Border Crossings: Considering the Political, Economic, and

Across the Americas

Peter Fraenkel, Ph.D.

This year's first explicitly Pan-American Annual Conference of the American Family Therapy Academy provided a fertile context for researchers across the Western Hemisphere to gather and discuss the political, economic, and cultural challenges in conducting meaningful research and mounting family-based treatment and training programs. Although these issues were addressed throughout the conference, two events paid particular attention to these concerns: The Research Interest Group, and the Poster Sessions. In these venues, we dialogued about a wide range of border crossings—geographical, conceptual, relational, and emotional. We heard research findings that brought into the light the subjugated narratives of struggling immigrants who had crossed actual borders from one country and culture to another, and who typically found themselves walled off from full participation in the country of immigration by a host of new, often unanticipated borders—linguistic, racist, classist, and sexist. We examined the challenges facing researchers attempting to cross the borders of understanding and acceptance between themselves and the families they study and learn from. We acknowledged the gifts and curses provided by political and economic forces that hover at the border around the researcher's project and either open or close borders to potential research participants, and to funding for projects and interventions. And we took a hard look at the borders that separate the intellectual, research, and praxis disciplines that guide our work as researchers and interventionists.

The Research Interest Group featured two of the conference's Presidential plenary speakers—Professor Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, a sociologist at the University of Southern California, and Professor Carola Suárez-Orozco, Co-director of the Harvard Immigration Project, along with one of AFTA's own, the 1993 Winner of the AFTA Award for Special Contribution to Cultural Diversity as Researcher, Clinical Theorist, and Mentor, Dr. José Szapocznik, Director of the University of Miami's Center for Family Studies.

Dr. Hondagneu-Sotelo led off, with a fascinating tour of the history of her innovative ethnographic studies of Latino immigrant workers. Her history illustrated well the impact of the larger political context on the life of a research project. For instance, her first major study examined the role of gender in mostly undocumented Latino families' adjustment in moving from rural to urban and suburban contexts. She began the study in the mid-1980s when President Reagan signed into effect the Immigration Reform and Control Act. IRCA involved both greater sanctions against employers for hiring undocumented workers, and also included the Amnesty Legalization Program that legalized approximately 3 million immigrants, mostly Mexican. Dr. Hondagneu-Sotelo noted that this program brought a large number of illegal immigrants "out from the shadows" and into public forums to learn how to qualify for legalization and what to do if they were not eligible. Her earlier work as an activist and community organizer gave her a level of credibility and trustworthiness that led families to share with her intimate experiences and documents surrounding their immigration process. Being herself Latina, and bringing her mother, a Chilean former domestic worker, along with her to interviews, also lowered the gates of privacy otherwise held firmly in place by these families. In this study, political changes worked in favor of engaging persons and collecting data.

In contrast, Dr. Hondagneu-Sotelo's next major study began at a moment in political history that threw many barriers in her way. Her study involved intensive interviewing of Latina domestic workers and their employers. But when she got started it was the early 1990s, and Zoe Baird and then Kimba Woods were in the process of being disqualified for the position of Attorney General because each had violated employment or tax laws with their Latina nannies and other home staff. Consequently, Dr. Hondagneu-Sotelo's cold-call attempts to recruit employers of domestic workers to interview met with much frustration, as the homecare employers assumed she was an IRS agent posing as a sociologist! A few years later, in 1994, as she began the portion of the study in which she interviewed the Latina employees, California was in the throes of debating and finally approving Proposition 187, conservative governor Pete Wilson's attempt to reduce the flood of undocumented immigrants by ending public school education and health services to their children (even if the children were U.S. citizens by birthright). Now, the Latina women she tried to recruit into the study thought she must be an undercover staff member of the INS posing as a sociologist!

Dr. Hondagneu-Sotelo's current study has also run into some roadblocks due to timing and politics. This study, of multidenominational and multiracial clergy, trade unions made up largely of Latino immigrant workers, and traditional ethnic lobbies that work to support and expand immigrant rights, ran into recruitment difficulties because she is a faculty member of the University of Southern California. Two years ago, clergy came to the defense of the hotel and restaurant workers being underpaid by the university, and moreover, USC has the long standing reputation of being a business-driven institution dedicated to educating wealthy children. To gain baseline credibility among the clergy and workers, she has had to explicitly differentiate herself and her political views from those of the university. And as usual, with some struggle and much creativity, Dr. Hondagneu-Sotelo has prevailed and is doing her important work. She closed her segment of the interest group by summarizing, "So, everywhere we have politics."

Carola Suárez-Orozco picked up with the theme of researchers' need to be aware of the impact of their own cultural background and how this affects their research. Beginning by noting that she is "a clinical psychologist, an immigrant, and married to an immigrant" (a cultural anthropologist and her co-investigator, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco), she expanded the notion of culture to include the particular nexus of research and intellectual traditions, ideas, and practices that inform one's research. Her research is a five-year longitudinal study of the educational adaptation of 500 recently immigrated children from a host of culturally diverse countries in Asia, Central America, the Caribbean basin, and South America. As she thought through the design of a study that would allow her to meaningfully cross the experiential borders represented by the different cultures of this diverse group of children and parents, Dr. Suárez-Orozco considered both the strengths and limitations of each research discipline, and her wish to avoid what she called the "methodological tyranny" of each tradition. For instance, for all their rigor, the experimental, hypothesis-testing methods of psychology—her professional culture of origin—did not seem appropriate to the kind of in-depth naturalistic phenomena to be captured, especially when she considered that she didn't yet know enough about these children and their experiences to formulate testable hypotheses. In contrast, although anthropology provided an orientation toward discovery and accessing experiences from the perspective of cultural insiders (known as the "emic" approach), she found its methods largely unsystematic—a problem if she wanted to be able to compare children's and families' responses within and across cultural groups.

Her solution? As we in family therapy like to say, a "both-and" perspective, but in her case, a both-and-and-and would be more like it. Dr. Suárez-Orozco advocates a complex design that engages multiple perspectives and types of data, including structured interviews with children, parents, and teachers; open-ended and forced-choice questionnaires designed especially for the study; sentence completion questionnaires (which, she noted, are particularly poignant and telling with immigrant children, as they fill in the blank in such questions as, "Mexicans (or whatever the child's ethnic group) are_______," and then, "Most Americans think Mexicans are _______"); ethnographic observation of the children at school, at home, in their neighborhoods; scores from achievement tests (administered both in English and in the child's primary language) and other documents; and statistics that capture potentially influential aspects of the social context, such as violence rates, school principal turnover rates, numbers of computers, and other critical school resources. Analyses capture commonalities across groups, between group differences, and within group differences in children's engagement in school and adjustment over time. The research also examines a selected number of cases for in-depth qualitative and quantitative analyses. By creating a study that crosses many conceptual and methodological borders and thereby engages multiple lenses on developmental processes and outcomes, Suárez-Orozco and her colleagues will come closer to something like the "truth" of these children's and families' experiences than if their research vision was dominated by one methodological "culture."

Dr. Szapocznik took us to the edge of a different political and economic border—the one between researcher-clinicians and persons/institutions with the power either to support or pass over our efforts to help families. He noted that at the Center for Family Studies, he, his colleagues, and many students have, for almost 30 years, "been doing an experiment in trying to get the world to embrace family therapy." He provided us with an example of the kind of presentation he mounts to those in power that shows the empirical support for family-based approaches to tough problems such as teenagers engaged in drug and alcohol abuse and a host of disruptive, risk-taking behaviors. Given that many researchers and clinicians often have difficulty distilling our complex findings and clinical methods into a clear, simple, and powerful message about family therapy, Dr. Szapocznik gave us an excellent template that could be adapted to make the case for family therapy research and practice around other pressing problems.

He began by outlining family factors and processes that are critical in creating protection or risk for teens. Degree of parental involvement with or monitoring of children's lives at school and with friends, quality of family communication, degree of warmth and support, sense of family bondedness, a child's sense of belonging, and degree of clarity in parent directives are all significant predictors. Dr. Szapocznik reported that when these exist, "children are less likely to smoke, use alcohol, marijuana, less likely to be delinquent, violent, suicidal, anxious, or depressed, less likely to engage in sexual behavior early and if they do it, are more responsible, and they are more likely to be well adjusted in school." He also demonstrated with clear graphics how the impact of family qualities is in turn moderated by a host of surrounding factors, such as the quality of the school and the neighborhood, arguing for interventions that target not only family dynamics but the institutions and community life.

In describing family therapy to results-oriented, pragmatically-minded power brokers, Szapocznik eschews the technical jargon and subtle theoretical distinctions that often occupy our in-house conversations. Instead, he uses phrases like "precision parenting" (adjusting how you parent to fit the needs of particular kids with particular risk factors surrounding them), emphasizes the need for parents to take a "leadership role," gives examples of direct and specific parent communication with kids, and highlights the need for children to feel connected to and valued by their families. He then shared two examples of his team's program of research on effective family therapy with Hispanic, delinquent boys and boys experiencing emotional and behavioral problems. Importantly, these studies pitted family therapy against either group counseling that resembled typical interventions provided in the community, or compared family therapy with psychodynamic therapy for the teens only, or recreational activities. In both studies, teens that participated in family therapy had significantly reduced rates of conduct and other problems as compared to the group intervention or recreation, and improved as much as those in the psychodynamic therapy. However, the most striking finding was what happened to the families: Those that received family therapy improved or maintained their existing good functioning, while those that did not receive family therapy deteriorated—even when the teens' behavior improved over the course of individual treatment. Given the power of family functioning over time to affect children's behavior, these results make the case for what family clinicians have said all along—kids may improve temporarily in individual treatment, but without attention to the family, treatment gains are likely to reverse over time. Summing up, Dr. Szapocznik showed his favorite final slide for these presentations: "Above else, do no harm—don't do individual or group therapy, do family therapy!"

The Poster Session provided a rare opportunity look across national borders at exciting range of systemically-based research and training efforts throughout the Americas. The diversity and complexity of the work represented from seven nations and one U.S. territory was too rich to do justice to within the space limitations of this newsletter article. However, I would like to list the topics of the research posters, and some of the interesting challenges faced by the training programs presented. Research foci included: the intersection of marriage, work, and gender issues (Diniz[1] , Brazil; Zimmerman & Haddock, USA), the relationship between maternal mental health, family relationships, and breastfeeding practices (Falceto & Giugliani, Brazil), outcomes of a program targeted to pregnant adolescents and their families (Ganc, Brazil), outcome research on family therapy for adolescent substance abuse (Lebensohn, Argentina; Liddle, Schwartz, & Henderson, USA), Alzheimer's Disease (Long, USA), outcomes of a systemic approach to families with persons who have multiple disabilities (Moya, Argentina), and identity and belonging as responses among Latino youth in Canada to negative stereotyping (Simmons, Canada). Training program challenges included: teaching systemic ideas and practices to non-therapist professionals (Soares Costa & Freire, Brazil); stimulating the creativity and autonomy of students while still providing them a comprehensive clinical model (Glasserman, Loketek, & Martinez, Argentina); maintaining a training program entirely devoted to family therapy within a university setting (Green & Cole, USA; Macedo, Cerveny, Grandesso, Neder, & Galano, Brazil); creating an interdisciplinary program within a law school that brings a family systems perspective to family law (Jutorán, Argentina); development and implementation of an ethnically-sensitive systemic training program in a country at war (Samper, Columbia); preparing family medicine residents to assist families facing terminal illness and death (Batelle, Santiago & Guzman, Puerto Rico); building a training program at a time when the mental health community did not recognize family therapy as a viable mental health treatment (de Tapia & Ruiz, Panamá); recruiting greater diversity in trainees and clients despite programs whose training philosophies provide special focus on issues of diversity and oppression (Turner & Dienhart, Canada; Zimmerman & Haddock, USA); and keeping a training program running despite years of great economic hardship in the country (Zevallos, Peru).

Take a good look at the photo of our colleagues from across the Americas. To me, this is the collective face of courage and tolerance, creativity in the face of often enormous obstacles, of a deep humanity and dedication to compassion. It was a privilege to be part of it.

Peter Fraenkel, Ph.D., outgoing Chair of the Research Committee, is Associate Professor of Psychology, City College of New York; and Director, Center for Time, Work, and the Family. Within that Center, he is Co-Director of the Family Support from Welfare to Work Project, and Director of the Family Support from Immigration to Work Project. His research focuses on collaborative development and evaluation of community-based family support programs for poor families in the inner city.

[1] Only names of presenters attending the conference are listed.