This thesis is a descriptive study calling on ethnographic methods of qualitative research as a means to explore experiences of a Puerto Rican community in Detroit, Michigan. The central focus of this work is on personal researcher observations and on the retelling of experience-oriented narratives related to the perceptions of success and failure as told by two Puerto Rican identifying community organizers in Detroit. As an object of inquiry, the gathered narratives on success and failure are representative of community interactions, community engagement efforts, and cultural upbringing, capturing the rhetorical nature of success and failure and the ways in which they shape the work of community organizing. Largely, this research is motivated by a driving force to understand how community experiences and motives function to counteract commonplace narratives about Detroit, highlighting how the identities of those in organizational leadership roles operate as an avenue for engaging members of the community and moving toward a new narrative. The data explored in this thesis emerges from three separate phases of fieldwork research during which interviews, observations, and participations served as capacities for realizing the rhetorical characteristics of success and failure existing in this particular community.
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