Why do I participate in community-engaged research? I believe in producing useful knowledge to further social change and social justice. As 2019 ASA President Mary Romero wrote, “Sociological data is wasted if our studies fail to affect public understandings of social issues or if research is not applied to improving social conditions.” Common definitions of community-engaged research posit community-university research partnerships that produce a ‘public good.’ I endorse Cynthia Gordon da Cruz’s call to move beyond the nebulous concept of public good to explicitly support critical community-engaged research in the name of social justice. Such research has community interests and participation at the heart of the project. It is not easy to do and requires building trust through action with communities and organizations, placing the community project before academic careers.
By my own standards, my research has not always qualified as critical community-engaged research. For whom is the research done? Who is “the community?” What happens when there is no organization that works with or represents a particular community? What if the university is only interested in politically safe topics? What if the project begins without community support? I faced these issues after completing my book monograph on women workers in Mexico. I wanted to pivot to work with, and do research on, immigrant workers in my own community—Bryan and College Station in central Texas. No local immigration rights or workers’ organization existed at the time, so I banded together with a small group of concerned citizens to found an immigration rights organization in 2010, the Brazos Interfaith Immigration Network (BIIN). To use BIIN for my own research purposes, however, felt too instrumentalist. Besides, community leaders spoke about how the Latinx immigrant community had historically been treated like guinea pigs by university researchers who parachuted in, conducted research, and left. To differentiate myself, I separated my activism from my research, seeking other avenues of contact with the immigrant community.
Justice for Day Laborers
In 2012, I joined a faculty from Texas A&M University who were visiting local organizations to spur community-university research, an institutional attempt to support community-engaged research. During those visits, I learned of the local community clinic that was facing skyrocketing levels of HIV/AIDS among Latinx male workers. Together with a public health researcher, we devised a study of STIs and HIV/AIDS risks in day laborers. As a labor scholar, I added a component to the survey on work, labor violations, and migration histories. While we provided all research subjects with information on STIs, HIV/AIDS and places to find treatment, I worry the research seemed to benefit us, the academics, more than the day laborers or community clinic, which ultimately had to close its HIV/AIDS clinic due to loss of federal funding.
Day laborers, however, still worked under exploitative conditions. Data from my research, the Central Texas Day Labor Survey, could be used to improve their working conditions. For this reason, I continued my research examining relationships between day laborers and employers, documenting wage and work violations, and how day laborers resist exploitation and fight back. The research has been ongoing since 2012. At this point, we have 225 ethnosurveys documenting the struggles and resistance of immigrant and citizen day laborers, and we have begun interviewing employers. Because I am at a very conservative institution, Texas A&M University, the “community-engaged” part of the research is conducted on my own time. While my department is supportive of my research focus, I do not trust that the university will see working with unauthorized immigrants as anything but political and thus unacademic. Hence, I work extra hard to be methodologically rigorous, and I use my personal time to work with the community, fighting wage-theft cases.
The goal is to collect data to propose a citywide wage-theft ordinance with BIIN and other community leaders. Although Texas already has a wage-theft law that allows individuals to sue unprincipled employers, there are too few labor attorneys who will take these cases. Hence, wage-theft claims remain an individual endeavor. If the claimant knows of BIIN, they may receive assistance from volunteers like myself who take on individual wage-theft cases, pressing employers to pay for work completed. Fighting individual cases, however, is not a particularly effective path to justice.
Using robust data from the Central Texas Day Labor Survey, I will help make a case for citywide wage theft ordinances in Bryan and College Station that would require employers to: (1) disclose any outstanding wages owed or judgements against them for unpaid wages, and (2) pay all wages due before obtaining or renewing a construction permit or business license. In addition, we will also lobby to keep a database of nonpaying employers to shame them into compliance, just as other cities such as Houston and El Paso do. If passed, these policies will necessitate vigilant local community participation so that Bryan and College Station enforce the ordinance and keep the database up-to-date and public.
While it would be ideal for nonpaying employers to also have to pay a fine for wage theft, we must be realistic about what is possible given the local conservative and anti-immigrant political landscape. The members of the city council either represent, or are themselves, developers, contractors, and realtors, and as such are closely tied to day-laborer employers. It will be an uphill battle to pass the resolutions, a battle that will require buy-in from key local churches using the locally resonant language of justice, faith, and morality. I am excited but also daunted by the social justice work ahead, a result of nine years of research with day laborers and conversations with local activists.
Deportability, Mixed Status Families, and Deportation
Another long-term project I am working on focuses on interviews with immigrant parents regarding how they navigate everyday life in an anti-immigrant context—that is, semirural Texas. Through focus groups and interviews, I have learned about the challenges, strategies, and successes of interfacing with schools, police, health care agencies, and the community at large. The most important concern immigrant parents face is family separation. Mothers and fathers cry during interviews and focus groups when discussing the possibility of losing custody of their children if they are deported. As a result, I have partnered with BIIN to provide services to the local community. I developed a resource document for unauthorized parents and organized legal clinics where parents can secure a power of attorney document that allows them to legally specify a family member or friend who will provide for the care of their children in case of their detention and/or deportation. At the conclusion of the clinics, the relief in parents’ demeanors is palpable.
Another outcome of the research with immigrant parents was the expansion of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) legal clinics at BIIN. These legal clinics help young unauthorized immigrants obtain or renew their DACA status with the help of pro bono legal counsel from Houston (1.5 hours away), Austin (1.5 hours away), or Dallas-Fort Worth (3 hours away)—as we were until recently in a legal desert. It was planning one of these legal clinics with colleagues from the Texas A&M University School of Law in Fort Worth that highlighted the pitfalls of doing community-engaged research at a predominantly White and conservative institution. A previous dean of liberal arts instigated the withdrawal of university support by writing an email, copying my department head and associate deans, and pointing out that planning a DACA legal clinic was akin to political activity and could not be conducted on university property or using university resources. This email confirmed my suspicion that community engagement has its limits. The work I was doing was not political in that it was not supporting a political candidate (or even a policy change), but rather assisting Texas A&M students and the larger community to access attorney assistance to renew DACA papers, as already allowed under existing law. I suspect that the dean feared backlash from Texas A&M students and alums. They are known to be conservative, vocal, and influential; participating in research that is considered politically left-leaning was deemed unacceptable. Working with the immigrant community was not the kind of engagement sought by the university, and the clinic was conducted off-campus, with any hint of university support removed.
The inconsistent support for community-engaged research from the university has meant that I have not partnered with an organization to do research on their projects, but rather have worked with them to provide services that are the outcome of my research. That is, the research, that is university work is separated from the personal social justice endeavor that I see as the natural outcome of research. This requires more time and investment outside of work to achieve what in other locales would be considered academic effort. The only exception to this has been the research with colleague Mary Campbell on motivations for Latinx lawful permanent residents (LPRs) to become citizens. With the help of BIIN, we contacted past citizenship class students to enquire about motivations and barriers to becoming a citizen. The goal of this research was to produce data that could be used to secure funding for citizenship classes, as well as to guide BIIN’s work with citizenship class students to overcome barriers to citizenship. Supporting LPRs becoming citizens is not a politically controversial issue.
The day labor and mixed-status family research projects highlight how deportability and deportation itself shape individuals’ actions and future, which led me to participate in a more recent group project on the social and economic reintegration of deportees and returnees once back in Mexico. For the past two years, I have been interviewing deportees and forced returnees in Mexico, documenting their deportation processes, their reception by Mexican immigration authorities, and whether they receive state and family support once in Mexico. Interestingly, this project received university backing through an internal grant for global engagement. Although the topic is deportation, the site is Mexico. The project promises both a research product, a survey, and a service effort—a convening of Mexican authorities and nongovernmental organizations to discuss ways to improve services for deportees and returnees. The pandemic has interrupted the research, but we have embarked on close associations with organizations set up by and for deportees and returnees, supporting their work and their goals. Importantly, we are also connecting deportees and returnees with resources and organizations in Mexico.
No One Path to Critical Community-Engaged Research
Although I see my research and social justice work as intellectually connected, they are in practice separated due to lack of consistent university institutional support. As a result, I am reticent to partner with local organizations to work on their projects as a researcher, fearing that I cannot fully participate in my role as an academic. Rather, I participate in local nongovernmental organizations as a private citizen. Does that mean, I have asked myself, that my research is not community-engaged? While I do not start from a community organization’s own project, all my research involves partnering with community organizations and leaders to respond to community needs. I do see the research as emancipatory in two particular ways. First, it involves student engagement. I train bilingual Latinx students to participate in the projects, providing hands-on research experience, and perhaps more importantly, a mechanism to get involved with their own community. Many of my students feel isolated in a predominantly White institution. Connecting with the Latinx community offers a sense of empowerment and rootedness. Second, the research furthers justice. Whether with day laborers, parents, LPRs, or deportees, a key component of the research is giving back to the community in ways that foster justice. Day laborers receive labor and immigration materials and resources that detail their rights in an effort to fight wage theft and exploitation; parental focus groups end with sessions that detail immigration rights and link community members to legal resources and local organizations; and deportees and returnees connect with local organizations in Mexico. At the same time, useful knowledge is created to embark on structural social change at the local level and inform policy at the national and international levels. While conducting community-engaged research is difficult due to the political climate locally and at the university, I have found it rewarding to be part of local efforts to apply insights from research to improve the working and living conditions of the immigrant population.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
