Past and Present Time in Qualitative Inquiry: Looking and Dreaming On the Future in a Particular Place in Northern Chile

This essay concerns my reflection, thoughts, and feelings from the foundations and movements between my heartfelt autobiographical experiences and the fieldwork with Colombian women refugees or asking for refugee status in the current Chilean society. Inspired from the Three Words Workshop, as Performative Writing of Healing and Resistance, I wish to connect my I from a humanity way with the international audience to talk about “Otherness” racism, gender, and social injustice in a border place in Northern Chile. Thus, to connect and provoke audiences, wondering about WHERE WE ARE in the fieldwork with people suffering seen as other people far from us vs. close people as us. At the same time, I ask about WHAT IS our position from the academia to the street. To finish, I reflect about HOW Interpretive Autoethnography could be a way to promote social transformation for a better world.