Community-based participatory research with Mexican migrants in a new rural destination: A good fit?

Establishing a community advisory board

A community advisory board (CAB) is integral to a CBPR approach (Israel et al., 2005). CAB members serve as cultural guides, bridges to the most marginalized community members, research consultants, and sources of critical feedback. The formation and responsibilities of the advisory board can shift power in the research process, as academics (in theory) take the lead from community members.

At the onset of our project, we saw the important intersections of the work of emerging migrant leaders, community organizers, human rights advocates, and service providers, and established a working group to link these individuals and define a common agenda. At this point, this working group was not functioning as a formal CAB. Formalizing the group took time, as we needed to establish trust with the addition of each new member. Because we knew that some of our members were undocumented, we had to ensure that all members of the working group felt safe, and that their affiliation with us did not put them at risk. Our first commitment to each other and to the migrant community was to do no harm.

Our formalized advisory board was comprised of: five Mexican community members (three women and two men); a graduate student in community health, who is Mexican American, raised in southwest Montana; a long time bi-lingual community advocate, who became our community organizer; an agricultural outreach worker who worked with migrant farm laborers; and the two of us. For a year and a half our CAB met every other month to shape our project. In our three and a half hour meetings conducted in Spanish, we spent approximately two and a half hours working equally on our research and action agendas, and then we shared a meal. We offered on-site child care so that children could accompany parents to meetings. By incorporating social and family elements into our meetings, we aimed to build community while moving our collective agendas forward.

Establishing partnerships

Early on, when we were still a working group, our CAB identified the need to educate migrants about their legal rights, and chose to implement a ‘Know Your Rights’ forum. At the base of this plan were several high profile raids that had taken place over the span of a few months, partnered with a common belief that the second author heard consistently in her in-depth interviews that racial profiling was ‘police policy’. In the initial planning phases of the forum, the group quickly realized that tackling these issues would be complex, and that wrong moves could endanger the very migrants we were trying to empower. We thus identified important partnerships that were necessary to do our work while doing no harm.

First, we contacted an MHRN community organizer who put us in touch with an immigration lawyer. Both agreed to advise us. We also strengthened our connection to a local priest offering monthly Spanish mass, who subsequently offered his church as a safe haven for our outreach efforts. In addition, we had meetings with the director of a local community health clinic who had worked to organize service providers concerned about immigrant health. Later we forged partnerships with two Montana-based migrant farmworker health organizations. Establishing these partnerships (often via snowball methods) formed important bridges between the university and the community and were critical to the next two steps of our work: collaborating with our community partners in research and taking action.

Collaborating with community partners in research

Once formalized, one of the main functions of our CAB was to oversee and guide our research efforts. As Stoecker (2009) found, involving community members in research is daunting because members often have to be trained and may not be interested in the intricacies of research, or the requirements of funders to carry out scientifically rigorous methods. After discussing the merits of different research methods, our CAB chose to conduct focus groups with Mexican community members to identify the most pressing needs in the community. We worked with our community partners to identify a safe space (the public library) to hold these focus groups and determined what questions we would ask. We hired child care workers, offered free transportation and a stipend to participants. On the day of the first focus group, we expected 10 participants, yet only two showed up. Our community organizer learned that the others feared meeting at the public library and were skeptical about our motives. We knew at this point that our trust-building efforts did not extend far enough.

Consequently, we took a step back and strategized a more appropriate method. After discussing several methodologies, the CAB determined that interviewer-assisted surveys might be better because we could meet with participants where they lived. The CAB identified themes and questions for the survey. We also partnered with a national expert on conducting survey research with migrants. Once we had a draft instrument completed, CAB members translated the document and presented the survey to other migrants for feedback. This step was instrumental in determining the level of detail to include in the survey, to reduce question confusion, and to weed out questions construed as threatening.

The first iteration of the survey included questions regarding the basic needs and well-being of Mexicans in the Gallatin Valley; awareness and uptake of services; treatment by local service providers; feelings of connectedness, fear, and safety; social support; and mental health. We also asked questions about connections migrants had to their countries of origin, and how transnational ties impacted community incorporation. With guidance from our CAB, we chose not to ask questions about participants’ migration status.

Next, we trained our graduate student, community organizer, and a migrant community member to administer the surveys. Each received compensation from a university seed grant. After administering the first 125 surveys using snowball sampling methods, we stepped back to analyze the findings with our CAB. The most striking finding was a high number of participants (50.4%) showing signs of depression in the range for clinical concern. This resonated with findings from the second author’s in-depth interviews, in which women and men talked about feelings of fear and isolation. CAB members guided us through an analysis that pinpointed the unique mental health struggles of migrants to a new destination, suggesting that those impacted the most were those separated from their families, and those living in isolation. This discussion also revealed the struggles of migrant children, who often have few friends and social outlets. Mental health consistently emerged as a central theme; therefore, the CAB agreed that this would be the focus of the next research phase.

We were fortunate to be able to build on our seed grant with additional funding from a university program encouraging development of National Institutes of Health proposals. This funding allowed us to hire our community organizer part-time and continue to fund our graduate assistant with the goal of completing 125 additional surveys. We used a snowball sampling strategy and offered survey participants a $20 Wal-Mart gift card. ¹ Throughout the project, we presented the findings of our research to the community via a newsletter and/or community presentations and consulted with our CAB about how to best use the data to develop culturally relevant and sustainable community-level interventions.

Implementing action

Guided by CBPR principles (Israel et al., 2005), we have been committed to weaving social justice-based action into our research. The initial project work of establishing university–community partnerships and seeking funding was important to action coordination and ensuring the safety of the migrant community. Once we had our partnerships and seed funding in place, we moved forward with the implementation of our ‘Know Your Rights’ forum. After several weeks of planning, approximately 100 migrants gathered for the forum. They asked questions about what to do if they were pulled over by police, if ICE officials showed up at their workplaces, or if they or a family member were detained. Our immigration lawyer/partner gave clear instructions about what to do in each case. Our CAB deemed the forum successful. However, we learned that community members wanted more case-specific advice from lawyers. To address this need, we held two free legal clinics where an immigration lawyer met individually with migrants.

In addition to the forum and legal clinics, we began tracking immigration legislation at the state and national levels. At the time there were several anti-immigrant bills put forth in the Montana legislature. The first author testified during the legislative session along with an MHRN lobbyist and our partner immigration attorneys. Our collective testimony is credited with helping defeat all the anti-immigrant bills put forward in 2009. In 2011, the legislature introduced more than 20 anti-immigrant bills. The first author, in conjunction with CAB members and university students, organized a letter-writing campaign and spent several days lobbying legislators in the Capitol. Most of the bills were again defeated or vetoed by the Governor.

To address our CAB’s concerns about the isolation of migrant children, the second author also launched a service learning project in her undergraduate migration seminar. With direction from the CAB, she paired select students with migrant families whose children were struggling. While studying the roots and complexity of Mexican migration, 15 students organized and participated in weekly activities that brought them together with Mexican children. Two of students in the seminar formed the organization Tías y Tíos (TYT) to build bridges between migrants and native Montanans. Currently, TYT is operating under the aegis of the GVHRTF, and has developed a fund-raising base to provide scholarships for migrant children to participate in summer and extra-curricular activities. TYT has also instituted a language tutoring exchange program between migrant families and university students.

Throughout this project, we also embarked on education-based action. We organized two public forums to discuss immigration issues. Our community organizer implemented adult language classes and computer classes for migrants that are often taught by university students. And this past year, the first author and her graduate assistant began developing a Promotora – lay health advisor – program in partnership with our local community health clinic to train migrant women to ‘spread the word’ about migrant health concerns.

Identifying community

Identifying ‘the’ community is critical to community-based work (Gaventa & Cornwall, 2008; Israel et al., 2005). Because the Catholic Church is the only safe, formal gathering place for Mexican migrants in our area, it became the primary base from which to build our CBPR program. Our Mexican CAB members were friends connected through the church’s Spanish prayer group. They became our community representatives, our project’s migrant face. Yet this group was not representative. While there are aspects of migrant life that apply broadly, such as missing ‘home’, feeling alienated, fearing deportation, and confronting language and economic barriers, there are other aspects of migrant life that vary from individual to individual and across families. Although theoretically we recognized the complexity and nuances of migrant life, we inadvertently reproduced the notion of migrant homogeneity by relying on a few representatives to guide our project. All of our CAB members were Catholic, lived in or near town, and with the exception of one migrant woman who is a single mother, supported their families through construction work. Excluded were non-Catholics, agricultural families, and those who lived out of town. Namely, left out were the most marginalized migrants in our community.

There are many challenges to reaching the most marginalized and elevating their voices (Freire, 1970; Gaventa & Cornwall, 2008; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1993). In southwest Montana, most migrant agricultural workers live in remote trailers and often prefer to remain hidden. They tend to be less educated, with fewer resources than migrants working in construction, and they have transportation difficulties and rigid work schedules. We struggled with how to build a CBPR project that includes the most marginalized not just as survey respondents but as research collaborators. Upon reflection, we acknowledge that we partnered with those migrants who were perhaps more privileged and more accessible to us. While our work has certainly served a segment of the migrant community, work remains to organize and build partnerships with some of the most vulnerable community members, if they are interested and willing.

Selecting ‘community-driven’ issues and methods

As Minkler (2004) notes, a distinguishing feature of CBPR involves its commitment to ensuring that research emerges from the community. Topic selection is thus inherently linked to the identified community, and we have discussed at length the genesis of our project topics. Because our community of advisors represented migrant families, our research tended to focus on women and children’s issues. When we developed our needs assessment survey, the first author urged for the inclusion of a depression inventory (informed by the second author’s ethnographic findings) with an eye towards future public health funding. Upon finding that depression was a significant issue, the second iteration of data collection focused on mental health. Importantly, because we accepted seed funding within a program whose goal was to increase NIH grant productivity, another challenge was the choice and timing of future funding drives (Green & Mercer, 2001). While we would have preferred to work another year with our community partners to strengthen our collaboration, we were pressured to seek NIH funding in the second year of seed funding with the threat of losing the funding if we did not launch the grant.

As Gaventa and Cornwall (2008) caution, we too acknowledge that if we had partnered with different community members, our research focus would likely have been different. The same could be said for our methods. As Reason (1994) suggests, many action research projects would not have occurred without the initiative of someone with time, skill, commitment, and privilege to be able to carry out the tasks. Throughout our project, we often discussed how to engage community members who are living on the margins and vulnerable to deportation. How much could this community, given their marginalization, partner with us and inform our work? Minkler (2004) suggests that in marginalized communities, consensus building for topic and method selection is critical. Yet, when working with undocumented migrants in a new rural destination, consensus can be difficult to actualize.

Negotiating power in partnership with undocumented migrants

Power dynamics, misunderstandings, and other tensions that arise with ‘insider-outsider’ research partnerships have been discussed thoroughly in the literature (Clements-Nolle & Bachrach, 2008; Collins, 2000; Minkler, 2004; Ospina et al., 2004). In this study, power dynamics are complicated by documentation status. We, the authors, are white, middle-class academics. We cannot be deported. We do not risk being separated from our children. These basic truths make us constantly reflect upon what is ethical, and how we balance our academic goals, activist agenda, and migrant security. There is an inherent risk in doing research that is action oriented within marginalized communities (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1993). This risk is felt disproportionately by those who are most vulnerable; in this case, by the migrants who are at the center of our project. The power and privilege we bring into the field necessitates constant reflection.

In addition to the privilege we embody via our human, cultural and social capital, we control the project’s purse strings. As such, we have contemplated the ways we can ease existing power differentials. This is complicated. For example, we have been challenged to find legitimate ways in which to ‘share the purse’ with the most vulnerable when we cannot legally hire individuals without documentation. This has made it very difficult to bring undocumented migrants into all phases of our project. As our current funding ends, we also wonder if we have done right by community members by engaging them in paid research assistance that is not secure and requires additional grant funding to continue. There are other ethical issues as well. Primary among them is activating a marginalized group without growing a sustainable movement around them (Israel et al., 2005).

Negotiating institutional barriers to collaboration and activism

The bureaucracy and power of the university (Boser, 2006; Levin & Greenwood, 2008; Minkler & Wallerstein, 2008) has been another barrier to our project with one exception. Interestingly, while many action researchers undoubtedly are challenged by Institutional Review Boards, ours granted us an ‘exempt’ status from the start. However, we have been challenged in several other ways. First, our university is not set up to deal with undocumented research participants. We have had to be strategic and creative in our research protocol to protect our participants without papers. For example, we have had to negotiate with the university not to require signatures of participants receiving gift cards, a university policy to document how we are spending our funding. Shielding our participants has complicated our efforts to establish equitable partnerships. Second, we (the authors) have been challenged in our collaboration given we are located in different departments in different colleges with different research support mechanisms. While universities often promote interdisciplinary research, many, like ours, have yet to create clear, equitable pathways institutionalizing these efforts. And third, we have been challenged in our political activism as we have had to carry out the bulk of our activism as private citizens, without identifying ourselves as academics. Such political activity in the name of the university is forbidden. This has limited us as change agents because we cannot tap into our ‘university’ capital and, for example, discuss our research findings in ways that might legitimate our activist calls for policy change.

Acknowledging ambivalence, fear, and resistance

Israel et al. (2005) and Minkler and Wallerstein (2008) discuss the centrality of recognizing and valuing the priorities of your community partners in CBPR. In our project, we (the authors) often found ourselves struggling to negotiate our aims and hopes for the community – the action and political thrusts of our work – with the different and often unspoken aims of community members. Many of our migrant partners were ambivalent and resistant. We heard from several that they did not want an immigrant rights campaign in the area because they feared it would make life more difficult. Instead, they preferred to remain as invisible as possible. Those who did want to organize preferred to focus on the social rather than the political. They were more enthused about organizing potlucks than political forums or protests. Their concerns are valid. Being undocumented is a challenge anywhere, but even more so in a rural destination where it is difficult to achieve anonymity (Schmalzbauer, 2009). For many migrants, coming out of the shadows has personal and familial risks. And yet, CBPR necessitates partnering with undocumented individuals.

Migrant ambivalence created ambivalences in us as well. Our passion for this work resides in developing meaningful university–community partnerships and taking action to promote health and social justice. When the CAB pushed back, often passively, it was confusing. They seemed on board with us in meetings, but things would often go awry when implementing action. Were our CAB members going along with us simply because we had the power, and were paying them to participate? As the work of bell hooks (1994) so clearly articulates, relatively powerless groups may simply speak in ways that ‘echo’ the voices of those in power, either as a way to comply or as a result of the internalization of dominant values. Such dynamics were challenging to talk about, nonetheless overcome, and often left us feeling ambivalent about ‘community-driven’ principles. To date, we acknowledge walking a fine line trying to balance the ambivalence and resistance of migrants to taking political action with our conviction that migrant marginalization and disparate health outcomes are indisputably linked to structural inequalities that can only be undone via systemic change.