This study addresses the ethnographic encounter between a researcher and teenage students, aged between 15 and 17, from a public high school in the capital of Brazil. The study aimed to investigate the processes of perception related to racial identification, especially for self-declared “pardos”. Based on participant observation in the classroom and individual interviews based on life trajectories, this paper puts into debate an experience report and partial reflections of ethnographic research carried out between August and November 2023. Field experience is understood as that in which we are inserted as thinking subjects (Ingold, 2019), considering the perspective of the interlocutors as essential to understand their experiences and associated phenomena. The complexity of racial identities construction in Brazil results in a diverse experience of racialization. To this end, understanding students' experiences is fundamental to understanding how these identities are perceived and acted upon by them, emphasizing the multiplicity of locations and the influence of everyday cultural and political practices in the formation of the subject (Brah, 2006). Moreover, considering the significance of interiorities (Corrêa, 2021), but without forgetting that they take up meanings of society. The imagined field was flooded by lived experience, by the demands and constant adaptations that were necessary to ensure that the study was conducted in a meaningful way for the interlocutor, in order to mobilize them to participate, to be part of, that is, to understand how we could mutually help us, as expressed by one interlocutor, as highlighted in the title of this proposal. It alerts to the exchange involved in participating in research and highlighting the demand to know the terms of the agreement in advance. Therefore, this work aims to demonstrate how the methodological agreements and adjustments came about, as well as the partial results from the dialogues conducted.