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, the work of Faye Ginsburg I found by accident, and then kept looking for more. I had to show the film Atanarjuat (The Long Runner) for a course where I was the teaching assistant. I didn’t know anything about that film or indigenous media, and I watched in awe. ←25 | 26→I began looking for references, to help me understand what I had just watched, and found Ginsburg article (2003) and then her other writings on indigenous media and visual anthropology (see 1997 and 1998) . I have since found also her work with Rayna Rapp (an early feminist anthropologist that I had read before) on disability, and this work I assign now in some of my courses.
Other complementary sources were also needed, which I found through interdisciplinary works such as Donna Haraway (1988). For problematizing issues of “home” an article by Chandra Mohanty and Emily Martin (1986) and the work of Sarah Ahmed (1999) were significant for me, as they addressed clearly through their arguments concerns that I had in researching migrant senses of home. I rejoiced when I found memory studies scholars, such as Maurice Hallbachs (1992), Pierre Nora (1989) and Henri Lefebvre (1991), but it was the book Cultural Memory: Recall from the Present (see Bal et al. 1999), that gave me the critical understanding I needed on cultural memory and memory-work. I found the grounding I was looking for in place/space through two edited volumes, one by the anthropologist Setha Low (2003) and another by Gupta and Ferguson (1997). Yet it was through the more radical approaches of feminist political ecologists such as Dorine Massey, Nancy Fraser and Nancy Duncan (see Duncan 1996, for a discussion of the basics of this approach) that the relevance of these dimensions became clear to me and gave me the tools to analyze critically the place-data. I felt that I still needed more concrete methodological ways of researching place/space dimensions during fieldwork, which were not a focus in the anthropology courses I was taking. That is when I found the work of Maria Elisa Christie, a cultural geographer doing ecological mappings of house gardens in Mexico (see