Dangerously important moment(s) in reflexive research practices with immigrant youth

As a white, working middle-class adult queer from the Southwest USA, my subjective relation to the Mexican (im)migrant, poor, working, straight adolescent boys in California participating in my study was tentative, politicized, controversial, and surveilled from both social and individual lenses. Our relationships were also mutually caring, loving, supportive, stimulating, and challenging. Our ethnographic encounters carried with them some long-standing and dynamic social narratives that surround relations between and across groups of relative privilege and oppression. These narratives produced ‘ethically important moments’ wherein I confronted microethics of research practices that remained largely under-theorized and misunderstood in methodological literature. By critically examining my reflexive processes and practices within one of these moments, insights into the workings of social narratives about race, class, and sexuality are revealed that can potentially assist future researchers as they confront the politics and microethics of working within and across the intersectionalities of oppression and marginalization.