Employing Charlas As a Culturally Affirming, Community-Engaged, and Chicana Feminist Method with Latine Immigrants

Background: As Latine undocumented immigrant families face mass surveillance, racial profiling, and state-impacting apprehensions, researchers must disrupt racial violence in U.S. restrictive immigration policies by developing anti-racist, liberatory-conscious, and community and culturally-centered research methodologies that honor their well-being. Rooted in Chicana feminist testimonios, liberation psychology, and an epistemology of resistance, this methodological paper introduces charlas as an anti-racist, community-engaged, and culturally affirming research method used in an empirical CBPR study involving Latine undocumented, mixed-status, and immigrant parents who combat racist immigration policies. Traditionally, charlas are known as a culturally bound and informal chat practice among Latine communities in interviews and groups. This methodological empirical study will describe how we co-transformed charlas as a ground-up, Chicana feminist, and liberation-conscious method in which the political and cultural entanglements of racialized immigration state-inflicted emotional pain and hope are voiced through multimodal individual, group, and observational charlas. The aims of this methodological empirical charlas study include the following: (1) explain how we co-fostered a community partnership foundation of pláticas (communal talks) where charlas emerged as a method that disrupts immigration racial violence, (2) describe how charlas are employed on the ground level with Latine immigrant parents as co-constructors of critical consciousness, and (3) examine charlas as a communal, culturally attuned, and dialectical truth-telling method.

Method: This CBPR study introduces charlas as an anti-racist, culturally affirming, and community-centered Chicana feminist critical multimodal narrative method that honors Latine immigrants’ multidimensional healing and resistance strategies against U.S. racist immigration policies. Two-hour participatory-driven and in-depth charlas (individual, groups, and observations) were co-developed and conducted with 15 Latine undocumented, mixed-status, and immigrant parents/caregivers. Constructivist grounded theory methods informs the analysis. Open coding includes line by line, segment-to-segment, focused, and axial coding.

Results: In the charlas, the parents/caregivers generated conversations about their participation in the charlas to share and fortify communal solidarity. The following themes emerged from the charlas: (1) Charlas as a safe and brave space to “desahogarse,” (2) Charlas as a space of aprendizaje (learning) and conscientizacion (consciousness) (3) Charlas as a space of confianza (trust) and respeto (respect), and (4) Charlas as a space of collective care and “guías” (guides). Trusting partnerships and parents' feedback were critical to developing the collective charlas as a culturally affirming counternarrative that disrupts mainstream research by honoring epistemic bridging, foregrounding parents’ expertise, and fostering participatory collaboration throughout the research process since it allowed for the parent’s culturally organic participation.

Conclusion/Implications: The findings call for culturally grounded, communal, liberatory, and non-Western methods to disrupt dominant “white methods” that have attempted to silence folkways of knowing and telling. The findings reveal that the co-creation of ground-up and culturally affirming charlas, through collective community partnerships of reciprocal care with respeto, confianza, valentía, and personalismo cultivates a safe and brave space to share and tell. Practitioners should develop community-engaged parenting interventions and programming alongside immigrant families that address the role of systemic racism and cultural attunement. Researchers should incorporate the community-affirming and critical feminist charlas and theories of resistance to promote equitable multivocality.