Trapped in a moral order

This paper focuses on the forms of reflexivity that emerge in the conversational narratives of Latin American teenage school girls co-produced during sociolinguistic interviews, in a multicultural school in the centre of Madrid. The narratives about confrontation at school portray the girls’ actions and ways of making sense of such behaviours, in the course of their migrant life trajectories. Understanding narratives as communicative repertoires (Rymes 2014) of an interactive and situated nature makes them suitable discursive spaces for revealing the moral identity constructed, and the moral order evoked in these narratives. Herein we analyse stories recounting conflicts with three different groups of opponents: female peers, teachers and parents. It is in recounting and evaluating moments of conflict that social actors call upon their systems of beliefs and values. The failure of the girls’ secondary school and all the negative repercussions of such failure are central to the ethnographic circumstances in which their narratives are produced. Some attention will be given to the researcher’s reflexivity, as a co-teller of the narratives gathered, but also in the interpretations made of the data in the light of expectations built up over time regarding the social actors’ academic trajectories.