Prioritizing Community in Research Decision-Making Through Partnership

In behavioral intervention research, taking a community-based participatory research approach enhances recruitment and retention while facilitating the transfer of research findings into social change. Successes with recruitment and retention are secondary to enacting fundamental principles of trust, reciprocity, cultural humility, empowerment, and respect. This presentation will describe a longitudinal clinical trial in a Southwest borderlands community, Oyendo Bien. The study was co-developed and implemented with community partnership throughout the research process. Dyads were recruited to participate in a community-delivered group education and support program addressing hearing loss for Spanish-speakers age 50+ years (n=132 participants randomized). We highlight the critical role that community health workers (promotoras) held as members of the research team. Furthermore, we describe an innovative approach for language mediation that integrates and empowers community participation. This presentation will include examples of lessons learned from the community in collaborating to conduct research in a way that truly serves.

Putting Ethnohistory to Work: Jack Forbes and the Remaking of American Historical Consciousness

Jack Forbes enjoyed a prolific and influential career as an ethnohistorian and educator. His groundbreaking analysis of the Southwest borderlands and interdisciplinary studies of mixed-race histories endures, and his championing of Native-centered pedagogies is now seamlessly woven into curricula throughout North America. This article examines Forbes’s efforts to remake the American historical consciousness—what Forbes called the “conqueror consciousness”—by using ethnohistorical methodologies in his scholarship and teaching. The article outlines Forbes’s career, paying particular attention to his scholarship and curriculum reform efforts during the 1960s. Those years proved crucial in Forbes’s development as a scholar and teacher and in advancing the nascent field of ethnohistory.

Southwest Borderland Voices and Stories: Community Cultural Wealth as Living Literacies

This study qualitatively examines the literacy experiences of three Southwest Borderland Latinos who left high school before graduating. Addressing a gap in the literature that reveals the limited attention paid to how students who left high school before graduating generate and use community cultural wealth (Burciaga & Erbstein, 2012), this investigation explores the vibrant role and contribution of community cultural wealth in literacy development. Through the frameworks of New Literacy Studies (NLS) and family literacy within the context of the Southwest Borderlands, and employing the tool of counternarratives through a Latino Critical Race Theory (LatCrit) lens, this study provides a platform for validating and affirming the voices, stories, experiences, and knowledges of the research participants. Utilizing portraiture as the methodology illuminates the living literacies that transpired when the participants read their world and the word (Freire, 2006).