Human Relations in a Multicultural Society
In fall 2019, I took the writing-intensive class Human Relations in a Multicultural Society through the Honors program. This was technically a K-12 Secondary Education course, but since I was taking it as a general class, I gleaned more information about race relations and the experience of cultural others in the United States. This class was primarily discussion-based, but we wrote a culminating research paper at the end of the semester based on an interview with an immigrant and supplementary evidence.
I had never written a paper based on an interview, and it provided a learning curve. I realized the importance of keeping the interviewee’s identity anonymous and the challenges that this poses when using an interview source and working through the difficulties of transcription. Additionally, this taught me the importance of creating interview protocol while being flexible enough to deviate from the pre-written questions to follow the natural flow of conversation and, in turn, find what the interviewee is most passionate about. Using an interview with open-ended questions was very conducive to creativity in my research, which I appreciated, leading me to find additional sources that I may not otherwise have found. My favorites were the books Latinos Facing Racism: Discrimination, Resistance, and Endurance by J. R. Feagin and José A. Cobas and Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance by Charles Ramírez Berg. These were useful because my interviewee talked a lot about Latino stereotypes in the media and how those negatively impacted his immigration journey and his current living situation in Minnesota. There was one
specific story he told about his experience as a white-passing Hispanic man going shopping with his darker-skinned Hispanic wife and how they experienced the same thing differently due to their appearances and the stereotypes related to them. The Latinos Facing Racism book gave strong analyses of similar stories that I could then relate to the story he told me, and the book Latino Images in Film supported the stereotypes that were described by my interviewee, as well as giving a more detailed history of them describing their perpetuation in pop culture. These sources allowed me to break his story into different parts that are interconnected and important and support them with further evidence. I found my sources using a library database, my favorite place to find supplemental research, but Google Scholar is also a good resource. I prefer these types of search engines for research since most articles and books are published through journals and books found there are trustworthy. However, it’s also important to do research on the author’s credibility. Some other resources I used were census and visa information through government websites. Many other websites claim to have that kind of information, but the only credible source for population statistics and visa eligibility is the government, as they’re the people to collect that data and administer visas.
In the society in which we live, it is important to be able to find peer-reviewed and well- supported research, and projects like this encourage me to practice this and become more aware of the biases in media and its portrayal of facts. Doing this project made me significantly more confident in my ability to connect several ideas, and the creative interview element helped me enjoy the process more. It enabled me to work diligently to create a paper that not only tells someone’s story but makes it feel smooth and connected with research. This was by far the hardest part of the process, as I wanted to tell the most authentic possible version of his story. I look forward to exercising these research skills in future acting, directing, and playwriting projects, as well as other scholarly work. Telling stories on a large scale like theatre allows, has the opportunity to impact many lives, and you want to make that as positive and representative experience as possible. Much like a scientific researcher does using a larger sample size, a playwright, actor, designer, or director must hear many different perspectives of stories to get the most representative account when creating a character.