The Baptism

Abstract

In this performance autoethnography, the author explores her positionality (Davies, 2000; Spry, 2001) in the Spanish-speaking community, moving from her outsider role as an interpreter at the Health Department to her relationships with some of the women and their families to her current position as the grandmother of a Mexican American grandson. She writes as inquiry (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005) to interrogate her own positionality/power/privilege and to trouble socially constructed borders. She continues to relate her own family to her birth/heart family in the Spanish-speaking community (Tilley-Lubbs, 2012, 2011). By so doing, she realizes that her hybridity is embodied in her grandson and is bounded by her own body (Min-ha, 2010). The performance of her own autoethnographic story (Spry, 2010) presents her as a constant border crosser/straddler who attempts to connect the “autobiographical and personal to the cultural and social” (Ellis, 2004, p. xix).