Never a Yellow Bird, Always a Blue Bird: Ethnodrama of a Latina Learner's Educational Experiences in 1950 - 60s South Texas

In recent years, performative writing has branched out into artistic schema as varied as poetry (Denzin, 2001; Pelias, 1998), theatre (Gallagher, 2007; Nimmon, 2007), music, (Daykin, 2004), photography (Bell, 2006), and documentary filmmaking (Woo, 2008). If we have become an "interview society" wherein dialogue is part of a moral community (Denzin, 2001), then interviews would appear especially suited for ethnodramatic adaptation. As Foster (2007) has observed, an arts-based approach to research enables us to "see the world from [the participants'] point of view and immerse ourselves in their stories" (p. 371). Ethnodrama is not just an accurate representation of data (Barone, 2002), but a translation of findings within narrative or poetic clarity; its primary purpose is to tell a story and tell it well (Saldana, 2005). Attention is given to form and content and how those components combine to produce a successful treatment. The trend toward theatrical presentation of data can be traced to anthropologist Victor Turner (1985), who saw performative ethnography as a means of "getting inside the skins" of those who are researched (p. 90). Turner theorized that ethnographers could better communicate the lived experiences of participants through the creation of narrative forms, which he initially referred to as social drama, and in the intervening years, Turner's controversial suggestion that researchers write and play-act the more interesting parts of their findings has attracted an array of proponents (Conquergood, 1991/2006; O'Neill, Giddens, Breatnach, Bagley, Bourne, & Judge, 2002; Saldana, 2003). Miller-Day (2008), for example, has endorsed performative writing's provocative capacity to enable social change. Additionally, Madison (2005) has promoted the method's inherent advantage of establishing a dialogic relationship between researchers and audiences. This dialogue can often occur within a public sphere where conflicts are played out for the community (Mienczakowski, 1997). In that sense, arts-based researchers may avail themselves of what Dewey (1934/1959) saw as "an idiom that conveys what cannot be said in another language and yet remains the same" (p. 116). In other words, like other art forms, theatre, can express abstract ideas in ways more effective than written text. Gray, Sinding, Ivonoffski, Fitch, Hampson, and Greenberg (2000) noted that with the development of research-oriented theatre, it will be necessary "for more researchers to detail the process they go through, including their many (inevitable) mistakes and dilemmas as well as their resolutions" (p. 143). More recently, Ferguson and Thomas-Maclean (2009) concluded that, where arts-based methods are concerned, "documentation of researchers' experiences is still scant, as are first person accounts" (p. 10). In this paper we seek to address that gap in knowledge through chronicling the processes involved in our attempt to transform a case study into a short series of interpretive dialogue scenes. As O'Neill et al. (2002) observed, performative pieces expose "contested and multiple versions of reality, and the unheard voices and experiences of individuals who may consider themselves powerless" (p. 71). Often, ethnodramatists seek to interpret the experiences of those from disenfranchised communities from across various parts of the globe who attempt to accommodate the societal demands of two (or more) separate cultures. Accordingly, we will present a case study of a successful Latina academic who reflected on her struggle to negotiate the multiple gender and ethnic spaces that have historically characterized the South Texas region where she was raised and educated. Additionally, the participant's spoken memoirs will be dramatized in dialogue scenes emphasizing the ethnic politics that became the basis for her determination to succeed within the repressive environment of a rural educational system during the 1950s and 1960s. …