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225 Chapter 10 Labores de la Vida/The Labors of Life: A Description of a Video Documentary of Mexican-American Adults Who Were Migrant Agricultural Workers as Children and a Commentary by Miguel Guajard Miguel Guajardo, Patricia Sánchez, Elissa Fineman, and James Joseph Scheurich This chapter is a brief discussion of a video documentary that four of us made— Miguel Guajardo, Patricia Sánchez, Elissa Fineman, and Jim Scheurich, but this discussion is written by just one of us (Scheurich); however, below Miguel adds his re¶ections on the video. This video was our attempt to do research that does not participate in white racism. This, of course, does not mean that the process resulted in no racism in the documentary. This is not true, and virtually impossible, given the context within which we all live. As mentioned in the “Introduction,” Francisco, one of the participants in the documentary, suggested that though he thought the video was a valuable and respectful representation of the participants, still, the method in which it was done was exploitive. By this he meant the documentary still used the approach of the colonist whereby we came in, gathered data, and then went away to analyze and compose. He suggested that a nonexploitive approach would have more deeply involved the participants in the project and would have shared expertise with the participants so that when we, the researchers, left, the community would have new expertise that the members of the community could use to enhance the community. We cannot argue with his critique, and we appreciate that he did not leave us without this critique. While we agree with and value Francisco’s critique, we will discuss here what we did and why we did it. Jim Scheurich received a limited amount of funding to do it as part of a larger project funded by the Migrant Education Division of the Texas Education Agency (the state’s education agency). The Project Directors of the project were faculty colleagues of Jim’s, Pedro Reyes and Jay Scribner. The project was divided into several areas of focus, and Jim was assigned to study adults who had been children in migrant agricultural worker families, but had been able to attain some level of educational and economic “success.” Jim requested that his research would result in a video documentary rather than the typical research report, and this request was granted. 226 Guajardo, Sánchez, Fineman, and Scheurich Because of his conclusions about the way white racism works that were discussed in the “Introduction,” Jim ¤rst set out to ¤nd an activist who had been in a migrant family and who would collaborate with Jim in making the documentary . He quickly found Miguel who has a strong history of working as an activist in the Austin, Texas, area and in the Rio Grande Valley area of Texas. Because neither Jim nor Miguel had any experience with making a documentary, Jim sought a student with some of that experience who could be paid to work halftime on the project. He found Elissa Fineman, who started out as a doctoral student in education, but during the project changed to become a doctoral student in “new media” in the Department of Radio-Television-Film. Although she was certainly no ¤lm or documentary expert, she had much more knowledge and experience than either Miguel or Jim. Since there was enough ¤nancial resources on the project to hire a second student, Miguel was able to ¤nd Patricia Sánchez, who grew up in the El Paso, Texas, area and whose father had been a migrant worker, to work on the project. Once all four were identi¤ed and agreed to participate, virtually all decisions and everything else was done as equally and as collaboratively as possible, though since they were the paid students, Patricia and Elissa did develop more knowledge of the editing equipment, Media 100. This project, the video documentary, was done as qualitative research. The four of us reviewed the results of an earlier literature review and then viewed several ¤lms that had been made in the past on migrant workers. We also read some related books. We then designed the research process and developed the interview protocol. We obtained participants through networks that Miguel and Patricia were involved in, and we used “snowballing,” a sampling method whereby one person nominates others who nominate others, and so on. We then interviewed the participants on camera one-by-one or in focus groups. All...

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