who had a tremendous influence in my commitment to critical research and academic writing, among them Aníbal Ponce, Eduardo Galeano, Franz Fanon, Aimée Cesaire, and Emeterio Betances, among others. I do not discuss the contributions of these “teacher-mentors” here (for details about my educational routes, see Chapter Four and the Bonus Track). Below I discuss authors that I encountered during the completion of my graduate studies in anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.
Among the classical anthropologists, Claude Levi-Strauss (1963) was the most readable for me; I enjoyed learning about his Marxist-structuralism legacy that has been so powerful and necessary for us to get to the post-structural and post-colonial de-centering of western grand narratives. He was not, however, interested in ethnography per se, but his brilliant insights in other areas compensated for that. Clifford Geertz’s concept of “thick description,” proposing the need for interpretive analysis of fieldwork data and deeper contextualization of the “realist” storytelling aspect of ethnography, had a tremendous impact in ethnographic research and writings, and was hopeful to me (see 1973). I appreciate also the way he paid attention to the “trifles” of everyday life in his fieldwork, as necessary for “thick description” (2008), and for his poetic interpretations in reporting his ethnographic findings. He published also a book (strangely invisible in debates) about the anthropologist as creative author (see 1988). It was, however, a series of chance encounters with certain authors that marked my decision to complete ←23 | 24→my degree in anthropology. As it has probably become obvious, those years of my anthropology and ethnography training were very intense; indeed, there was a lot of crying and existential crisis, that helped me grow tremendously, and for which I am deeply grateful today.
The seminal article by the Mexican-American anthropologist Renato Rosaldo (1983) about headhunters’ rage (when loosing a dear person in war), was an important landmark in my formation. In that article he reflected about his own rage about the death of his wife, during his fieldwork research with the Illongots in Luzon, Philippines in the 1960–1970s. This moving and poignant self-reflection made a great impact in my conception of the separation between “field” and “home,” and about ethnographic narratives. I saw an example of the powerful writing that can be produced when the ethnographer (who is the main instrument of research and not an objective, neutral machine) becomes a visible aspect of reporting our research findings. Dorinne Kondo’s works were a revelation to me, through her Crafting Selves book, and especially, through reading her reflexive journal article “Dissolution and reconstitution of self” (1986), both based on her fieldwork research on gender and power in a Japanese workplace. Her Japanese-American experience in the country of her parents, her approach to ethnography and her powerful writing voice, had a crucial impact in my understanding of the complexity of ethnography, in my research practice, as well as in my writings. Kirin Narayan, an Indian-American anthropologist, through one of her self-reflexive articles (1993), helped me question our roles as “native” anthropologists, who study in communities with whom we share a common language and cultural history, and to understand critically our assumptions about difference and familiarity, and how false dichotomies of self/other, home/field are even more problematic for those of us in such positions (see also Jacob-Huey 2002). In a similar fashion, the problematizing of Kamala Visweswaran (1994) of the micro-politics of fieldwork for feminist anthropologists warned me of the dangers of assuming commonalities a priori, and the need to be critical of power differences, in spite of shared women’s experiences, in and outside of the “field.”
By a citation chance, I came across the work of Ruth Behar, a Jewish-Cuban-American anthropologist, through her book Translated Woman (1993) and her article about “anthropology that breaks your heart” (1996), based on her fieldwork with Esperanza (an ethnographic project focusing on only one person, but crowded with other humans surrounding her), taught me the benefits of an extreme form of focused “deep hanging-out,” and about the challenges of validity when our research sampling is very small (for further discussion of this see 1999). I also found in her work an echo of how emotionally challenging is to do work with marginalized individuals, to feel our impotence to help, and the delicate ethical negotiations of ←24 | 25→doing so even if we could. Other works, found through my graduate courses, have also been significant for designing my feminist critical ethnographic practice. The fierce poetics in the queer writings of Jafari Allen (2007), Audre Lorde (1984) and bell hooks (2000), taught me to dare to express my ethnographic voice, beyond a mere academic reflexivity, and to have the courage to also admit my limitations, contradictions and vulnerabilities, so the reader could best judge the accountability of my work.
Important also for my ethnographic understanding and practice were the work of Faye Harrison (see 1991, 1997), her radical approach to de-colonize anthropology and ethnographic practice and her focus on Afro-diasporas in the Caribbean. In fact, I assign now to my graduate students the article “ethnography as politics” (1991) as the best training ground before they go “into the field.” In the work of Haitian anthropologist Gina A. Ulysse (2007) I found a wonderful example of radical, post-colonial and critical feminist ethnography, that showed me the path to finish my dissertation. The book of Arlene Davila, Latinos Inc (2006), was crucial for me to understand the media production apparatus going beyond a semiotic analysis of representations, as well as to understand how and when Dominicans in NYC engaged with this pan-ethnicity label, and the role of media in identity politics. I later found other relevant works of hers, in particular related to Latinx ethnic enclaves or barrios (2003) and language and culture of Latinx in media (2000), as I had noticed that many ads and programs used food as metaphor. Davila helped me understand the complexity of ethnicity as cultural identity, specifically the emergence and transformations of the “Hispanic” and “Latino” labels, as problematic pan-ethnicity claims agglutinating a great diversity within immigrant populations and their descendants, as well as those “Hispanics” who resided, for example in New Mexico and other states which used to be part of México until the 19th century, when the US took over those territories (“we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us”).
Since audiovisual data was central to my project and to my approach to research, I searched related methods and found visual anthropology. The focus of this fringe sub-field was on ethnographic films (produced mostly by professional filmmakers in collaboration with ethnographers), it was a bit disappointing to me. However soon I found works by anthropologists that used audiovisual methods as central part of their ethnographic fieldwork (see Pink 2013, 2015). I found, as well, critiques of visual anthropology that open other doors unknown to me and that became, eventually, important in my teaching also. For example,
