CITATION AND COPYRIGHT INFORMATION:
Cite as: Huesca, R. (1999, May). Challenges and insights in a cross cultural setting: Sense-Making interviews with Mexican factory workers. Paper presented at a non-divisional workshop held at the meeting of the International Communication Association, San Francisco.
© Robert Huesca (1999).

ESSENCE OF PROJECT:
Since completing my dissertation project, I have been interested in exploring the process of social change, especially as it relates to the efforts of marginalized populations striving for more equitable relations in the arenas of work, governance, and cultural production. My dissertation research focused on the practices of radio stations operated by and/or in solidarity with tin miners in the Bolivian highlands. My research focused on the communication procedures of media producers that seemed to have achieved a high degree of success in terms of both popular participation and social transformation. Nevertheless, the research also indicated that the practitioners were limited in their ability to achieve long term change in their communities. Questions surrounding this seeming impossibility to effect long-term social change have become a focus of this project.

For the past three years, I have been conducting ethnographic research in several Mexican border communities where efforts to organize factory workers have been underway for the last 20 years. Given the length of the organizing efforts, a fairly large number of participants now live and work in these communities. This project has involved participating in organizing efforts and interviewing current and former participants regarding their efforts to achieve higher wages and better working conditions. To date I have gathered about 4 months of field notes and interview transcripts from 21 participants. I have been focusing specifically on the communication strategies and procedures that have been used over the years in the effort to organize workers. I am hoping to achieve a general understanding of how communication procedures are related to successes, difficulties, problems, and challenges of social change efforts.

THE REASONS I TOOK THIS ROAD:
An unexpected personal illumination from my dissertation research regarded the extent to which everyday life is guided by explicit and implicit theories of things such as social change and participatory communication. Quite unexpectedly I found that Bolivian radio producers tended to talk about the relationship between communication and social transformation in two distinct and, in some respects, opposing ways. This finding suggested to me that research would be more fruitful if it explicitly attended to the ways in which human subjects interpreted complex relationships in life, rather than trying to draw conclusions regarding those relationships based on observations and/or other forms of data collection.

With this general orientation, I chose to use Sense-Making interviews because it provides a systematic way of ascertaining the complex, everyday theorizings of human subjects. Through its iterative process of examining situation-movement-gap-consequence, Sense-Making provides an abstract template that draws out the relationships among social phenomena from the perspective of the participant. Because the Sense-Making template is conceptualized at such a high level of abstraction, it is capable of coherently transcending particular time/space details of different social actors. This coherence then allows researchers to develop generalized patterns of relationships between phenomena, such as communication procedures and social change, without losing the descriptive richness that resides in the individual experiences and histories collected through ethnographic methods. I selected this approach because it allows me to begin identifying such general relationships from the varied and detailed experiences of factory workers.

THE BEST OF WHAT I HAVE ACHIEVED:
This is very much a work in progress, so commenting extensively here is impossible. A couple of tentative achievements are: 1) The data clearly indicate that the dominant model of social change is one that focuses on individuals, not groups. That is, participants have repeatedly explained that social change occurs when individuals learn “how to defend oneself” or “how to stand up for oneself.” This is an interesting finding because it runs contrary to most academic theories and prescriptions of social change, which focus on the construction of solidarity networks and collective organizations, such as parties, unions, and other institutional formations. 2) The social aspects of communication for social change appear to be claiming a major place in successful organizing efforts. Group meetings, especially in initial phases of involvement, repeatedly have been judged as successful and helpful to the extent that they were welcoming, comforting, and affirming of the participant’s basic humanity. It seems to be of far less consequence to participants that group meetings and organizing efforts achieve visible, material changes. 3) This project has really illustrated to me the difficulty of bridging gender differences in research. Many of the factory workers I am working with are women, and our relationship is markedly different than the relationship I have with equivalent males. Basically, interviews with women have been more abbreviated and somewhat uncomfortable because of pronounced gender inequities in Mexico and severe social taboos concerning male/female communication. I believe it is an accomplishment simply to be aware of this difference, even though I have not figured out a way of responding adequately to this challenge.

WHAT HAS BEEN HELPFUL:
The most helpful thing in this project has been time spent in the field and entry provided by certain participants. Spending time living in the Mexican colonias has given me a visible presence that has facilitated my observations and interviews in an important way. Also, being involved in this organizing effort and working with individuals with established reputations and high levels of trust has been invaluable.

WHAT I HAVE STRUGGLED WITH:
My struggles involve two main areas: gender and social change theories. The struggle with gender divisions is explained above. I have not been able to find a satisfactory way to engage in this research environment so that gender divisions begin to diminish. Regarding theories of social change, I have struggled with the generally agreed upon strategies identified in the research literature versus the strategies that appear to guide the vast majority of people in this project. That is, the research literature suggests that social change movements need to rely on coordination and solidarity with like-minded groups. In contrast, the people involved in this movement repeatedly avoid strategies of coalition building and networking. In fact, many of the subjects speak negatively of such strategies and locate their reasons within harsh, material experiences with unions, non-governmental organizations, and other formal groups. I struggle with this contrast because I find merit in both arguments and am looking for a way to negotiate this division. To date, however, they seem to be incommensurable theoretical understandings of how social change occurs.

WHAT WOULD HELP NOW:
What would really help at the moment are concrete, methodological suggestions relevant to my principal difficulty of not being able to fully communicate with the female participants in this study. I am specifically interested in suggestions that assume that I will continue working alone in these communities. What research practices have others found useful in overcoming differences—language, class, cultural, and gender—in various settings? What do people think regarding the potential of Sense-Making interviews in reducing the gap between interviewer and interviewee? Are certain aspects of the Sense-Making interview problematic? Are certain aspects particularly useful at reducing the distance between interviewer and interviewee?

PROJECT ABSTRACT:
Social scientists have written extensively about social change and how it occurs. Within the last 10 years, a literature on “new social movements” has emerged, arguing that in contemporary, democratic societies, forces for social change have taken on new shapes. Rather than emerging from institutions, such as political parties, labor unions, or other formal organizations, social movements are emerging from highly participatory, citizen initiatives focusing on issues and identities, such as the environmental, gay, and women’s movement. Communication researchers have played a minor role in developing theoretical understandings of how new social movements sustain themselves. Of the communication research focused on social movements, most has tended to look at strategies, such as persuasive speeches and particular rhetorical appeals, rather than the communication procedures used by participants in a specific movement. This study focuses on the communication procedures for social change that have been used by participants in organizing efforts of the Comité Fronterizo de Obreras (Border Committee of Working Women). Through ethnographic fieldwork and Sense-Making interviews, this study has begun to craft a portrait of the communication procedures that have succeeded and failed in efforts to sustain a particular social movement.

REFERENCES:
(For references to works by Dervin and colleagues, see Dervin’s writings: Chronological listing.)

Alvarez, S. E., Dagnino, E. & Escobar, A. (1998). Introduction: The cultural and the political in Latin American social movements. In S. Alvarez, E. Dagnino, & A. Escobar (Eds.), Cultures of politics/Politics of cultures: Re-visioning Latin American social movements (pp. 1-29). Boulder, CO: Westview.

Beverly, J., & Oviedo, J. (1993). Introduction: The postmodernism debate in Latin America. Boundary 2, 20 (3) 1-17.

Hellman, J. A. (1994). Mexican popular movements, clientelism and the process of democratization. Latin American Perspectives, 21 (2) 124-142.

Hopenhayn, M. (1993). Postmodernism and neoliberalism in Latin America. Boundary 2, 20 (3) 93-109.

Schild, V. (1994). Recasting ‘popular’ movements: Gender and political learning in neighborhood organizations in Chile. Latin American Perspectives, 21 (2) 59-80.

OTHER MATERIALS BY THIS AUTHOR ON THIS WEB SITE:
See:http://communication.sbs.ohio-state.edu/sense-making/AAauthors/authorlisthuesca.html