On a Personal Note: My Behind-the-Scenes Interview with La Cuenta

My decision to avoid interjecting my personal story into my writing on Substack derives from a commitment to keeping the focus of my work on the research rather than on myself. As much as I love stories, I do not gravitate to overly self-referential writing that twists a healthy call for reflexivity into a distracting mishmash of memoir and analysis that neither respects nor advances either genre. I am not skittish about taking ethical positions that reflect my values, provided that I have evidence and a rational basis for such positions. But generally I prefer to stay out of the way—not out of a lack of reflexivity, but as a result of my own sincere engagement with this writerly problematic.

Apprehension is not prohibition, however, which is why I hope you will permit me to share with you this two-part interview with Antero Garcia at La Cuenta. When Antero first contacted me, I assumed we would focus on immigration data. But Antero, a Stanford professor and skilled interviewer, led the conversation through the thicket of my academic background and personal experiences to tell the story not only of what I do but why I do it. We discuss how my training as a geographer continues to shape my thinking, how my military service influenced my research on immigration enforcement, and why I believe—perhaps deeper than I believe anything—that working class Americans and immigrants need to see each other as allies, not adversaries, in the struggle for economic justice.

I am grateful to Antero and La Cuenta for generously publishing both parts of the thorough interview this week. I invite you to read both parts at the links below, then to explore La Cuenta’s many other moving stories. La Cuenta’s goal is to offer individual stories and perspectives about the costs of undocumented living in the U.S., primarily from the perspective of current and formerly undocumented individuals as well as members of mixed-status families. If you would like to contribute to La Cuenta, please read their call for contributions.

Read my two-part interview with La Cuenta at the links below:

• Part 1: “At the core of immigration enforcement is a question: who belongs where?”

• Part 2: “There are commonalities that we overlook because our ideas about documentedness and citizenship and race cloud our vision to seeing the ways in which we actually share and we struggle together.”

As always, thank you for reading.

Sincerely,

– Austin Kocher

Author’s photo, 2018.