughly embodied.Here in highland Guatemala, where I'm interviewing fellow gringos about their experiences in the cottage-industry Spanish-language schools, I've come to understand culture crossing as a feast of all the senses.Culture crossing here is not something that can be accessed by the 'usual' ways of researching.Here, it is necessary to feel in order to understand.
The city I'm researching in is Xela, pronounced 'SHAY-La' and officially called 'Quetzaltenango': its Mayan name was Xelajú and although the Maya have been systematically abused, silenced, and exterminated for centuries, both they and their city's name live on, defiant.Xela is high altitude, high octane.Its air is sharp with traffic fumes and the narrow streets fill with the cries of ayudantes from the little buses into which people crowd.'Zunil', they shout, 'Retalhuleu, Coatepeque, Sololá'.When I take weaving classes at a women's cooperative, Xela sounds like the breathy K's and T's and Ch's of Kaqchikel and Kiché.
Xela tastes of carbohydrates.Every lunchtime, in the comedor where I have a nodding relationship with the staff, I count the carbs that make up a single meal.There is rice, pasta, tortillas and potatoes with the pollo pepian today and there were tamales, rice, potatoes, and maize with jocon yesterday.
Xela smells of the black, choking diesel smoke that issues from ancient vehicles.After the rains it also smells loamy, earthy, although always with a top note of dog shit.Also: it is mango season, and in Xela the mangos smell of heaven.
Xela looks like cobbled streets and some belle epoque architecture but also razor-wire fences, broken bottles cemented into the tops of high walls, and concrete-box stores with crude murals advertising the businesses.But Xela is an ugly picture in a beautiful frame: all around are verdant, vertiginous volcanoes.
On the weekends, I take myself to the places with the unfamiliar names.It is here that I experience how Xela feels, because to my large, gringa body, the buses -retired, US-American school buses-feel so very cramped.Seats designed for primary children have been taken out and put back in, closer together, adding another few rows and leaving only a ten-inch-wide aisle.Coming back from Zunil, I exchange smiles with a señora who is carrying a live hen on her lap.I ask where she is going and she says Xela.And the hen?She laughs.'Also Xela, but don't tell her.She wants to go back to the campo.I'm making a caldo, a soup'.This feels sad, although it shouldn't.I eat meat.I just don't usually ride buses with homesick chickens.Xela feels closer to reality, sometimes.
I notice that I walk differently in Xela.The people move so damn slowly, and on narrow pavements alongside fast-traffic roads you have a choice: fall into step with the meandering or get squashed flat by a delivery truck.I walk and seethe.Obviously, I say nothing (except, occasionally, 'con permiso', as the traffic calms and I squeeze around the dawdling walkers, owning my gringa air of annoyance).Am I this stereotype, of the rushed, stressed gringa?I'm really not.But unlike many of the people of Xela I have stuff to do, places to be, a research project, and a ticket out.
There is far too much unemployment and even more underemployment here, and it riles me when I see advertisements for gringos to work in tourist places: Weekend staff @ Black Cat Hostel.Free food, cheap drinks.3 months minimum commitment.… Evening and weekend bar staff needed at the Old School bar.Guaranteed fun.Give Jose a call.
(Classified Ads, 'Xela Who' Magazine, April-June 2015) Why, I ask the gringos who are working here, why do they think that the bars and the hostels hire them, gringos, rather than locals?And one says: I got a job as a waitress.I joined a band.Hearing this, I realize that crossing cultures is more than feeling, sensing my way around Xela. Crossing cultures is also crossing discourses, crossing paradigms.Every critical bone in my body jolts when I hear the entitlement and implied racism of some of the gringos.Is it really just that Guatemalans are insufficiently 'go-getter', that they lack 'lots of ideas'?Is this why there is so much unemployment, why the bars and the hostels hire the unqualified gringos?I don't think so.I do like a lot of the gringos that I meet.And I like a lot of quetzaltecos, too.This is not about liking or disliking.Instead, I realize that the biggest culture crossing I'm negotiating is the one where my gringo interviewees casually fall into social imaginaries that disparage Xela, and Guatemala, and Latin America, perhaps without meaning to and often without considering the gringo privilege that puts them on a pedestal.This is my biggest culture shock here in Xela.

*** Michelle´s voice: Making every word count
[L]inking theory to the ground in which the theorist's boots are planted.
To think in this way is to reject the deeply entrenched habit of mind … by which theory in the social sciences is admired exactly in the degree to which it escapes specific settings and speaks in abstract universals.(Connell, 2007, p.206)It is hard for me to think in a deterritorialized manner (Sassen, 2001) since I come from the periphery.I was born as the oldest daughter of a working-class family who had to move to the north for better life prospects after being harassed by Pinochet's military dictatorship.I was raised in a city located about 1,800 km from the metropole, which for most Chileans is represented by the capital city, Santiago.Hence, my personal, political, and emotional connections are primarily to my country, Chile, and particular to Iquique, the city in which I was raised and which has heavily influenced who I am.
I am a PhD candidate doing a compressed ethnography of the uses (nonuses) of digital technologies in a school in northern Chile.I am curious about the push for technological integration into schools, which has been happening worldwide for a while now.I have a hunch that the drive for technological integration responds more to a knowledge economy 'readiness' than aiming to improve quality and equality in education.
And: I am currently living thirteen hours into the future from my family and friends.I come from the south of the globe and although I am still living in the south, this 'south' is rather different.I live in Australia.I use English to communicate with others outside my home but I still use Spanish to talk to my husband and kids.My family and I have taken this adventure and crossed the world, crossed cultures for me to achieve my goal of getting my PhD.Life in Australia has not been a rose garden and we have faced difficult times.For me, as for many of my colleagues PhD candidates who happen to be international female students, the perils of juggling motherhood and academic work make this journey harder than for our male counterparts.However, dealing with hardship, academic work and lack of help only make our will to finish our research stronger, and all the sweeter to achieve.
Education has been my life.I remember playing to be the teacher to my friends when I was about eight years old, at the back of the fair where my mother had a food stall.All of them were younger than me.I spent most of my childhood and adolescence playing in the streets surrounding the Mercado Centenario de Iquique, an area haunted by the blood of those salt pitting miners who were massacred at Escuela Santa Maria over a hundred years ago.I did my primary schooling there, too.Stories of the ghosts of the people who had died in that massacre pullulated my childhood.Who I am has been shaped by the life experiences I have faced.
I do not intend to start a debate on whether language determines culture or culture determines language.For me, the language I use influences the way I see the world.My choice of language to express myself has a lot to do with what I want to say.When it is something related to academia, English is undoubtedly the language I feel most comfortable with.Why?Well, because even though Spanish is my native language, I learnt during my undergraduate degree in EFL [English as a Foreign Language] teaching, so most of my academic work has been done in English.Indeed, the most difficult presentation I have ever had to prepare was my first in Spanish, at the CEAD conference in New Zealand.Now, as I work through my PhD in Australia I have come to realize that writing is not only a way of communicating your thoughts.It is a way of thinking.Even though I do a lot of thinking in English, the passion I have for my work… well, I feel it in my Latina heart.This is hard to convey in English words, but I will try: "Make every word count".These four words still echo in my head after having heard them more than eighteen months ago.
"Write your first draft as if it were the final one"."Pay close attention to your choice of words".These suggestions make a lot of sense.However it is even harder to put into practice when English is not your first language.
My Spanish language background gets in the way of my English academic writing style as well.This has become one of the major struggles I have had to face while writing my thesis.As I explained before, writing in English is natural to me when it comes to academic work.However, my personality permeates my writing.It should be all right but I tend to be sarcastic and also idealistic and passionate about my work.All of these characteristics are not supposed to be present when I write academically in English.I am having difficulties in finding myself, my voice in my work because the academic style I have been asked to use makes the piece of writing sound as someone else wrote it.We Spanish speakers tend to beat about the bush.We tend to write as if it were a poem or a story.The romantic nature of our language shapes our discourse, whereas English obliges us to go straight to the point.In English, I write in shorter sentences.In English, I try to leave my emotions behind in favor of facts.That is why I have embraced this opportunity to write [auto]ethnography.
During my data generation period I experienced the culture of a school for a semester.Everything that happened in the school was conveyed in Spanish.It happened in a specific context, particular people, at a particular time.And now I struggle to come to terms with a writing style that can convey my participants' stories.English language writing conventions do not allow me to express all I would like to say, at least not in the way I wish I could.Would it be possible to write an account of their everyday life with a Latin soul but in English words, and have it still sound academic?I want to try.I should start, then, by trying to contribute to the decolonization of academia through my thesis.I write a hybrid text in which I mix the soul of the south with a language of the north.Is this how I can make every word count?*** Pame's voice: Training in a foreign country: The liminal space between they/us/me, there/here/behind I feel sometimes like I am swimming against the current, or as if I'm climbing a 20-meter wall that unfairly prevents Moroccans and other Africans from freely passing the geographical boundary that divides their lives.It is a limit set only in one direction, from Africa to Spain.A Cuban man without a visa to travel to Europe once told me in Tangiers, 'I am exercising hard every day to one day jump the wall and leave Morocco'.
Academic life is like the Olympic Games.I have been training four times a week over the last two years with Les Mills BodyFlow classes.It is difficult and challenging for a sedentary woman like me.I need to wake up at 5:30 to be on time.Sometimes, this is a sacrifice although a sweet sacrifice because in the class itself, I feel I'm gaining control of my life.I don't know if this is a consequence of the class, or if I found this class as a consequence of the current moment, at age 39, as a woman who has found her voice.I am a woman who values everything life gives to her every day.I am woman who survived three physical accidents last year.
In BodyFlow classes, most movements are in the air, slow but definite.Strong but harmonic.I can feel muscles I've never felt before.I can feel life running through my veins.I enjoy the mild pain I feel when I am in a position that forces a specific part of my body.I can see and feel my body sweat despite the slow movements.I enjoy stretching, focusing and achieving sustained movements with my 77 kg, sometimes on just one foot.I feel good with my body resting on the ground.I live the day better after that simple experience in the mornings.If I am thinking or worried about something that does not concern the movement of Tai Chi, Yoga or Pilates, I unravel and I can't keep my balance.This forces me to connect with the class, to separate the mind from the body.I do this without shoes.Mellow melodies, such as Quiet Place, by Stanton Lanier, speak to my soul.And now: my feet are over my sky-blue yoga mat, in the ARC-gym at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.I am among international students.
We follow our female Chinese trainer, when the movements of each of us seem to be the movements of all the participants of the class.
Sometimes I feel I am training to stick imaginary strong blows and kicks to the ghosts (e.g.Zapata-Sepúlveda, in press).But they are outside the classroom.They are in the liminality between my memoirs, imaginary and geographical borders, and in daily life's unjust acts in the world.So I could drive them away, outside, far, at least causing them to faint, stunning them.At the same time, I focus my 'I' from my mind-body to a place, the BodyFlow class, where the next step is knowable.I am not an Olympic athlete and would need to be born again to become one.But attending BodyFlow, I feel as if I'm gaining strength and strengthening my muscles through sweat.I feel alive.
What is BodyFlow?It is just a first world eccentricity?could be.But for me it is like research.It is both pain and privilege, like the pain and privilege of researching among Colombian women migrants in Chile.Performative writing is a healing of resistance (e.g.Weems, 2013), and I have the privilege of working at a university that allows me to do qualitative inquiry as I believe in it.But there is pain here, too: I can do this in my country, but alone.Or I can attend Anglo conferences in places called first world countries, and there I can be a foreign voice.And so I reflect, necessarily, on my own culture crossing as I research Latin-American immigrant women.I place my 'I' from their side.Working with Colombian women in Arica resonates with my feelings of being in a foreign country.Here I am writing these words in the USA.Stop! Interpretive [auto]ethnography puts color in my voice (Zapata-Sepúlveda, 2016) as I understand the feeling of being Other.(Most people in Arica, Chile feel as if they are white: 'Shut-up Pame! Don't say things we don't want to hear!' But I know what it is to be a woman of color, as a result of spending time in the USA.) And so this is about seeing and finding what we seek in international and local environments.Crossing borders is like that.Our international experiences as a standpoint allow us to understand our work not only for our local realities.This concerns us all, in which process the fieldwork make us live experiences we never get to live.It is as a privilege.These are the muscles I have never felt before. ***

Final reflections
We are four women who have travelled a lot.Certainly, we have travelled more than our neighbours and friends.Our trips give us the chance to visualise and identify ourselves as both coming from and also moving away from our origins.Sometimes, we are fish out of water.Sometimes, that's a good thing.These trips allow us to take the next steps.What emerges most strongly from our texts, though, is not travel for its own sake.Instead, our cultural, linguistic, disciplinary, and physical crossings have allowed us to learn, to question, and to see from other, from others', perspectives.Physically moving allows us to open up new intellectual spaces.Being able to write from the heart has allowed us to move beyond our 'own' spaces and paradigms.
Our voices have come together here as those of female academics writing together in and about Latin America.We share a satisfaction, and an affection, for the waters we swim in and a sense of muted pride for having found these waters in the first place, but at the same time we struggle with the inequalities and injustices that still predominate in our region.Nevertheless, like Nemo, we 'keep on swimming'.In doing so, we hope to contribute to academy and, crucially, to society.For us, these waters are inscribed from our biographies, from our humanity, and from the strength of the voices of a group of young women.From crossing cultures, as an experience to be felt in our bodies and not just our minds, we are learning feel with our five senses.This takes us beyond existing paradigms, discourses, and positions in the academy, and constantly pulls our personal histories and our identities into our work.This is what we can do by physically travelling and by forcing ourselves out of what are, for us, the normal, usual, expected ways of being.And by doing this repeatedly, we find that crossing cultures need not leave us feeling like fish out of water.
And so we return to where we began, to the process of writing this paper: it is borne of the affection we have for each other, our spontaneous collaboration, and our sharing of ideas through conversations.
We acknowledge that we all have a heart which dyes itself of 'latinness'.However, at the same time it is different in the sense that one of us must go back to her anglo world while the others are involved in the never-ending tension that implies the need of acting within the realities we are immersed in after we have gathered the information from the anglo world in which our academic lives also take part.Therefore, the foci changes from conducting research to generate knowledge or researching from the urgency, as it is the case of the three Chilean authors.
We have also, we hope, contributed a paper whose strength lies in its heart-work.We have shown that research can be, must be, embodied, and that writing can, indeed must, be informed by what is felt as much as it is informed by that what is rationalised and logically reasoned.
You have to accept what life gives you.Husbands are like carrying a cross, just like Jesus did for us, and we have to carry that cross until we die." grandmothers: "Why do you study so much?If it won't help you care for your husband and children, and if you'll only end up cleaning the house and bathing your kids?"Women must sacrifice themselves for family and kids, that's what God wants.
Like, either one, I wasn't qualified to do in the US.…Here,I literally just walk up to people and [I'll] be like, 'hey I think you need a waitress', 'alright', 'good, that's me'.…I'm also very go-getter, yeah, and I'm very active and have a lot of ideas.So maybe that's partially just me.I think, yeah, there's just a lot of opportunities to start working on projects[here].…I think [local people in Xela] could [do the same] if they wanted to, yeah.(Katy,pseudonym, June 2015)