Writing after betrayal: Desahogarse,street outreach,and ethnography

Me Desahogo

Desahogarse is a curious compound verb, coming from the root ahogarse, meaning to drown. Metaphoric, of course, the popular psychology of the term indicates that the individual is drowning in one’s sorrow or pain or anger. Desahogarse is the act of un-drowning oneself, a form of therapeutic encounter that allows the speaker to throw out words like a life preserver, searching for an anchor in the interlocutor that will pull the speaker out of the emotional morass they are in. It is not surprising, then, that in the social service encounter street youth develop the kind of relationship with outreach educators that support the therapeutics of desahogarse. Indeed, the philosophy of outreach is predicated on providing triage support services – prioritizing emotional, medical, and judicial assistance that keep kids from drowning any further.

In many ways I had been prepared for the unburdening that desahogarse engendered from the ethnographic research I conducted in Honduras for my doctoral thesis. In the Honduran research context, the insecurity of everyday life was highlighted by the unpredictability of high rates of gun violence (Wolseth, 2008, 2011). In interviewing young men and women who lived in a community where the murder of friends and relatives was far too common, my questions were sometimes painful points of reflection on their lives. Their candor in replying was predicated on the trust we had developed, even as I was ill-equipped to do much more than listen, absorb, and recognize their experiences, hopes, and disappointments as valuable.

Indeed, the inability to be able to offer much more than a sympathetic ear as an ethnographer in Honduras is what led me to choose my next research opportunity in a setting where I was actively able to conduct ethnographic research while also doing social support work with marginalized youth in the Dominican Republic. I made a deliberate choice to enter into this research project with the ability to offer my professional skills in service toward advocacy at both the personal and policy levels.

As I made the transition from ethnographer in Honduras to social service provider in Santo Domingo, I realized how the deep listening that ethnography fosters can have therapeutic value (what Castañeda (2006: 92), following Tyler (1986), describes as ‘reintegrating the self in society and restructuring the conduct of everyday life’). The outreach educators at Niños were the closest thing to mental health professionals the street kids we had contact with were ever going to know. The situated therapy of our street conversations may have provided space for reflection and allowed for a kind of emotional release not available through other means, but it was not going to lead to transforming the exploitive context of their street relationships. Like all forms of triage, our conversations worked to stabilize situations from reaching a point of further deterioration but were incapable of being preventative in nature. Desahogarse provided only momentary reintegration of the self through decrying how one had been wronged. Thus, desahogarse as a genre of speaking could only react to betrayal on the street and never be proactive in preventing that betrayal from happening.

It took me nearly a year to develop the kind of trust and consistency of presence for some of the youth we worked with to seek me out as confidant. Until that time, I had accomplished quite a bit through leaning heavily on the borrowed rapport of my outreach co-workers. In many ways, my colleagues were both gatekeepers and cultural guides, facilitating access to, and understanding of, street life through their work. My first year with the organization was primarily a period of apprenticeship and preparation for the subsequent year of service. My colleagues had worked with at-risk and street youth for years and had developed a repertoire of ways of interacting that garnered quick results. I was always amazed at how easily the youth would open up to them, even new contacts. My co-workers knew all the right questions to ask and their different approaches developed authentically from their own personal histories, such as having been a teenage mother or having grown-up working as a bootblack. I watched my colleagues’ interactions, their ways of dealing with the everyday crises of the kids we worked with, and how and when to draw boundaries around our personal and professional lives. From their example, I developed my own approach.

X, ¹ in particular, was an apparent favorite among the kids we worked with. During outreach visits, kids would pull X aside and spontaneously open up to him about everything from their current levels of drug consumption to their worries about having contracted an STD. X had the ability to get to the heart of the matter by getting people to share intimate details about their problems, using a combination of humor and concern. For instance, during an activity on STD prevention we were doing with a small group of teenage boys we had been working with for several months, the youth were clearly initially uncomfortable discussing anything but heterosexual sexual activity. We knew, however, that many of the youth were engaged in sexual activity with men, typically in exchange for money, gifts, or drugs. X turned the discussion this direction through word play using the double entendre of chapa, or bottle cap. In Dominican street slang, dar la chapa is a vulgar way of describing anal sex, something akin to saying ‘giving up one’s ass’. There is also a pastime on the streets of kids playing a betting game using chapas (bottle caps) in place of coins. X broke the ice by drawing a parallel between the betting game and sexual risk taking that elicited immediate laughter from the youth. By humorously drawing attention to a taboo subject, he created a space in which the youth felt more comfortable to talk about sexual risk taking.

Toward the end of my first year at Niños, X announced he was leaving the organization to work with another agency. We worried about the upheaval of his departure and the problem of trying to find a replacement. Every time an outreach worker left, it upset the balance of relationships both within the organization and on the streets. We anticipated the impact would be even more so with an educator as relied upon as X.

While the initial loss was acutely felt, the kids we worked with took it in their stride. X’s absence meant kids started to open up to other outreach workers more, myself included. I was embarrassed to discover how much I had relied on X to the detriment of developing my own rapport. Occasionally a kid we hadn’t seen for a while would ask about X and where he’d been. Late one evening, as I was making my way home from a night out, I ran into Miguel in the little park I crossed to get to my neighborhood from the Colonial Zone. It had been several months since I had seen the teenager, as he’d gone to live with his grandmother in the countryside while he recuperated from an attack by university students. Miguel looked the best I had seen him, his normally scrawny crack-sculpted body had put on enough weight to not look as sickly as he had prior to the stabbing. I told him he looked well fed. He smiled and said his grandmother knew how to cook. Regardless of her culinary skills, however, it was clear that Miguel was back on the streets and reacquainting himself with his crack addiction.

We chatted for a few minutes and, as I made to go, Miguel asked after X. He hadn’t seen him for a while, he said. No, I replied, X hadn’t worked for us for over three months. In fact, he was no longer in Santo Domingo, having moved to the western outskirts of the city. There was a brief pause, as if Miguel was processing the information. Out of nowhere he said, ‘X was always weird, you know? Like when I was in the hospital and he wanted to bathe me. It was weird. I never let him touch me like he would some of the other guys. Like with Chico.’

I had trained myself to not sound or look shocked at anything the kids and youth we worked with would tell us. One look of disgust or surprise, I assumed, and I’d never be told anything again. Miguel’s comment, however, sucked the wind out of me. I was barely able to reply, ‘What do you mean, Miguel?’ To which he shook his head and said, ‘You know. You should ask Chico.’

I was thrown into a tailspin at what Miguel had hinted at. Over the course of several conversations, I asked Miguel to elaborate on what he meant. A picture started to emerge from Miguel’s narrative about X’s abuse of others. Some of it was vague insinuation, but the heart of it, about 15-year-old Chico and a pattern of predation, was specific. It did not have the same quality of malicious gossip that often circulated among the peer group because there was no apparent motive. In fact, Chico had not been participating in activities for several months, since before Miguel had been stabbed, having left his regular zone on the streets. Missing, too, from Miguel’s disclosure was the performative need for release that characterized a moment of desahogarse. The texture of the story was altogether different. Miguel was understated in his narration. He wasn’t unburdening himself so much as trying to make some sense out of what he had heard and experienced.

I will not go into detail concerning the subsequent events, but will say that there was no available resolution to the series of difficult conversations I had with co-workers. In the end, Miguel’s comments confirmed the fears of several of them, including the director. Too little, however, was ultimately able to be done about the situation: the accusation was mostly hearsay, the accused no longer worked with us, the purported victim could not be found, the administration that had hired X had left the organization even before he had, and, perhaps most damning of all, no institutional mechanism existed to prevent a situation such as this.

I couldn’t hold on to this information for long without succumbing to the rage I felt toward X and the anger I felt toward myself at having not seen the warning signs. Someone I considered a friend and a role model betrayed me. In truth, the emotions were intertwined, making it difficult for me to untangle the moral repugnance I felt based on my own cultural perspectives of a proper childhood, fears that my reliance on X as a gatekeeper had repercussions on my own relationships with the youth, and the selfish concern over what impact this event would have on my research.

My first obligation was to work toward mitigating the impact of abuse. This concern dominated my second year of work with the organization, making sure we had proper policies in place that could prevent this from happening again. I knew that sexual exploitation on the Santo Domingo streets was commonplace. Sexual contact in street cohorts is often used to cement relationships, exert influence, and stave off loneliness. The youth we worked with also exchanged sex for goods and money with wealthier clients, both Dominican and foreign men. Sexual contact is wrapped up in coercion, manipulation and social cohesion on the streets, but is also a source of comfort, fun, and self-determination (see, for instance, Beazley, 2003; Kovats-Bernat, 2006; Montgomery, 2016). Youth explored the contours of agency, violence, love, and power through sexual behavior. X’s behavior fit within the moral economy of the streets and was possibly even understood as part of that economy by the youth themselves.

However, although the knowledge of sexual contact between street youth and adults had become unexceptional, I could not – and still will not – cast X’s behavior in the same vein. Our role as educators, like that of doctor, counselor, or social worker, holds us to a standard in which sexual contact with patients, clients or pupils, especially when they are children, is a breach of professional ethics. It bristles because the outreach educator listens, counsels, assesses and uses the trust she or he builds as the basis for their client’s own self-reflection and improvement. In my view, X took advantage of that trust when he used the logic of the streets to obtain his own desires, even if the sexual contact may have been consensual. ² For an organization that fights for child protection, even within a frame of child rights, sex with minors is unethical. Within the context of most international law, including Dominican law, it is unlawful.

I had gone to the Dominican Republic with the intent of conducting research, but this was knowledge I had trouble processing emotionally, especially because I was aware that I built rapport with many of the youth through X. At first, I was tempted to appropriate desahogarse, using the declaratory genre as a means to accuse and position myself as the subject of betrayal much like many of the youth on the street would do about the wrongs they faced from fellow members of their cohort. I was angry and hurt but had a difficult time understanding what lay behind these emotions. I was aware enough, however, to feel like no direct harm had been done to me, nothing that would have warranted the way that when an individual desahogarse it is from the position of victim – victim of an individual wrong as much as a victim of circumstance or structural violence. I was neither. I harbored such anger because I feared I might have been complicit in X’s conduct.

I had relied on my colleagues, X included, as gatekeepers and de facto research assistants. I processed what I was learning through our conversations and work experiences. They were teaching me to be an effective outreach educator. If I learned from someone who abused his position of power and – in my view – manipulated his relationships with youth for personal pleasure, was I then using those same techniques in the name of ethnographic data collection? By blending my roles as outreach educator and researcher, I questioned if I was not guilty of a different kind of exploitation, but exploitation nonetheless.

This was a debilitating revelation, a parallelism that blocked me from writing. I felt the research up to the point of X’s departure was methodologically compromised. I took great pains to erase not just the knowledge of X’s behavior, but X himself, from the work I was writing. In many ways this is the antithesis of desahogarse, a way of speaking that fronts how the speaker has been wronged. Instead, the ethnography that emerged from my work in Santo Domingo served to conceal these relationships altogether.

Searching for perspective

Learning of X’s behavior made it difficult for me to know how to process much of the data I had gathered while he worked with the organization. Participant-observation, as a methodology, entails perception from a point of view. The metaphoric turn of phrase is intentional. If I was going to be able to salvage my fieldwork I had to figure out from which perspective I was going to be writing.

The French philosopher and phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his foundational Phenomenology of Perception (1962 [1945]) details the ways in which objects of our perception are required to be experienced from a certain point of view. Merleau-Ponty is, of course, not speaking metaphorically here. He literally means that our vision requires us to see from some perspective and that this perspective is necessarily incomplete: all seeing is a seeing from somewhere. Trying to comprehend the entirety of an object at once destroys the coherency of the particular object before you (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 204).

We only ever get a partial representation since social life manifests within the realm of possible points of view. We shift our way of seeing through shifting our focus, visually highlighting the edges of an object of study against a horizon of other objects. Likewise, ethnographers learn through being present, experiencing and then later reflecting on that experience. While I hesitate to focus too much on the visual aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s description, the experience of perception he describes resonates with the way of knowing that participant-observation encapsulates. As fieldworkers we are limited by our perspective, by our point of view. We try to collect multiple angles to shift our understanding of our research. This is accomplished through more conversations with our research subjects, collecting more data, even through the flow of time and the deepening of our relationships with our friends in the field. We continually attempt to make sense of the objects before us and represent the situations we experience, however partial, as best we can.

When the unexpected, unhoped for, or catastrophic occurs during the course of fieldwork, it will necessarily shift our perspective. In all likelihood it will shatter the complacent understanding we had begun to settle upon through the slow process of gaining increasing familiarity with our research context. The question is, does the unhoped for or catastrophic become the perspective that grounds our narrative or the horizon against which we focus other objects of our attention?

The revelation about X’s behavior cycled through being both the object of focus and the horizon against which I evaluated all other information and relationships in the field. It was personal and emotional and couldn’t be extracted from my work or research. In this sense it was representative of the Gordian knot of the personal and professional that is ethnographic research and the result of the instrument of data collection being tied with the subjective experience of participant-observation. There was no way around it: in order to write ethnography, I had to figure out the perspective I was going to use as my point of view.

This is essentially the process that all writers go through, deciding on the through line, the analytic scaffolding from which to hang one’s argument. In ethnographic writing, we are in need of the best, most representative data that illustrates that argument. Some events in the course of fieldwork, no matter how formative they might be for our understanding of the field, may ultimately prove to be a distraction to the argument we wish to make because they shift the focus. They can draw our attention, prove to need too much background, or even narrow our field of vision at the expense of seeing the larger picture. They can even call into question the research process, to a debilitating degree. Ethnography is cultural description, and while we have come to understand its limits to offering an omniscient view of culture, the responsibility of the genre tends toward this broader view. Too narrow a thematic focus and the product ceases to be illuminating about people in places and coalesces around a more singular event to the detriment of broader cultural understanding.

I eventually settled on a compromise of sorts. X’s behavior fit with street norms of a quid pro quo power dynamic based in sexual contact that existed with many of the adults that youth encountered in their daily life on the streets. However, as an organization that promoted child rights and protection, sexual contact was a violation of our norms, values, and ethics. Learning of X’s sexual relationships with the youth highlighted the inherent interweaving of trust and manipulation that develops in the outreach worker-street child relationship in way that I had not been aware of before. Outreach builds trust with youth so that they can be empowered to change their behavior, seek help for their addictions, and ultimately move off the street. While the motivation is different, the mechanism is very similar. It was a very unflattering truth about work that I had become very invested in, one that I sought to avoid investigating for fear of painting the organization and my co-workers in a negative light. I buried it and took instead as the focal perspective of the work the turmoil and stress of the streets that included support networks and betrayals of confidence within street cohorts. Even as I wrote about needing to situate social service workers as part of the web of street relationships, I hid the primary source from which I gained that perspective.

Making a composite picture

When I began writing what would become Life on the Malecón, I took the volumes of fieldnotes I had amassed and reconstructed my two and half years in the field in such a way that eliminated X from the storyline. I created composite events and characters from the raw data of my written notes, striving for ‘narrative cogency’ (Angrosino, 1998: 267) in such a way that the truth of events and people described bore out in their plausibility and representativeness. Narrative ethnography may be readable like a novel, ‘but it is nonfiction, with the goal of an accurate ethnographic portrait’ (Darnell, 2001: 269). Fieldnotes are transformed from raw experiences, the first instances of what we know (Wolf, 1992: 91), to the finished (cooked) product of the ethnography (McClusky, 2001: 14–15).

There were several motivations for the use of composites, some ethical, some aesthetic. Ethnographers often use place name pseudonyms, for instance, to obscure the identities of their field sites in order to protect its inhabitants from unwanted attention. It is also common practice to choose pseudonyms for individuals who are featured in ethnographic anecdotes. Again, this is to protect the privacy of the individual being described. Creating composite identities, however, goes further than the use of pseudonyms. Composites are quasi-fictional representations based on data that can be used to convey the multifaceted complexities one encounters in the course of fieldwork, without having to introduce a cast of thousands. It is a device that simplifies and condenses, cutting back the number of events or people or places described so that the reader can more easily follow along. More importantly, however, condensing events, people, and places allows the ethnographer to highlight what he or she deems to be the most salient and illustrative reasons for focusing on those qualities.

For instance, in the opening sequence of Life on the Malecón, I follow the story of teenage Pepe as he makes the decision to return to his father’s home after having lived on the streets for over a year. The ‘character’ of Pepe is based on the experiences of accompanying many youth as they try to re-integrate back into their families. I took elements from the numerous visits I had made in the course of the two plus years I worked at Niños and wove them together to create a storyline that highlighted a number of common themes from the families with whom we worked. Specific details from the Pepe storyline do draw from a couple of youth I grew close to on the street. For instance, the description of the sleeping area that had been created out of the fallen palm tree and the wanting to buy a bike with his own money (and not wait for his father to do so) both came from interactions with the same child. Other elements, such as Pepe having separated parents and a mother who engaged in probable prostitution, I took from encounters with other families.

My reasons for settling on the use of composites, however, goes beyond Narayan’s (2007) call for using the literary devices of creative non-fiction in ethnography to reach a wider reading audience. Settling on the use of composite events and people was a way for me to exclude direct reference to X throughout the written ethnography. Even as I had centered on writing the narrative from the perspective of the street outreach encounter, I knew I was unable to write directly about events in which X had been involved. In developing composite situations, events, and characters, I wasn’t bound by the linear timeline and specific encounters and relationships I had with families and youth that had been facilitated by my relationship with X.

As I built my own rapport with new arrivals to the streets we worked, I could see many of the same circumstances and themes arise in the lives of these youth. This was particularly true when writing about emergency room visits or trips to the state penitentiary. The details of specific visits to such institutions – especially if they were my first visit – would find their way into the particular description of such places in the final product of the ethnography, regardless of when those details were perceived. The same principle played out as I was searching for ways to write a reliable and representative description of the kinds of experiences, family situations, and street careers of which children and youth in Santo Domingo’s street scene were part. Even though I found it emotionally difficult to write head-on about specific cases I may have worked with while working with X, I was able to draw on details from these interactions to provide me with a fuller range of representation. This included details such as interactions with parents, street cohort relationships, and impressions of the physical environment that I had normalized by my second year of fieldwork.

By combining events that may have occurred to multiple participants over a longer stretch of time, I was better able to protect the identities of individuals without compromising the cogency of the narrative. Using composites also provided me a certain emotional distance, allowing me to suture the narrative together to exclude my own sense of shame.