Karen Tejada-Peña, associate professor of sociology in Hillyer College, recently published the peer-reviewed article “Making Meaning from the ‘Yo no sé:’ Agency and Truth-Telling in Salvadoran Women” in the Journal of Sociology and Personal Relationships. In the article, Tejada-Peña looked at interviews pertaining to community-policing relations that she had conducted with Salvadoran women residing on Long Island. With help from her research assistant Natalia Navas, she found a pattern of responses ranging from “yo no sé” (I don’t know) and “I just mind my own business” to silences, many of which appeared at unexpected moments when the interviewees clearly did know but were safeguarding their stories. This reticence to respond, she argues, can serve as an aid for scholars engaging in qualitative research and, as such, provides a toolkit on how to consider these responses as entry points that serve as both an insight into this reticence and a means of capturing the participants’ voices more fully.
The article stems from Tejada-Peña’s three-year research project funded by a $101,000 grant from the Russel Sage Foundation and is part of her larger book project Putting Them on ICE: Policing Salvadoran Communities on Long Island. Here, she examines how Salvadoran migrants are negatively affected by crimmigration, a merging of the immigration and criminal justice systems that together penalize immigrants more harshly.
You can see the article here.