Finding Ramón: navigating failure and luck in Mexico

Failure is taboo. Yet as researchers we often encounter failure in the field and engage in confessional conversations with colleagues about ‘what went wrong’. Failure is regarded as an unfortunate and unproductive part of research. Better luck next time. In this paper I offer an autoethnographic narrative, tracing the attempt to find Ramón to conduct a longitudinal life history. A 20-something member of a group of street youth increasingly involved in gang and criminal activity when last we met, efforts to reconnect with Ramón more than a decade later were unsuccessful. I reflect on this apparent failure and how it provoked an unexpected appreciation of luck in ethnographic research.