Interpretive Autoethnography as a Way of Social Transformation in Academic Teaching and Learning Spaces in Chile

Introduction

We are three Latin American voices, women, academics who teach and investigate from the qualitative paradigm in education, health, and psychology. From our biographies we break up the traditional academic discourse; from our stories, our physicality, our emotions, our origins, our social and political context, and also from our experience with national and international audiences we do social transformation. We do so by having a horizontal relationship with our students, by focusing it on what we have learnt in our graduate programs in our particular realities, working in the decolonization of knowledge to apply it to the different local realities that our students will face when they become professionals.

We look forward to transforming reality from a human perspective, to make sense of the knowledge we deliver, from the connection to the other (students) in our lives, their experiences, and their biographies and thus to understand the macro and micro levels of our societies. It may seem obvious; however, we cannot take it for granted because it does not occur in our higher education contexts, where hegemonic powers make great distances between students and teachers in the teaching and learning processes.

We challenge the Chilean higher education system, which follows market policies set by the globalization trends. We create consciousness from—toward—inside and outside our places within the academy, to educate thinking professionals, psychologists, teachers, and nurses, for them to become a transformative hope.

As teachers and researchers, we assume aspects related to a critical positioning (Kincheloe, 2011); all ideas are mediated by power relations, which are constructed socially and historically. The facts cannot be separated from the values or removed from their ideological basis; relations between concept and object and between signifier and signified are not fixed and are mediated by the relations of capitalist production and consumption.

Continuing with Kincheloe, oppression that characterizes contemporary societies, including the Chilean one, reproduces when subordinates accept their social status as natural, necessary, or avoidable. Oppression has many faces that are interconnected, and research practices unfortunately mostly reproduce a system class.

In today’s Chile, this seems to be determined by historical, social, and political processes of our recent past, a past that left us with an open wound, and in the academic sphere, we can see the numbness of the human sciences in their approach to what is not said, but occurs as the different types of violence that are part of standard practices between powers and we understand it as the legacy of Pinochet’s military dictatorship between 1973 and 1990 that still continues to this day.

Chile has a high level of inequality. The Gini index reached 0.5, the highest in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development Associates [OECD]. Income of the richest 10% in Chile are 26 times higher than the poorest 10% (OECD, 2015). This results in increased crime rate because it increases the income of the richest people in greater proportion than that of the poorest, making all illicit activities more attractive (Becker, 1968). A key aspect in the development of our research is related to the characteristics of education in our country.

In 1981, there was a major neoliberal educational reform, which implied a substantial change in the way of financing public education. The management of primary schools and high schools was transferred to the municipalities, and the Chilean government began to subsidize private parties by buying education services for students. Hence, “subsidized” schools were created, whose quality has been as deficient as municipal schools. With this, the differences between social classes further deepened, with a quality private education, accessible only to those who can pay large sums of money (Donoso, 2005).

According to Gajardo (2006), “socioeconomic status is related to the activity that the student performs after graduating from high school . . . three out of four students of higher socioeconomic status studies, compared to one in four in the lowest level” (p. 27). The author points out that 31.4% of young people belonging to the lower strata neither study nor work, in contrast to only 3.8% when it comes to students of high socioeconomic status. With regard to the entrance examination to college, socioeconomic status gave the 100%, versus 64% of the low level. A correlation between socioeconomic status and score obtained by the student in the entrance exams to college was also observed, with the upper class students obtaining better results (Gajardo, 2006).

We, then, are three Latin American women who do qualitative research from the interpretative autoethnography, understanding it as methodologies that challenge social research from what is valued in Latin America and the world; the beliefs and value given to neutrality, the accuracy of knowledge, the position of the researcher as “superior” in relation to the research subject who suffers, the disadvantaged, the one who belongs to a vulnerable group and the periphery, distant from the comfortable position of the academic. Subjects who have to participate in our studies come from a position of inferiority, just because it was previously determined as such. In this knowledge society, where productivity is understood as papers and obtaining government funds, which are usually the ultimate goal of the research and allows us to survive in academia, we challenge the research from the heart, from our voices of Latin American women, from a critical perspective of the post-colonialist and interdisciplinary life that forces us to constantly question our conceptions about human beings, our social problems, our positions in relation to the other, and the purposes of the academy.

Methodologically, we ascribe to interpretive autoethnography, that is, the methodology of the heart, and thus, we understand the ontological reality. The desire to write from the heart was born from the intention to boost the investigator to not hide behind the illusion of objectivity (Pelias, 2004). We draw and re-draw pictures about our particular realities, with dyes and materials that can be seen and interpreted through different cultures.

Autoethnography rescues these stories and can be defined as a different approach to the study of the human experience (Denzin, 2014). For Holman, Adams, and Ellis (quoted in Denzin, 2014), it is the use of experience and personal writing to comment or criticize cultural practices, to contribute to existing research, expose the vulnerability, and create reciprocal relationships with the audience attending to achieving an answer. Thus, autoethnography expands giving space to personal stories set in a social and cultural context.

For Tammy Spry (2001), autoethnographers’ texts reveal the fractures, stitches, and seams of individual interaction with others, in the context of the investigation of the experience. In the autoethnography interpreting of the text, readers identify themselves with fractures in their lives helping healing in their own lives.

The Methodology of the Heart (Pelias, 2004) can be used only if you are willing to share that place where the heart is, to appear emotionally vulnerable and linguistically evocative, becoming a poetic voice reaching the people we want to study.

Performance ethnography is part of the methodology of the heart (Pelias, 2004) and exposes dynamic interactions between power, politics, and poetry and challenges researchers to represent these interactions to make meaningful interventions. It also gives researchers a vocabulary to explore the expressive elements of culture, focusing on the incorporation of the crucial components of cultural analysis (Hamera, 2011).

Using our stories (storytelling) as a way of understanding life processes, and our own students, we learn from our lives as academic, understanding the experience narrated. We looked for a way to create academic knowledge that is personal, practical, constructed, and expressed by practice. We understand our lives in terms of narrative, so the narrative forms are appropriate to understand our actions and those of others.

In the words of Jean Clandinin (2013), people create their lives through stories of who they and others are and interpret their past in terms of these stories. The stories are a portal through which people enter the world and for which their experience of the world is interpreted and given meaning.

Here are our stories, stories of women, Northern Chile academics. We work from a qualitative paradigm in our respective areas, and we study, we investigate, and we teach in national and international contexts, spreading from the heart.

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Be the Light; We Need It More Than Ever

Michelle’s story: I am a teacher of English. It is one of my identities. Part of my job is to teach another language but not to “instill” another culture. I am a teacher of teachers; however, many times are the future teachers or new teachers who teach me much more as contact with the school is far more real for them than it is to me. From my very own reflection, why I’m here doing what I do, my memories crowd, and the emotion overwhelms me when remembering my students. I revisit situations lived with them and think of how addictive it is for me to be in a classroom and how often I proudly see how far they have come in their own lives.

My work has consisted more than anything in helping them find the tools to become teachers within themselves, and this sometimes has little to do with teaching content, but with the transformative power of education, with its capabilities to think critically and not take anything for granted. In a sense, my main motivation is to help them “wake up” to “defy,” to “challenge” the system, to be key actors in social transformation, especially taking into account that higher education in Chile has a strong neoliberal component, which highly contributes to the competition at the expense of equity and quality. This, since the Higher Education reform of 1981, allowed private parties to create universities resulting in the geographical expansion of Higher Education Institutions in the country. In turn, the Chilean Higher Education system has been acknowledged as one of the most privatized in the world, as well as one of the most expensive for students’ families. However, most of the students who access higher education belong to the richest groups (Marav & Espinoza, 2014).

The university where I work is regional and state-owned. This means that it is located far from the capital, on the outskirts of the north of the country, and it is also funded primarily by contributions from the state either by applying to grant funds or by the enrollment of students who get high scores in the University Selection Test (PSU). In short, there are not many economic resources that regional and state universities receive as most students with this profile prefer to study in the most prestigious traditional universities (and the ones who have greater resources) that are located in the capital. However, it is also true that many of our students arrive with many shortcomings, not only economic but also academic.

It has particularly drawn my attention in these more than 14 years of academic career that many students entering teaching programs come from a social class of working families where their parents daily break their backs to give a college education to their children. Many of these students strive quite hard to advance and move forward with their studies, but there are occasions in which they should stop studying due to economic reasons. I have had several cases such as that, and it actually causes me great sadness that young people with a great future who could clearly be a contribution to education in Chile are lost because of this. This is especially true when it comes to students who come from the towns located in the highlands near the city of Iquique, in desert and mountain areas.

When it comes to female students who must stop studying, the most frequently cited reason is having to stay at home caring for younger siblings so their mothers can work and feed them. Although often planning on returning to their studies “later,” most do not do so because life gets in the way between them and their desire to become teachers. In the case of men, the situation is similar, but here it is them who must enter the workforce to help their families. There has been a natural resource boom in the last decade in Latin America, and Chile has benefited from it through its copper mining boom. The mining industry is quite attractive for young people in particular for the salaries they can get paid, and so their dreams of being university graduates, often first generation, are inconclusive.

The other situation, which is even more worrisome, is that of novice teachers who have educated themselves on the basis of their own efforts in college, preparing themselves to deliver quality education to their students, full of energy, ideas of change, creativity, and so on, but nevertheless, when entering the labor market, they bump into the wall of reality and often must “fit” to the criteria of the schools in which they work, and so the system wraps them in its dark cloak making their dreams of improving education to remain as nothing more than that, a dream. This system cuts their wings before they learn to fly. And this is how I see day to day that many of them, my dear former students seriously contemplate the thought of stop teaching. For me, it’s like a dagger in the heart.

Some of them take advantage of social networks to make their defense against a corrupt system that transforms them into producing machines of planning, assessments, and extra-curricular activities, with a strenuous workload and a salary that is not consistent with the time, effort, and sacrifice put in their teaching. Thus, studying a new undergraduate program and continue to work to pay tuition fees and monthly payment have become a new challenge. Several have chosen to study programs related to the area of economics and business, while during the day, they give private lessons or work in language schools. Not to mention that most of them also do this while still living with their parents to lower expenses.

That’s why doing autoethnography has allowed me to know myself better in different areas of my life, or as I like to call it, in my various identities. Through autoethnography, I discovered my voice and at the same time I have learnt to appreciate my own voice. My life is not very different from my students. The socio-political cultural context is very similar, and that allows me to use my own experience, my biography, to work on social transformation from within the classroom.

At the beginning of each school year, a feeling mixture of nerves and excitement runs through me when I meet the “mechones” (freshmen) from undergraduate English Teaching Training program. I am usually the one who welcomes them and with whom they will spend most of their time during their first year of studies. It motivates me, fostering a collaborative and trusting environment based on mutual respect with them. Every year, I meet new young people full of ideals and dreams, and being part of their training is fascinating to me. In these more than 14 years, I have seen about 600 students of the English teaching training program passing by my classroom, and they always amaze me. When I see them anxious because they are notable to understand my talking to them in English from the first day, I take a moment to tell my own story in Spanish. I, like many of them, come from a middle class worker family. I studied in public schools in a country where these schools are considered poor performers and therefore are blamed of providing poor quality of education. I even studied high school in a public professional technical school from which I graduated as a public accountant.

My first day in the English teaching program was full of challenges for me, which would be the norm during my first year of study. I tell them that while academics welcomed us in an auditorium where all speeches were entirely in English, I only managed to ask my seatmate what the word “about” meant. With that, I try to explain that I did not know any English when I started. At school, I never learnt more than the use of “Do” and “Does” and that I never really understood what they were. However, here I am now. I am an academic of the Faculty of Human Sciences at my Alma Mater. I hold a master in applied linguistics from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and I am currently a doctor of education candidate at Monash University, Australia. If I got this far, they too can. I always say that my greatest satisfaction as a teacher is to see them become better than I am. It is my biggest pride to see them grow, becoming better professionals and greater persons, and to further specialize on what they like the most.

And this is how after all this time, I’m still in contact with them, now mostly through social networks, specifically Facebook. Despite the physical distance between us, as there are several of them scattered around the globe, the virtual world keeps us connected. I continue receiving feedback through them, and they continue to inspire me. Yes, because I have discovered that they are also my inspiration. I have lit a candle, and they have been responsible for lighting many others. Without them, I would not be here. I have never sought personal glory, it does not motivate me; it is not my goal in life . . . for me it is about being a better professional by and for them. They are my reason. Perhaps more than one of them will also become motivated and want to be a better version of themselves by and for their own students. And then, it becomes a spiral, a cycle. If I can get them to discover their own voice by telling them about my educational journey, and thus I encourage them to begin their own journey of self-knowledge, so they can reflect, listen to their own voice, and make themselves heard, I shall be satisfied.

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Who Could Be Me but You?

Mirlita’s Story: How can we change the world? . . . Our little worlds? How can we change the realities? . . . Our small realities? I am an academic at the Faculty of Medicine. I teach nursing, kinesiology, medicine, and nutrition students, and I face a reality of lack of overwhelming academic and economic resources. Students often go to clinical experience or practice without even having had breakfast; however, they strive to provide the best care for their patients. As it was mentioned at the beginning, Chile has become a country where raw inequality and lack of social mobility are our painful reality.

I think our students will graduate and care for people; maybe they will be nurses taking care of me or my loved ones. I must make a contribution, however small, to humanize their training, to help them become aware that the “patients” are not bodies, not machines, they are people first of all, comprehensive and sensitive, which are located in a social and historical context, in which they are constituted, and, at the same time, they are constituents of their environment. But before that, the future professionals should be aware that they are people themselves. If they do not know, if they do not love, if they do not take care, how could they know, love, and take care of others.

In our speech as nursing teachers, the concept of “holistic care” is always present. The vision of “the human being as a whole.” But in practice, it happens to us that we forget that we work with people and do not accept mistakes. We tend to not understand that our students can have problems, their mothers, grandparents, or sick children. How can we expect them to get to the hospital or the health center and forget about their problems? Do we want them to be machines? How do we teach to care if we do not care?

My story as an academic started long ago. It started in Santiago de Chile. In a grand Chilean university, first class level, with high cognitive demand relegating to the attitudinal and value-based background. I taught community health and constantly tried for students to understand that people are not isolated, they are not an “index case.” The teaching style and formality did not allow me to approach students and listen to their problems.

In 2008, for family reasons, I went to live in La Serena, in Northern Chile. I started working at Universidad Catolica del Norte (Catholic University of the North) in the Nursing program, teaching in the area of obstetrical nursing and mental health nursing. As we got to know each other, students were approaching me; they asked and asked for guidance. Gradually, we were building trust and shared spaces. Gradually, I began to make some changes. My obstetric pathology classes stained with the social determinants of health: disease: preterm birth risk factors: cavities. I asked: Students, who do you think suffers from this disease? They answered: poor women and why? Because habits are not adequate, there is a shortage of nutrients and the dentist is very expensive. They must get up very early to get an appointment. Who has more problems during pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum? Again poverty appears as a risk, as well as the low educational level.

Time passes, and I see that it is not enough. How can I educate conscious professionals, agents of social transformation? The change goes through each one. Starting with myself, I believe in the potential of my students, let go of the ego of the “expert” and place myself in the background. I must find a way to create awareness, build self-awareness, in a system that is biomedical and relegates the experience, emotion, being human to the background. I construct and deconstruct hopes and dreams. I get involved, show myself, I’m not perfect, my stories are shared with them. Resilience is part of my life, and I teach from experience, from my experience, not only from books.

I teach: Pain is part of the life of a Nurse. If a patient dies, it is normal to feel sad and for grief to invade them. If they want to mourn, weep, find a quiet place, and express what they feel. Emotions are not to be kept inside. Locked emotions sicken the soul and body. If you want to go to the funeral, do it; that makes them more human. I listen and reflect and remember my own story. I worked several years in a program of Peritoneal Dialysis; I was the only nurse with 22 people with kidney problems. We built the person to person relationship day by day among users, their families, and me. As part of my educational activities, there were health monitoring, and home visits, the “comprehensive home visits.” I felt so important and recognized, the program was “mine,” and almost everything was decided by me. I resorted to the doctor only when complications were higher.

I studied hard, I did everything possible to do my work with knowledge and love. But I never went to a funeral; I sought (and found) a thousand excuses for not attending. Over the years, I realized that my absence from the funeral was because I felt I had failed. My big ego suffered, and my low self-esteem was damaged even more. And I felt a lot of guilt. “My patient died.” As if everything depended on me or us as a team. It took me years to recognize that there are things that escape us. That while we do our best, people get worse and die. Often in public hospitals, we do not have the supplies, equipment, and professional specialists who allow us to provide a better service. Access to quality health depends on the amount of money you have in your pocket.

These are the stories that I share with my students, and they tell me and write their own stories. Stories of small children caring for their parents and siblings, who assumed the role of adults that was not their place. They worked hard, they were resilient, and they overcame their situations at point of not listening to their sadness, abandonment of one or both parents who live in poverty, which are the first of their family to attend college. Their hopes placed in the fact that studying would allow them to have social mobility.

The reflections and experiences, tinged with hospital scents, white aprons, words sometimes sweet and sometimes bitter, laughter, and sobs, allowed me to create a model of teaching that gives the spaces in freedom and confidence to open their hearts. All this developed in an environment of self-care workshops in mental health, where the stories and emotions unite and identify us all, we look as if we were mirrors, “who could be you but me?” And when we care for our patients, we also look at them and wonder: What do they show me of myself?

Autoethnography drives me and moves me. It makes me stop running, stop my demanding and structured watch to enable and evoke and reflect: I’m part of the problem, I’m part of poor quality in Chilean education, but I am also part of the solution, like all the actors who are involved. With the autoethnography, I attempt to create awareness, self and social awareness, and with this, a journey begins that lasts a lifetime in which we grow and learn, interwoven in our stories, our culture and our spirits in the hope of a transformed Chile.

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Communicate to Heal

Pamela’s story: Communicate to heal . . . Interpretive Autoethnography (Denzin, 2014) as a way to break silences and connect us from our humanity, to say the obvious as a ceasefire in no man’s land, in the land of all.

A few months ago, I was traveling back home from Urbana–Champaign to Arica (four flights in total and 2 days of travel), and on the last leg, the national stretch Santiago to Arica, I was assigned a seat next to a young man of about 35 years old, with whom I talked during the trip. The young man looked friendly, and I had a face that revealed very tired after more than 24 hr of travel and flight changes, and after leaving the apartment where I lived for 2 months of my post-doctoral stay just completed in Urbana. The guy asked me what my job was, I am a psychologist, I teach and work with Colombian women entering the city of Arica seeking refuge—I commented. The man looked at me without understanding much of what I was saying. And what were you doing in America? I went to school, I said.

The young man kept talking to me, making jokes, and I despite the fatigue, laughed. On the route of almost 4 hr and many feet of altitude, he asked me: And do you like what you do?—Yes of course, I love it—I said smiling, while watching his expression change as his gaze seemed to be transported to a distant site. And you?—I asked. To what he answered, it is what you get. I earn here twice than in my city. I go for 20 days and return for 10 every month. You’re lucky—he added. I know few people who like what they do. At that moment, I felt guilty because of my smile. I felt silly too. I felt the weight of a big commitment beyond my responsibility to my work. I felt useless in guiding my accomplishments in part to the production of academic papers to survive in the academia and remembered my concern for what follows. Leaving the academy to produce social transformation. My pending task. While chatting with the young man, I understood my solitude, I understood that being a Chilean woman from the provinces satisfied with what she does, with economic independence, with ideological independence and intercultural baggage as a result of travels, is also an impediment to develop myself in other areas of my life.

I can do qualitative research connected to teaching undergraduate and graduate programs in the social sciences and humanities at a public university of Northern Chile, in the same city where I was born and raised in the same university where I studied psychology. In this context, these processes include the clean silently sweep behind a forced “Chilenization” processes against the other foreign, indigenous, color person regarded as “problem,” “invaders,” and so on, that comes mainly from Peru and Bolivia and lately from Colombia; in a territory where the boundaries are not consistent with the space characterized by sharing and living together among Peruvians, Bolivians, and Chileans. I mean a space that has reinforced a vision of nationhood based on the supposed Whiteness of our skin, a notion of Europeanized and centralist “Chilenity,” of a pure race and all of that which constituted our own: the Chilean, based on an ideal corresponding to the Santiago’s elites very distant to our local realities. A border nationalism that threatens against the respect for the other foreigner and local indigenous seen as an alien “other,” different, who is placed in a lower order and who is discriminated against and exploited.

In these spaces, qualitative research has allowed me to be inquisitive, to question ourselves and to question myself regarding the usual, what is normal, what is ours, the obvious, what is taught in psychology, what teaches us to be psychologists, strongly influenced by Spanish, European, and American literature. What makes us look White and teaching a psychology of Whites for Whites, without being White, but at the same time, without being Black. Our Latin American multicultural richness recorded in our skin. Is psychology perhaps a standardized way of understanding the human being that conditions us to see ourselves and understand our behaviors and worldviews, life, and humanity as they have been understood and studied by other White North American or Spanish thinking in their own context? Is it possible to think and escape from our realities, the everyday and the “normal” to understand it as a science that is applicable and replicable to all people of the world regardless of their culture, geography, lifestyles, among other things? I do not think so. I disagree.

Body, paper, and stage (Spry, 2011), the body as a space in which to feel and embody emotions that are transmitted as a way of performing realities with the other, the audience, are a lifesaver for a scientific psychology based on a positivistic logic, and scarcely felt rather streamlined and based on traditional academic discourse. However, in this academic career where the requirements for survival include obtaining contestable government funding and publishing scientific papers in journals indexed in Web of Science, working from my emotions on sensitive topics and the suffering people in my country, in a hurry to meet the requirements of a system that values the product in detriment of the process, relieves the challenge of achieving a more humane social science research that benefits the quality of life of people. This is not measurable only through the works of a publication. At the same time, the publication allows us to obtain licenses to investigate, and thus academics of my generation can survive in academia nowadays.

In this, I consider urgent for me to investigate the long-term effects of the worst tragedy that my country has lived: the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. To work on this issue from the emotional, affective, and social effects seen as long-term effects in the Chilean survivors guided the focus of my research line for these effects in the Chilean population, in Northern Chile, and allowed me to understand why today, it is not so simple to discuss politics and the realities are understood depending on the place from which the facts were experienced and these can be very different even regarding the same event and at the same time, because sometimes many resist injustices for the fear of being punished.

Interpretive Autoethnography is for me a go further. It is a brave writing, sometimes painful, connected with the being and the self, that breaks the trend in the most classic psychology, which seeks the particular over the general, something that can portray in words, audiovisual resources, or artistic representation a precise significant moment in the investigation that allows the audience to understand the meaning of what is being shared as if the viewer could connect the story with his or her own experiences.

So, working with Colombian women in the border city of Arica has allowed me to see the discriminatory treatment toward the other Latin American that “invades” us and brings problems, I mean people who enter the country willing to accept working conditions that locals hardly accept, or who leave their home countries by the apparent security offered by Chile. These people entering by land across the border in Northern Chile, from where I write these lines, are in the position to cope in a society that tends to place them in a category of second order, observing them with suspicion and associating them with problems, diseases, and crime in the country. With autoethnography “I realize,” I see myself through the others, I understand myself and forgive myself, and I give myself another meaning. At the same time, I reaffirm my commitment to transformation, not with one but with all and for all. I am in time to produce texts that so far we can only publish in English.

There are no Spanish academic spaces where we could write this type of methodology. This article has already been sent to different journals that give proof of this. This makes it difficult for our students and our Spanish-speaking societies to access this type of material. The challenge is great, if I do not want to feel like an idiot the next time a man of my generation leads a life of sacrifices working the land having to travel every 20 days for a fairly decent wage due to the living conditions in Chile. The same man who asked me what I do for a living and to whom I could not easily explain about my academic contribution in a second language. It is time for greater efforts to break the glass of the database to the classroom and from the classroom to society.

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Final Thoughts

In this scenario, our country, a corridor of dreams, sufferings, hopes, and silenced voices, the fact of seeing us, me, seeing them through the process behind the performative writing as a way of revealing, discovering, and developing a personal voice of criticism of the research, we create in international academic spaces outside our country. It has allowed us to place the person under investigation in a safe area, but also in a land of dispute, from where we can understand their experiences from the human side of the academy, moving our position in and to the field, from being outside observers to women who can put themselves in their place and see ourselves in other contexts.

We give life to the narratives, the urges, the learnings, the dreams, and the frustrations. All of these are condensed in our narratives of interdisciplinary moles. Behind these narratives, there is an urge to teach along with the need for social transformation, which bursts into each corner of our country without permission. Our stories have our own life experiences as a starting point, experiences of women in which we defragment our lives and watch the autoethnographic academic knowledge processes as a situated, localized, and focused knowledge.

We narrate the processes without stopping questioning ourselves, with multiple questions that arise: Which stories should we tell, and which ones we should not? What to say, and how much to say? Is it only for myself and my environment or do I want to have an impact on institutional policies? We conduct a type of research that has little to do with the dominant trends, such as what is referred to as strictly academic. However, our stories diverge to connect with networks of criticism and social macro and micro transcendence, questioning the structure. There is a certain kind of sensibility through which we can see ourselves and from ourselves see the others and create a real or metaphorical dialog with the society or the other people. Through our story, we are allowed to recognize ourselves in the heart of the others in a society determined to make us deaf, mute, and despicable.

Interpretive autoethnography has allowed us to develop a voice with color, not White, not Black, with Latin American dyes, and discover the power behind it to say, break the norm, and promote critical thinking to say what is hardly said in academic spaces.

In violent times, in times of crisis and social injustice, in times of forced silence to avoid conflicts, in times of widespread government crisis and political disbelief that make new normalities based on mistrust and despair in an “other” that represents us and that shows impunity and corruption, we are in a stage of critical thinking that is beginning to wake up and lose the fear to express ourselves, to break the still present effects of the sustained political repression between 1973 and 1990, and break the silences of what was silenced due to fear, and was forgotten pretending “as if” it were possible.