Many of the authors discussed in this informal genealogy were considered “minorities” due to their own cultural histories or diasporic origins and, hence, their mere existence influenced how I perceived my own problematic relationship to anthropology, my presence in this discipline and in academia, more broadly, since I was also an outsider, a working-class Dominican immigrant studying, of all places, in Texas. These outsider-within scholars represented for me a sense of hope and relief, a certainty that I was where I should be. The scholars discussed in above, and many more that I had to leave out, inspired a commitment to keep refining my ethnographic approach, to engaged scholarship and ethics, and a desire to produce powerful writings whenever I share my research findings. These authors have been mentors-teachers to me, even if, in the majority of cases, we have never met; in a sense, this is a thank you and homage to them, for what they have done, through their work, for me and for other minority scholars. Although some authors who I have discussed are not ethnographers, and the reader might be asking, what do those works have to do with ethnography? I hope it has become clear, that ethnography is an interdisciplinary praxis, and that, in order to be a good critical ethnographer “in the field,” we need to also become a critical scholar outside of it. In sharpening our understanding of the human condition, we sharpen also our “ethnographic eye.”
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