Undocumented Immigrants and

New Directions in Social Science

CAR SO BEJ
MIR JGOS G
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2019 with funding from
Duke University Libraries

https://archive.org/details/decolonizingethnOOalon
DECOLONIZING
ETHNOGRAPHY
DECOLONIZING
ETHNOGRAPHY
Undocumented Immigrants and
New Directions in Social Science

CAROLINA ALONSO BEJARANO / LUCIA LOPEZ JUAREZ

MIRIAN A. MIJANGOS GARCIA / DANIEL M. GOLDSTEIN

Duke University Press Durham and London 2019

 © 2019 duke university press All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper °°
Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker
Typeset in Minion Pro and Avenir by CGI

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Alonso Bejarano, Carolina, [date] author. | Lopez Juarez, Lucia,
author. | Mijangos Garcia, Mirian A., author. | Goldstein, Daniel M.,
[date] author.
Title: Decolonizing ethnography: undocumented immigrants and new
directions in social science / Carolina Alonso Bejarano,
Lucia Lopez Juarez, Mirian A. Mijangos Garda, and
Daniel M. Goldstein.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2019. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2018042313 (print) | lccn 2018060919 (ebook)
isbn 9781478004547 (ebook)
isbn 9781478003625 (hardcover : alk. paper)

isbn 9781478003953 (pbk,: alk. paper)

Subjects: lcsh: Anthropology—Methodology. | Ethnology—Methodology. |
Eurocentrism. | Critical pedagogy. | Racism in higher education. |
Education, Higher—Social aspects. | Education and globalization. |
Decolonization. | Marginality, Social—Developing countries.
Classification: lcc LC191.98.D44 (ebook) |
lcc LC191.98.D44 A46 2019 (print) ddc 378.008—dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018042313

Cover art: Illustration and hand lettering by Peter Quach. Courtesy

of the artist.

(opposite): Figure fm.i. Photo by Daniel M. Goldstein.

Para nuestro querido Evandro, Q.E.P.D.
 Contents

“broken poem” / be Preface / xi Acknowledgments / xv

Introduction / x

chapter i. Colonial Anthropology and Its Alternatives /17

chapter 2. Journeys toward Decolonizing / 38
chapter 3. Reflections on Fieldwork in New Jersey / 59
chapter 4. Undocumented Activist Theory and a
Decolonial Methodology / 78
chapter 5. Undocumented Theater: Writing and Resistance /

Conclusion /136

Notes / 149 References / 161 Index /179

.
 BROKEN POEM BY MGF

June 17, 2014

one of this day i will find the opportunity to become a president of

opss back to real life, well life is toff in this country usa,
since i come to this country to leave the american dream
so far only leaving by nightmares, so they say going to be easier
don’t worry,
but they never say to do worry to learn english.
do worry to have a legal green card
do worry to pay high price for rent your own habitate
do worry etc.etc.etc ...
so it is not easier i like to go back to my country wich is brazil...
but right now in brasil we have ... poverty all over,
hospital has no good management people are dieng.
scholls fall a part,has no teacher .money in people pocket only
for the rich ones.
i fell bad because right now am leaving in usa ...
i hope one day everything get in place.
 Preface

“Are you scared about Trump?” Carolina asked Mirian.

It was December 2016, and Donald Trump had recently been elected
president of the United States. Carolina and Mirian were in a restaurant in
downtown New Brunswick, NJ. They were warm inside the restaurant but it
was raining heavily outside.
Mirian looked at Caro for a long time without replying. Then she asked,
“Are you scared, nenaV’ Caro admitted that she was, and not just for her¬
self but also for so many people she loves. “People like you,” Carolina told
Mirian. Mirian said that, to the contrary, she was not more afraid than she
already had been. “I am here to stay. Ahora nos toca organizarnos aun mas
porque la ilegalidad no es solo un problema de nosotros los indocumentadosn
[Now it’s time to organize even more because illegality doesn’t only affect us,
the undocumented immigrants]. She smiled at Caro, who found comfort in
Mirian’s kind eyes.
Earlier that day Mirian had spoken to Carolina’s Latino Studies class
about her life as an undocumented woman organizer from Guatemala. She
told the students about working long days, having a work accident, and be¬
coming an ethnographer and activist in the immigrants’ rights movement.
She told them about her daughter who she has not seen in many years,
about civil disobedience and being in jail, and about her work as a singer
and songwriter. She sang one of her songs for the class, about the need for
immigration reform, and told students about the relationship between art
and activism.
It was important for Caro to bring Mirian to talk about her work in class
that day, only a few weeks after the election, because the debate around immi¬
gration was at the core of Trump’s presidential campaign. As poet Nicholas
Powers noted, “He won with a metaphor. He won with the image of a wall”
(Powers 2016). Mirian’s story, as well as her approach to activism, recognizes
that this metaphorical wall excludes many of us—and not just those of us
who are not U.S. citizens.
Much has happened in terms of immigration policy and political rhetoric
around immigration since we officially closed our four-year ethnographic
project in August, 2015. Despite the fact that the Obama administrations
“deportation machine” was operating at full force during our research and
remained unrivaled by the deportation efforts of any previous adminis¬
tration, it was not yet the era of Donald Trump and the open and state-
sanctioned hateful rhetoric toward immigrants from the Global South and
people of color in general. Under President Trump, the policy of the Obama
administration that prioritized the deportation of immigrants with criminal
records has been replaced by a “zero tolerance” policy in which everyone—
especially nonwhite folks, from toddlers to naturalized citizens—is subject
to incarceration and deportation.
This book is based on ethnographic research conducted in a New Jer¬
sey town between August 2011 and August 2015, when the policing and ha¬
rassment of immigrants in the United States was relatively less intense than
it would become under the Trump administration. As we go to press, the
modified “Muslim Ban” has been upheld by the Supreme Court; immigrant
families are being jailed by executive order; thousands of immigrant children
have been separated from their families, and many of them remain detained
or lost in the system despite a judicial order mandating immediate reunifica¬
tion; a new Denaturalization Task Force is targeting naturalized citizens for
deportation; the administration is attempting to end the Deferred Action
for Childhood Arrivals (daca) program that gives some protection to un¬
documented immigrants who came as minors ... The list goes on and on.
Based on our findings, in these pages we stress the rights that undocu¬
mented immigrants have in this country. We advocate for undocumented
people to engage with the justice system and to adopt direct action strategies
in defense of their dignity and rights. And we contend that ethnography can
be a tool for undocumented people in these struggles. Lucy and Mirian, the
two undocumented authors of this book, continue to follow this program
despite the increased risk for folks with their immigration status. In writing
this book with Carolina and Daniel they are asserting their right to think
freely, to speak publicly, and to exist in the United States. We recognize,
however, that the stakes have changed since we researched and wrote our
book as a call for action, at a time when a Trump presidency seemed im-

xii / PREFACE
probable at best. In the current era of regular ice raids in courtrooms across
the country, it is becoming increasingly difficult for undocumented immi¬
grants to engage with the justice system to defend their rights as workers and
as people. The same can be said about direct action strategies that may result
in people’s arrest and subsequent deportation.
But people, both documented and undocumented, are also responding
to the Trump administration’s immigration policies in the massive way that
we imagine in this book, and that we believe is necessary to bring about any
immigration reform in this country. As Mirian suggested above, people are
beginning to realize that the surging sexism, racism, and authoritarianism
of the Trump regime harms all of us—citizens and noncitizens. For instance,
“Abolish ice” has become a mainstream idea, as protesters flood the streets
and occupy buildings in outrage, especially after seeing and hearing footage
of immigrant children being held in cages by immigration officials. In a con¬
text of increased policing and demonization of immigrants—particularly
immigrants of color—but also of increased public awareness and engage¬
ment with the struggle for immigrants’ rights, we believe our book to be a
timely contribution to the movement for the recognition of the humanity of
all people. As Lucy says, today, in the midst of the rise of White Nationalism
as a policy of state in the United States, “we have to keep struggling against
our oppression. Like in the times of Martin Luther King, when you had to
risk something to get something. The history of decolonization continues.”

PREFACE / xiii
 Acknowledgments

This book would not be possible without the collaboration of countless

people in the place we call Hometown. We thank all those who shared their
stories with us, in particular the members of “Casa Hometown” and its di¬
rector, Rita Dentino, who made invaluable contributions to this project and
from the beginning welcomed us with open arms. Others to whom we are
indebted include Lauren Dempsey, Tony Dentino, John Leschak, Sima Mil-
graum, Juan Reyes, Jorge Torres, Roberto Vaca, and friends at Unidad Latina
en Accion, and Teresa Vivar at Lazos America Unida. We also thank the
many undocumented friends whose names we cannot include, owing to the
criminalization of undocumented immigrants in the United States.
The feedback from our two anonymous reviewers was indispensable
to shaping the arguments made in these pages. Angela Stuesse in particular
provided valuable feedback and engagement with our ideas. Other academic
friends and contributors to whom we give our thanks include Ulla Berg,
Linda Bosniak, Janice Fine, Alyshia Galvez, Peter Guarnaccia, Ursula Rao,
and Jasmin A. Young. Jeremy Friedman read the final draft of the book and
offered invaluable edits and feedback, and Peter Quach made illustrations
for us, which we included throughout the book and cover. We are grateful
to Gisela Fosado and her staff at Duke University Press for their patient and
skillful work on this project. Thanks also to the administrative staff in the De¬
partment of Anthropology at Rutgers University, particularly Ginny Caputo,
Shelly Harden, and Jovani Reaves, for logistical support throughout the re¬
search process.
This material is based in part upon work supported by the National Sci¬
ence Foundation under Grant Number 1324234. Any opinions, findings, and
conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of
the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science
Foundation. Preliminary funding was provided by the Russell Sage Founda¬
tion. Sections of chapter 3 originally appeared in Daniel M. Goldstein and
Carolina Alonso-Bejarano, 2017, “E-Terrify: Securitized Immigration and
Biometric Surveillance in the Workplace,” Human Organization 76 (1): 1-14.
Carolina thanks the administrators and faculty of the Departments of
Latino and Caribbean Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers
University, her two academic homes. In particular, her work has been in¬
spired by the mentoring and encouragement of Carlos U. Decena, Robyn M.
Rodriguez, Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Ed
Cohen, Drucilla Cornell, Elizabeth Grosz, Marisa Fuentes, Jasbir K. Puar,
and Daniel M. Goldstein. Throughout her years teaching at Rutgers, Caro
has encountered many students who have reflected with her upon the topics
discussed in this book. Special thanks go to Jamie King, an undergraduate
student and native of Hometown, who worked as her research assistant on
her dissertation project. The intellectual and emotional support of Martha
Lucia Bejarano Marin, Jorge Ernesto Alonso Munoz, Jasmin A. Young, Peter
Quach, Jeremy Friedman, Stephen Seely, Max Hantel, Stina Soderling,
Miriam Tola, Kendra Boyd, Jesse Bayker, Nafisa Tanjeem, Rosemary
Ndubuizu, Alexandra Demshock, Monica Ramon Rios, Carlos Labbe,
Marlita Greenwald, Tiana Hayden, Malav Kanuga, Efrain Rozas, J. Brager,
Enmanuel Martinez, Amanda Kaplan, the H(e)art House Collective, Nelson
de Witt, Juliana Devis Duran, David Lababsa, Huem Otero, Maria Paula
Vela Valdez, Juan Felipe Rodriguez Bueno, Nicolas Caceres Daza, Daniel
Casallas Noguera, Ana Maria Zuluaga Prada, Daniel Calderon Ardila, Adri¬
ana Gomez Unda, Ana Maria Canal, and Carolina de Angulo Sanz has been
invaluable for Carolina, who also thanks her family for supporting her every
step of the way. She forever stands in solidarity with Lucy, Mirian, and Daniel,
sus companeros de viaje etnografico, who shared with her the experience of
doing fieldwork while trying to be a better ally to undocumented folks.
Lucy thanks God and the Juquila Virgin for giving her life and allowing
her to write this book. She also thanks Caro and Daniel for inviting her and
Mirian to be the bridge, allowing them to learn many stories that touched
their hearts. Finally, Lucy thanks her husband and her children for their
support and understanding.
Daniel would like to thank his students, colleagues, and friends in and
around Rutgers University, who have constantly supported him in his work
and personal life. Huge thanks and appreciation to Lucy, Mirian, and Caro¬
lina for making this project possible.

xvi / ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
 Mirian thanks God for giving her the gift of writing and singing songs,
and also for giving her the privilege to migrate to this beautiful country
and meet wonderful people. She is grateful for her parents on Earth, Pedro
Mijangos and Maria Santos Garcia, and for her two children, Nick Segura
Mijangos, who first brought her to this country for his mountain biking
competition, and Kimberly Segura Mijangos, who at age twelve supported
Mirian in her decision to come to the United States. Her brothers and sisters
have also always been there for her. She thanks the organization Casa Home¬
town for the support and sisterhood she has found there. Don Eugenio and
his wife, Aracely, have offered Mirian unconditional support in times of
anguish. Don Narciso and his wife, Teresa, were the ones who took her to
Casa Hometown when she thought that no lawyer would help her, and Juan
Reyes was the first person to welcome her into the organization. Rita Den-
tino and her husband, Tony Dentino, took Mirian into their beautiful home
when she had nowhere to go, and they fought for her life. Sima Milgraum,
Mirian’s lawyer, also fought for her. The help of John Leschak and his family
has been invaluable for Mirian, as was the help from the doctors at Central
State Hospital in New Jersey. Mirian also thanks her friends from the
Domestic Workers Alliance. Her friend Lucy Lopez was her companion in
the field and in the fight for immigrants’ rights. Daniel Goldstein, her mae¬
stro, took the time to instruct Mirian and help her in this very special project.
Doctora Carolina, her friend and maestra, was a great collaborator in doing
the fieldwork and writing this book. Finally, Mirian thanks you, the reader,
for reading our book.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS / XVII
 Introduction

In 1991, Faye Harrison and her colleagues published a slim volume of essays
calling for the decolonization of anthropology.1 With postmodernist, feminist,
and political-economic approaches dominating the discussion of what might
constitute a critical anthropology for the twenty-first century, the scholars of
“the decolonizing generation” (Allen and Jobson 2016) put forward a differ¬
ent agenda. Perceiving a crisis in both the discipline and the world at large,
Harrison and her colleagues looked beyond the Western intellectual canon
for their inspiration while envisioning ways in which anthropology might
become an instrument for advocacy and progressive social change. They
posed questions that addressed anthropology’s colonial past and its contin¬
ued relevance to contemporary anthropological practice.2 “Can an authentic
anthropology emerge from the critical intellectual traditions and counter-
hegemonic struggles of Third World peoples?” Harrison asked. And, “How
can anthropological knowledge advance the interests of the world’s majority
during this period of ongoing crisis and uncertainty?” (Harrison 1991b, 1-2).
In the twenty-first century, these questions remain unanswered, their
urgency undiminished. The world today continues to present profound
challenges that frame anthropological practice: savage inequalities of income
and opportunity, sustained by an unbridled capitalism; intractable racism,
sexism, xeno- and homophobia, woven into the very fabric of our social
institutions; senseless and seemingly endless war; an ever-expanding prison-
industrial complex; political corruption and police brutality. Add to this a
pervasive feeling of insecurity—a precariousness born of the rapid concen¬
tration of wealth in the 1 percent, planetary climate change, and a permanent
War on Something (terror? opioids? immigrants? Take your pick)—and you
have our society circa the 2020s.
 How has anthropology responded to this reality?
The disciplines trajectory has been long and convoluted. Born in the co¬
lonial era as part of the broader Enlightenment project of discovering the un¬
known, early anthropologists studied the peoples of the lands then colonized
by Europe and the United States. For much of its history, anthropology—like
the other social sciences and related fields—understood itself to be a science,
basing its conclusions on supposedly objective research and dispassion¬
ate analysis while ignoring the obvious political realities in which its work
was embedded. In the 1960s and 1970s, some anthropologists—including
women, people of color, and anthropologists from the Global South—began
to criticize the objectivist stance, questioning the possibility of objectivity itself
and shifting the field away from a concern with grand questions of human
development toward more focused, problem-driven studies (Pels 1997,
2014). They also called into question anthropology’s colonial legacy, drawing
attention to the field’s origins in and, at times, collaboration with the proj¬
ect of colonial rule (Asad 1973; Stocking 1993). Anthropology—“a child of
Western imperialism” (Gough 1968,12; see also Forte 2014, 2016)—became
historicized and often critical, aiming not merely to understand society but
to denounce its inequities and cruelties.
These critiques led to significant and enduring changes in the discipline.
Anthropologists today are more attuned to the roles of power, history, and
political economy in shaping cultural realities and to the relationships be¬
tween large-scale, often global problems and the local worlds of the people
and institutions they study. Feminist anthropology has been influential in
making gender-based formations and inequalities central to the study of cul¬
tures and societies worldwide and in challenging the power imbalances that
exist within all forms of social life, academia included. Feminist and post¬
modern anthropologies have also inculcated an awareness in anthropologists
of their own roles in producing the knowledge they write about, including
attention to the author’s racialized and gendered “positionality” and the power
relations that underlie the ethnographic process itself.3 Applied or “practicing”
anthropologists, meanwhile, look to use ethnographic knowledge to make
change in the world, taking the discipline’s methods and findings and putting
them to work in an effort to improve the lives of others.4
Nevertheless, mainstream anthropology—what some critics (Restrepo
and Escobar 2005, 100) have called “dominant” anthropology—has yet to
engage fully with the decolonial challenge. Despite years of critique and the
many changes in its theory and method, anthropology, like other social
sciences, remains plagued by what we identify here as the coloniality at the

2 / INTRODUCTION
heart of the anthropological project (see chapter 1). In its theory, dominant
anthropology remains Eurocentric, even as many individual anthropolo¬
gists in their work struggle against Eurocentrism and its consequences. In
its methodology, dominant anthropology continues to endorse a model of
scholarship in which the lives of cultural others constitute the legitimate
objects of scholarly inquiry and to practice forms of research that distribute
power upward, from those being studied to those doing the studying. We
call this entire configuration colonial anthropology. This strain of anthropology
has dominated the discipline, in both its academic and applied forms, from
its founding to the present day.5 Anthropology’s unwillingness or inability
to come to terms with its coloniality limits its possibilities as a field of both
academic and applied research. And, we contend, unless anthropologists
fully reckon with its implications, the discipline will become steadily more
irrelevant, unable to engage meaningfully with the problems that confront
us in a world shaped by coloniality. In this book, we argue that a new kind of
mainstream anthropology can emerge from an engagement with decolonial
theory and methodology, an engagement that characterized the project
described in the chapters that follow.6
At the same time, however, this characterization is not meant to be
monolithic—colonial anthropology may be dominant, but it is not all-
encompassing. If anthropology remains colonial, it is a coloniality that, like
other regimes of power, is fractured and fraught with contradiction, con¬
taining spaces that afford the possibility of transformation. Within the
dominant paradigm, many scholars—uncomfortable with the inequities
of colonial anthropology and the discipline’s academic/applied rupture—
have developed approaches that challenge the field’s disconnection from the
world while maintaining its intellectual insights and critical edge. These
approaches appear under different labels, each with its own characteristic
adjective, though they sometimes overlap and compete. The “action” anthro¬
pology of Sol Tax, for example, was an early attempt to bridge the academic/
applied rift while challenging the power of the researcher, goals shared and
developed by those who do “Participatory Action Research” (e.g., Fals Borda
2001; Reason and Bradbury 2008; Smith 2015). Others have similarly de¬
veloped “collaborative” or “participatory” research methods to involve local
people in the work of ethnography and to advance their particular concerns
(e.g., Hale and Stephen 2014; Hemment 2007; Lassiter 2008; Reiter and
Oslender 2014). “Engaged,” “activist,” and “militant” anthropologists have called
for a more explicitly political approach to research design and method that
makes common cause with the struggles of those with whom ethnographers

INTRODUCTION / 3
work.7 Feminist, Black, indigenous, and queer anthropologists have issued
similar calls, locating activism and engagement as centerpieces of their intel¬
lectual and liberation work.8 Many anthropologists have endorsed a “public”
scholarship that includes everything from direct action to cultural critique;9
“world” and “native” anthropologists have challenged hegemonic modes of
understanding and pushed to open the field to non-Western theorists and
perspectives (e.g., Jones 1988; Lins Ribeiro 2014; Lins Ribeiro and Escobar
2006; Restrepo and Escobar 2005). Similarly, anthropologists interested in
what has been termed the “ontological turn” have asked how indigenous
ideas can converse with Western philosophy and have called for an anthro¬
pology that works for the “permanent decolonization of thought” (e.g.,
Viveiros de Castro 2009, 13). Each of these anthropologies represents an
important challenge to the colonial variety; each represents a response to
Harrison’s call for anthropologists to “accept the challenge of working to free
the study of humankind from the prevailing forces of global inequality and
dehumanization and to locate it firmly in the complex struggle for genuine
transformation” (Harrison 1991b, 10; see Berreman 1968). Many of these ap¬
proaches have inspired the project described in this book.
But powerful counterforces are at work in the academy. Those of us
looking to go beyond the limits of the dominant paradigm soon encounter
resistance from the centuries-old investment in the colonial-academic proj¬
ect. The academy is structured to defend the colonial approach to scholar¬
ship and to privilege those who collaborate to maintain it. These values are
reinforced by the culture of audit and accountability now rampant in the
neoliberal university (Overing 2006; Shore and Wright 1999; Strathern
2000). Graduate training programs and career ladders reward academic
publication, grant-getting, and, to a lesser extent, classroom teaching, all of
it quantified and ranked within a disciplinary hierarchy in which such work
is the only value worth pursuing. Conservative voices discourage us from
questioning our own authority and exploring too far outside the academy,
contributing to the lingering sense of powerlessness that we believe many
younger anthropologists feel. Those of us who wish to use our work to ad¬
vance a cause or address a different public often find ourselves without the
time or resources to do so, our advisors and colleagues encouraging us to
keep our focus on academic work—which, they insist, is “what we do best.”
Women, scholars of color, queer and indigenous people, and native anthro¬
pologists interested in nontraditional scholarship face additional hurdles in
the white public space of dominant anthropology (Brodkin, Morgen, and
Hutchinson 2011), our very identities seeming to underscore the lack of

4 / INTRODUCTION
detachment or “rigor” that skeptics find in anti-colonial research. The em¬
bodied experiences of field researchers, particularly of women and scholars
of color, are deemed inappropriate for the polite conversation of the acad¬
emy (Berry et al. 2017). Other forms of engagement are sometimes thought
to cheapen one’s academic profile, to reflect badly on one’s professional am¬
bition, or to interfere with one’s ability to produce “objective” scholarship.
In our experience, students in particular express doubts about the field’s
willingness to allow them to combine their academic and activist goals, and
they question their decision to pursue anthropology in the first place. They
express confusion when confronted with the diversity of counter-dominant
movements and fail to recognize themselves among the adjectives. “Am I an
‘engaged’ anthropologist?” they wonder. “I don’t see myself as an ‘activist.’”
“What the hell is a ‘public’ anthropologist?” And so on.
For instance, not long ago Daniel and Carolina were invited to speak about
their immigration research to a graduate seminar at a prestigious university,
in an anthropology department not known for a particular interest in aca¬
demic engagement or activism. The conversation quickly turned to political
and ethical issues and the possibility of using anthropological knowledge to
advance the causes one cares about. Many students in the seminar expressed
concerns about this, but one student in particular stood out. In her first year
of graduate school, she was planning to conduct dissertation fieldwork in
the town where she had grown up and so felt deeply obligated to use her
research to assist her informants—in her case, these included her family and
friends—in their local travails. This student was struggling to find a way
to do this, to find the relevance of her inquiries to the lives of the people
she studies. She was also deeply anxious about the possible professional and
social consequences of her work: that her university might not accept her
research as proper anthropology; that she might not ever be able to get an
academic job because her work might be seen as insufficiently conceptual
or abstract; or, alternatively, that her friends at home might ostracize her for
making abstractions out of their suffering. And she was worried that, for all
these reasons, anthropology might not be the right discipline for her.

Centering Alternative Anthropologies

This book has multiple audiences and agendas, one of which is to explore
the rights of undocumented immigrants in the United States. But it also ad¬
dresses academics, ethnographers, and social scientists, including students
and professionals like those described above, who seek to do more with

INTRODUCTION / 5
anthropology than just interpret the lives of others, building their careers by
fueling the academic machine. It is meant for those who—despite the long
history of critically engaged anthropology and the many achievements of
those who have come before—continue to doubt their abilities and seek per¬
mission to pursue their goals. We believe that these anthropologists are dis¬
satisfied with colonial anthropology’s position vis-a-vis the contemporary
world and its problems, in which the suffering of others is a subject of intel¬
lectual analysis but not typically of informed action.10 They are not content
within the narrow confines of academia and its normative limits on what
counts as legitimate scholarly work, but the usual forms of applied anthro¬
pology leave them hungry for theory and political engagement. These scholars
are troubled by the dominant anthropology, in which they recognize the
power imbalances that exist between themselves and the people who are
the objects of their research (and between themselves and their professional
mentors; see chapter 3). Many social scientists today continue to enjoy the
intellectual work of academia yet are searching for ways to engage the world
without retracing the colonial footsteps of their ancestors. Their fieldwork
brings them into close relationships with individuals and communities
caught in dire struggles for dignity and survival in a world of brutal and
enduring injustices, and they are outraged by the situations they encounter.11
Some researchers—including Black, Latinx,12 lgbtq, working-class, and
indigenous scholars—come from communities with intimate experience of
these struggles and find the academicization of suffering intolerable. Many
scholars are uncomfortable with cultural analysis or “critique” amid pro¬
found social violence.13 The questions of the decolonizing generation remain
relevant to this impulse: Many scholars are still asking Harrisons question,
“How can anthropological knowledge advance the interests of the world’s
majority during this period of ongoing crisis and uncertainty?” (Harrison
1991b, 1-2).
In recounting our work with undocumented people in New Jersey, we
describe a theory and a method for those looking not only to join schol¬
arship with social engagement and political activism but to challenge the
coloniality of anthropology itself. Inspired by earlier generations’ efforts to
decolonize anthropology and building on the many advances made by col¬
leagues practicing activist, feminist, world, and collaborative anthropolo¬
gies (among others), this book builds on and extends previous counter¬
dominant approaches to explore the possibility of remaking the problematic
ideologies and relationships that underlie ethnographic practice more gen¬
erally. To do so, the book draws on the literature of the “decolonial turn,” a

6 / INTRODUCTION
move within ethnic, area, and cultural studies that recognizes the colonial
nature of Western thought and scholarly inquiry and attempts to transcend
it.14 In that vein, we argue that anthropology’s enduring coloniality (a concept
we explore more fully in chapter 1) limits its possibilities and potential, in¬
flicts harm on the very people it seeks to understand, and alienates a gen¬
eration of students hoping to use the tools of anthropology to impact the
world. Countering this requires scholars once again to take seriously calls
to decolonize ethnographic research—to reexamine its history, reinvent its
present, and reimagine its future.
Central to our discussion is the methodological reassessment that decol¬
onizing requires. The colonial within anthropology is perhaps most evident
in the practice of ethnographic field research, long the discipline’s most dis¬
tinctive feature. Of course, some anthropologists “study up,” focusing their
attention on powerful people and institutions; others work in settings and
among groups to which this observation may not apply (Nader 1972). But
by and large, anthropology is known for studying the poor, the marginal¬
ized, the indigenous, the powerless. To collect its data, ethnography relies on
the disparities of power, position, and access inherent in the fieldwork rela¬
tionship, disparities that reflect the logics and structures of earlier colonial
formations. Colonial anthropology is made possible by the historical rela¬
tions that have subjected the many to the domination of the few, positioning
some within the academy to be able to study and know and intervene in
the lives of those located without. Whether understood as disinterested and
value-neutral or as attentive to identity, position, and power, research—the
techniques by which authoritative knowledge is produced—as traditionally
conducted in the academy remains a situated practice, grounded in ways
of thinking and doing characteristic of the West, unreflexively infused with
Western power, and perpetually reinscribing Western forms of knowledge,
representation, and authority (see Smith 2012). Colonial anthropology de¬
ploys the tools of ethnography to know the lifeworlds of others without
contributing to those worlds or allowing their inhabitants to become full ac¬
tors in or beneficiaries of the research process. The colonial strain of ethno¬
graphic research is extractive. It cracks open the oysters of other people’s
lives and harvests the rich goo within. It brings this material back to the
university, the factory wherein it deploys further tools—what it calls “theory,”
sets of ideas that are nearly always the products of Western thought—to
process raw materials from abroad and render them suitable for Western
consumption. In the academic-capitalist machine, the university depart¬
ment remains the place of absolute privilege to which most—even most

INTRODUCTION / 7
Ph.D.-carrying anthropologists—are denied access. The power to know is
restricted to those who are fortunate enough to speak and write from that
place of dominance.15
To decolonize anthropology (or, for that matter, any of the social sciences)
is to decenter the academic project as it has been historically understood,
recentering it on committed social praxis—“the instrumentalization of
liberating intellectual production” (Gordon 1991,156)—in its various forms.
This requires more than just “giving back” to those whom anthropologists
have studied,16 more than “engagement” in some general sense.17 It requires
ethnographers to recognize the privilege their colonial heritage bestows and
to dismantle the subject/object dichotomy on which all modern science is
founded. It asks them to take seriously “‘lateralist’ approaches to theory”
(Boyer and Howe 2015; see also Maurer 2005), what is sometimes called
“theory from below” or “theory from the south” (Comaroff and Comaroff
2012a), to understand and prioritize local conceptions of local realities,
rather than just running those realities through the interpretive machinery
of elite European social theory. It requires anthropologists to write in differ¬
ent ways to address multiple publics—not only the usual scholarly reader-
ship or even wider audiences of educated readers, but publics that include
anthropological subjects themselves. It asks ethnographic researchers to
acknowledge the privilege and power that come with assuming the Western
academic’s authoritative stance and to adopt a posture of humility and soli¬
darity in recognizing injustices and taking part in combating them. In doing
so, it frees scholars and researchers from convention, allowing them to open
themselves to the possibility of learning from others, rather than merely
learning about them (Jones and Jenkins 2008).
A decolonial methodology takes a different point of departure to arrive
at a different set of endpoints. It is anti-objectivist, not in the classic sense
of objectivity in which the anthropologist is exhorted to remain aloof from
her object of study in order to understand the truth of an ethnographic real¬
ity. Rather, the decolonial approach is anti-objectivist—or, in another sense,
anti-objectificationist—in that it asks ethnographers to regard their study
populations not as objects, but as fully equal subjects capable of becom¬
ing their own ethnographers. Instead of being the ones who know, in other
words, anthropologists can allow their historical objects to take control of
the research process and to benefit from the power that knowledge confers.
This means putting the instruments of ethnographic research in the hands
of local people so that they may produce knowledge about themselves, for
themselves.18

8 / INTRODUCTION
 Anthropologists, we are suggesting, can use the very tools of the disci¬
pline not merely to study and represent those whom a previous generation
called “the Other,” or even to advocate on their behalf, but to join with those
in struggle so that they may become scholars of their own lives and com¬
munities. Ethnographic research, its instruments and methods, can be used
not only by professional scholars to study subordinated peoples. Ethnogra¬
phy can be a tool of self-knowledge for the marginalized, and by enabling
them to better understand and articulate their condition, it can contribute to
popular struggles for liberation. Coincidentally, such an approach can lead
to better, richer ethnographic data, emerging from the engaged and embod¬
ied participation of local collaborators in the research process (Juris 2007).
To the extent that this approach inverts the relations of power and privilege
that have always characterized ethnographic work, it can begin to quiet the
ghosts of anthropology’s coloniality and make ethnography an instrument
of subaltern self-empowerment.
Given the diversity of adjectives from which to choose, we describe our
research in this book as a form of activist anthropology, though it has much
in common with other approaches mentioned previously as well. Ultimately,
we hope to see the emergence of new counter-dominant anthropologies that
incorporate and embrace the lessons of activist, engaged, feminist, indige¬
nous, collaborative, decolonial, world, and other critical predecessors. When
these alternative anthropologies move from the fringes to the center of the
canon, the fruits of the discipline will be available to the many, not only to
the privileged few. Anthropology will offer a toolset that the oppressed can
themselves adopt for their own political and intellectual projects. It will be
a discipline that can fully respond to the challenge of using ethnographic
knowledge to advance the interests of the world’s majority in these times of
relentless crisis, uncertainty, and peril.

Decolonizing Research on Undocumented Immigrants

The importance of decolonizing anthropology should be apparent to ethno¬

graphers working with undocumented people in the United States. The
situation of the undocumented—-the consequences that illegalization, ex¬
ploitation, and violence enact on their bodies, families, and lives—is clear
and compelling. Under these circumstances, merely researching and writing
academically about undocumented people seems profoundly immoral. To do
so is to participate in the same abusive systems that produce migrant vulner¬
ability in the first place. Like the machines that disfigure migrant bodies on

INTRODUCTION / 9
the farm and in the factory—like the machine of global capitalism that con¬
sumes human labor to generate wealth for privileged others—ethnographic
research about immigrants can be a machine, the lives and experiences of its
objects serving as raw material to fuel the academic engine. In our New Jersey
fieldwork, we—like many other researchers of undocumented lives19—felt
compelled to work with local people to fight back against the predicaments
in which they were enmeshed. We didn’t simply want to extract data, but to
use what we learned to throw a monkey wrench into the workings of both the
U.S. deportation regime and the academic-capitalist machinery of scientific
research.
To that end, in August of 2011 Carolina and Daniel—the academics on
the research team—began a project in activist anthropology that aimed to
join the work of ethnography to the struggle for undocumented workers’
rights. The project was to study how the “securitization of immigration” in
the United States was impacting undocumented people living in one small
New Jersey town. Two years later, Lucy and Mirian joined as research assis¬
tants. In time, we came to focus more specifically on the effects of immigrant
securitization on undocumented workers, as these were manifest through
such workplace abuses as wage theft and work accidents. We also worked as
activists, collaborating with two local community organizations advocating
for the rights of the undocumented. The details of the project are discussed
in chapter 3.
None of us anticipated that our collaboration would require us to take
a new perspective on ethnographic research, one that we are here calling “de¬
colonial.” Over the course of two years after joining the project, Lucy and
Mirian evolved from research assistants to collaborators to full-fledged
ethnographers while continuing to work as activists for immigrant rights
and immigration reform. In the process, they took the work of ethnography
and activism—two linked yet parallel elements in the project’s original
conception—and fully integrated them, such that the ethnographic re¬
search became indistinguishable from the activism. As they conducted
research about work accidents and wage theft, Mirian and Lucy not only
learned about and collected data on these problems. They also used the
research encounter to inform injured workers of their rights, to deliver
services directly to them, to exhort them to become active in demanding
benefits under the law, and to recruit them to join a local immigrant rights
organization. At the same time, the knowledge they gained through research
made them more effective activists. Through interviewing and participant
observation, Lucy and Mirian developed broader and deeper perspectives

10 / INTRODUCTION
on workplace abuses than what they knew from their own experiences
or from talking in isolated and unsystematic ways with victims of abuse.
These efforts contributed to an expanded understanding for all of us on the
research team. Armed with data to support our claims, we could argue more
forcefully for the rights of undocumented workers while empowering those
workers to take up their own defense.
We describe this research as decolonial for several reasons. For one, it was
Mirian and Lucy who took control of the research process and made eth¬
nography into something more than an academic exercise. Already activists
for immigrant rights, Lucy and Mirian found in ethnography a powerful
tool to enhance their ongoing activism and to create new spaces in which
they could work to activate others. They also experienced powerful personal
changes as they became more comfortable in their role as activist anthro¬
pologists, gaining increased confidence and a greater sense of efficacy in their
own lives. Similarly, Carolina and Daniel also grew as scholar/activists:
Through their engagement with Lucy, Mirian, and the undocumented com¬
munity of Hometown, they encountered their own assumptions about field
research, theorizing, and collaboration and attempted to grapple with them.
The data the project generated were rich and carefully documented, a much
more robust source for academic analysis and writing than ordinary field¬
work methods would have provided. Perhaps most importantly, the project
demonstrated the utility of ethnography as a tool for self-empowerment,
public advocacy, and personal transformation, both for professional scholars
and in the lives and communities of those historically identified as anthro¬
pology’s Others.
Another important decolonial finding to come from this research—one
discussed in more detail in chapter 4—is that ethnographic subjects can
themselves be the source of theory, rather than merely the objects on which
theory acts. In this project, we observed the emergence of an undocumented
activist’s theory of undocumentation—what might be called an “emic” or native
understanding of what it means to be undocumented and an activist in the
twenty-first-century United States. We call it “undocumented activist theory,”
for short. It is a theory of the nature of undocumentation, what it means, its
causes and appropriate responses to it, as developed by undocumented ac¬
tivists themselves. It is a theory that stands in contrast to those of academ¬
ics, who emphasize structural explanations that represent undocumented
immigrants as the suffering subjects of immigration policy and the objects
of critical scholarly analysis (Robbins 2013). Undocumented activist theory
recognizes these structural problems but identifies the lack of unity among

INTRODUCTION / 11
the undocumented as a factor contributing to their inability to demand the
rights that are their due as workers and human beings. Such a theory con¬
stitutes a set of ideas that demand to be taken seriously as theory, not dis¬
missed as a misreading or a folk notion. Nor is it static: In chapter 4 we track
the ways in which undocumented activist theory developed and changed as
Lucy and Mirian joined their activism with ethnography and learned more
about themselves and their community. Undocumented activist theory is
the product of those who create it: people who lack the requisite passport
into the lofty academic realms from which authorized theory flows, but who
are deeply engaged in resisting injustice and fostering reform and who are
struggling to make sense of their experience. By daring to theorize, the un¬
documented people in this book challenge the global division of knowing
that we criticize as an expression of colonial power. Taking undocumented
activist theory seriously is another decolonial move that this project—and
this book—undertakes.
Arjun Appadurai has called research a right. The right to research is “the
right to the tools through which any citizen can systematically increase
the stock of knowledge which they consider most vital to their survival as
human beings and to their claims as citizens” (Appadurai 2006,168). This is
a powerful insight, though it is limited by Appadurai’s insistence on citizen¬
ship. As our New Jersey fieldwork demonstrates, research is a valuable tool
for noncitizens as well, including the most marginalized and illegalized
people in society.20 In recognizing ethnographic research as an instrument
of self-discovery, community advocacy, and collective struggle, we find that
as ethnographers we already possess unique resources to contribute to the
causes we care about. What we learned from our New Jersey project is that
ethnography—the skills it provides, the methods it employs, the stance it
requires, and the knowledge it produces—can be a powerful instrument in
political activism and a productive force for positive social change. By offer¬
ing the tools of research to our friends in the field, we become their collabo¬
rators as they work to demand their rights and to denounce injustice more
effectively, and in doing so we can contribute to their struggles for social and
political reform.

A Decolonized Publication

This book is coauthored by four people from different backgrounds and per¬
spectives, an unlikely team of activist-researchers who embarked on an ethno¬
graphic project to learn what they could about undocumented workers

12 / INTRODUCTION
and, in the process, learned something about ethnography itself. Daniel was
the project’s principal investigator, a designation bestowed by the National
Science Foundation, which funded the majority of the research. Carolina
(aka “Caro”), at the time a graduate student in Women’s and Gender Stud¬
ies under Daniel’s supervision, had never previously studied anthropology
or practiced ethnographic research. Lucy and Mirian were residents of the
place we call “Hometown,” in central New Jersey. Undocumented immi¬
grants from Mexico and Guatemala, respectively, Lucy and Mirian had never
heard of anthropology or ethnography before the start of field research.
At the beginning, Daniel was the teacher, Carolina the student, and
Mirian and Lucy the employees or research assistants. But over the two years
in which we worked together, Mirian and Lucy also became the teachers,
demonstrating the true potential of a decolonized methodology for both
scholarly learning and political praxis. They seized the opportunity to do
ethnographic research, making it into a critical tool in their struggle for im¬
migrant rights and recognition. Mirian and Lucy turned our ethnographic
work into a vehicle for their activism and the knowledge we produced an
instrument for more effective advocacy. The results were transformative.
By the end of our project, ethnography had changed them and they had
changed ethnography.
The question of authorship is a complicated one for a decolonized an¬
thropology. Typically ethnographers, like many if not all researchers, work
collaboratively in the field, albeit within established hierarchies of author¬
ity. But anthropology is unlike many other sciences in its insistence on the
single-authored ethnography—lab-based sciences, for example, typically
assign authorship to all the various contributors to a project.21 This is probably
a relic of the discipline’s colonial past, in which the intrepid “Lone Ethno¬
grapher” set out by “himself” to document the unknown (Rosaldo 1989).
So, even today, when the time comes for writing up the research the scholar
assumes sole authorship of the final product. This is part of the extractive
nature of the traditional research enterprise, in which “writing” equates only
with the act of inscription, rather than with the whole range of activities that
preceded that act and made it possible. A decolonized anthropology must
recognize the contributions of those collaborators in the field who were inte¬
grally involved in data collection and with formulating the ideas that are put
down in writing. At the same time, however, the act of inscription should
not be underestimated. Sitting down and writing a book is an immensely
difficult task, requiring strict dedication of time and energy to bring the
project to fruition. Scholars must share authorship with their fieldwork

INTRODUCTION / 13
collaborators, but they also deserve recognition for the effort they invest
in producing the text out of the fieldwork experience. Determining author¬
ship is thus a task not without contradictions. It requires us to make tough,
politicized choices.
This book is coauthored by four people with different backgrounds, all
of whom participated in the field research and activism on which this book
is based. Daniel coordinated and managed the project and its many com¬
ponents and participated in the research and activism that comprised the
project’s daily work. In writing, he sat down daily at the keyboard to craft
the majority of this text. Carolina, whose work analyzes the relationship be¬
tween decolonial feminist theory and the production of immigrant “illegal¬
ity” in the United States, also wrote several sections of the book and provided
edits and comments for the other sections, which we later discussed and
incorporated. She also did the archival research that informs our description
of Hometown and selected and translated many of the fieldnotes included in
this book. Mirian and Lucy, in addition to coproducing much of the data on
which the book is based, were active in discussing the themes of the book
and the stories it tells; they reviewed the chapters, making comments and
suggestions that were incorporated into the final draff. Carolina, Mirian,
Lucy, and Daniel together wrote chapter 5, which includes a play that
dramatizes Mirian’s work accident and the lessons learned from it.
Determining authorship also raises the question of pseudonyms. Anyone
writing about the undocumented has to take care in disguising people’s
identities, for obvious reasons. But does it make sense to give authorial
credit to someone identified by a false name? Yes and no. On the one hand,
undocumented people are very familiar with pseudonyms and often use
them in their own lives. Many workers acquire fake identities in order to
work, borrowing or buying the Social Security numbers of others so that
they can be hired “legally” (see, e.g., Horton 2015). Other people use false
names to hide from the police, an abusive ex-partner, a creditor, or a crimi¬
nal gang. Some of these names can be quite creative. One of the jornale-
ros (day laborers) in Hometown calls himself “James Bond”; another has
adopted the sobriquet “Vicente Fernandez,” in honor of the famous Mexican
corrido singer, and laughs because gringos don’t get the joke. A good friend
named “Jose” once pulled Daniel aside before a meeting to say that most
people in town know him as “Tony,” and so Daniel shouldn’t be surprised if
he heard him addressed that way. Another friend, whom some people called
“Carmelita” and others “Juana,” one day admitted to Caro that her real name
was Magda. And so on.

14 / INTRODUCTION
 While it would not be inconsistent, then, to credit an undocumented
author using a pseudonym, it also defeats the purpose of acknowledging
that individual’s contribution to the book. In the end, that is why Lucy and
Mirian elected to identify themselves by their real names. They are proud
of the work they did on the project and want to be credited for their role in
producing this book. They want to be able to give copies to their children
and to friends in town and back home, to show that they have done some¬
thing important and unexpected in coauthoring a book in the United States.
They balance this pride, of course, with a certain trepidation in revealing
themselves fully before the public and the law, especially in this moment of
intensified hatred and policing of immigrants in the United States (see the
preface). The four of us had extensive discussions about this prior to publi¬
cation. Daniel and Caro thought it better to use only Mirian and Lucy’s first
names in listing authorship, but Mirian and Lucy felt differently. As Mirian
put it, in an email to Caro on November 10, 2017: “I want my last names to
be used [in the book]: because in the first place I am not afraid to have them
appear there and also because for me it is very important that my children
and my grandchildren and great-grandchildren see it, so it serves as an ex¬
ample for them.” Lucy said something similar, in an email of November 15,
2017: “I have decided to use my [real] name, because it is time to come
out of the shadows. Now is the time for a change, and besides that, I do
it to inspire many other people to arm ourselves with courage [armarnos
de valor]” The strength of these women and their commitment to the val¬
ues of dignity, defiance, and social activism (discussed later in this book)
are clear from their words. Though Caro and Daniel remained concerned
about the decision to publish real names, they deferred to Lucy and Mirian.
However, as a group we agreed not to use photographs that would put real
faces together with real names. Instead, we commissioned drawings from
the artist Peter Quach, another longtime friend and collaborator, which ap¬
pear throughout the book to illustrate its various themes. Where necessary,
some personal details have been altered to provide protection from possible
legal repercussions.
The chapters of the book tell the story of the research process while in¬
troducing readers to the problem of work-related injuries and abuses and
how they impact the lives of undocumented workers. Chapter 1 explores the
meaning of coloniality, begun in this introduction, in more detail. In par¬
ticular, it considers the implications of what has been called the “decolonial
turn” for anthropological research and how this and related ideas can help
anthropologists to move away from their historically produced coloniality

INTRODUCTION / 15
and toward a new perspective on theory and method. In chapter 2, we offer
an account of the personal and professional histories of the four coauthors
of this book, describing our journeys toward decolonizing ethnographic
research, to provide readers with the perspectives we each brought to the
project and how the ethnographic research intersected with our own activist
goals. Then, in chapter 3, we turn to a discussion of the research problem and
setting—the vulnerabilities facing undocumented workers in Hometown,
NJ—and how our research team came together to confront these issues.
The decolonial methodology and approach to undocumented theory that
emerged in the course of the research process is explored in chapter 4. At the
end of the research, the four of us authored and performed a one-act play
about work accidents, which we understood to be part of our ongoing efforts
to make our research public and productive for local residents, including
the people who served as participants in the research. This play appears as
part of chapter 5. Originally written in Spanish, we present the text of the
play here in both Spanish and English (with a translation by Carolina). In
the conclusion, we return to the question of what it means to decolonize an¬
thropology and why we believe it is so critical for the future of ethnographic
research.
One conclusion that might be drawn from the anti-colonial critiques
made in this book is that anthropology is on its deathbed, or should be—
indeed, others both within and outside of anthropology have made this very
claim (e.g., Mafeje 2001; Magubane and Faris 1985). We disagree among our¬
selves as to whether or not anthropology as a discipline can ultimately enact
a decolonial social science (see the conclusion), but we all agree that the
decolonial turn can signal a new beginning for ethnographers everywhere.
Though the book contains a strong critique of anthropology as traditionally
practiced, it is, in the end, a hopeful expression of all that ethnographic
research can and should be as we move forward into the future.

16 / INTRODUCTION
 1

COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY
AND ITS ALTERNATIVES

Anthropologists have long been critics of sexism, colonialism, racism, in¬

equality, and capitalist exploitation, especially in the sites and contexts in
which they practice ethnographic research. And yet anthropology remains a
colonial discipline, a reality that shapes its theories and methods and limits
its possibilities for engaged political action. Exploring this reality and point¬
ing the way toward alternatives are the aims of this chapter.
Anthropology emerged as a scientific discipline during the colonial era,
when Europeans were consolidating their control over the non-Western
territories that they had subjugated to their rule. The people of these terri¬
tories became anthropology’s objects of analysis, and anthropology became
the discipline in the Western scientific academy dedicated to the study of
non-Western peoples. Within the emerging social sciences, anthropology
laid claim to the “primitive” world as its intellectual turf, occupying what
has been called the “savage slot” in academia and ceding the study of the
modern or “civilized” to other fields (Trouillot 1991). Critical to this proj¬
ect was the ethnographic method, including the techniques of participant-
observation through long-term field research, which enabled anthropolo¬
gists to access the insiders’ perspectives on their own societies. Scholars
debate anthropology’s contributions to colonial rule, with some calling it
the “handmaiden of colonialism,” created merely to serve colonial interests,
a charge that others reject (Lewis 2or3). But whatever service they may have
provided colonizers, anthropologists benefited more from colonialism than
the colonial powers did from anthropology. Colonial domination of non-
European others made the world safe for anthropological fieldwork: With
the natives violently “pacified” and their territories opened for exploration,
anthropologists could readily move in to local indigenous communities and
set up shop (Asad 1979, 91-92). The colonial power structure enabled Eu¬
ropeans to safely observe and participate in the lives of non-Europeans, to
establish the long-term, intimate relations that became the basis for and the
hallmark of ethnographic fieldwork.
Yet, rarely if ever did anthropologists of the colonial era mention the fact
of colonialism or its possible impacts on the people they studied. Although
they worked with people whose lives were lived under the shadow of co¬
lonial rule, their own practice made possible by that rule, anthropologists
wrote as though they were studying a world apart, their objects living in
original societies untouched by outside influence. As Talal Asad observed,
this blindness to—or willful ignorance of—the colonial context was wide¬
spread and persisted well into the twentieth century: “It is not a matter of
dispute that social anthropology emerged as a distinctive discipline at the
beginning of the colonial era, that it became a flourishing academic profes¬
sion towards its close, or that throughout this period its efforts were devoted
to a description and analysis—carried out by Europeans, for a European
audience—of non-European societies dominated by European power. And
yet there is a strange reluctance on the part of most professional anthro¬
pologists to consider seriously the power structure within which their disci¬
pline has taken shape” (Asad 1973,14-15).
Anthropologists have since become much more aware of their discipline’s
colonial origins, and anthropology in general has become more critical and
political. A so-called crisis of anthropology came in the 1970s, when the
formal end of colonialism in most of the world shattered “the optimistic
scientific disciplinary confidence” of the past (Stocking 2001, 320) and an¬
thropologists’ claims to universal, generalizable knowledge about human
culture became untenable. New concerns, new theories, and new method¬
ologies began to take hold. Ethnographers began to denounce the condi¬
tions of inequality and disempowerment that many of their friends and
collaborators in the field experienced, offering powerful critiques of the
racist, sexist, capitalist formations that characterized their fieldsites. Femi¬
nist anthropology, meanwhile, gained greater influence as its long-standing
concerns with gender, sexism, and sexuality, and of gendered and racial-
ized power more generally, moved closer to the center of anthropological
attention. Many anthropologists were influenced by postcolonial theory,

18 / CHAPTER 1
becoming critical of the effects of European colonialism—and of subsequent
programs, including neoliberal capitalism—on the societies that they stud¬
ied. Such concepts as “community,” “development,” even “culture” became
explicit targets of critique as anthropological analysis became global, his¬
torical, and concerned with power at the most local of sites.1 Anthropology
had its postmodern turn, during which scholars interrogated the discipline’s
claims to knowledge and found them wanting, calling into question the very
possibility of scientific objectivity. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as part of
what is sometimes referred to as the “writing culture” moment, anthropolo¬
gists began to deconstruct ethnography’s authorial techniques and to ex¬
periment with new forms of ethnographic expression, often including their
subjects’ voices in their texts and recognizing the anthropological self as an
actor in the social world being depicted (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus
and Fischer 1986). Feminist anthropologists, their earlier efforts at literary
experimentation neglected or derided, critiqued the writing culture project’s
attempt to include “other voices” as a co-optation rather than a truly dialogi¬
cal innovation (Abu-Lughod 1991; Behar and Gordon 1996; Visweswaran
1994).2 More recently, collaborative, activist, and engaged forms of research
emerged as efforts to make anthropology more productive for the peoples
under study and more ethically sustainable for anthropologists themselves.
Yet, despite its concern with power, injustice, and inequality, including its
critique of its own colonial past, dominant anthropology—like all academic
disciplines—remains part of a larger colonial project. From a decolonial
perspective, this is the case not merely because of anthropology’s emergence
within the era of colonialism but because of its inherent coloniality. For con¬
temporary scholars and students, it is less relevant to ask whether early an¬
thropologists colluded with colonizers to facilitate colonial rule than it is
to examine the inscription of coloniality in anthropology’s dna. To under¬
stand this claim, in this chapter we explore the idea of coloniality and the
role that science—including so-called soft sciences like anthropology—have
played in maintaining it.
It is impossible in one small book to provide a comprehensive summary
of the extensive, interdisciplinary scholarship on colonialism and postcolo¬
nialism, or the so-called decolonial turn.3 Nor can we delineate the variations
within the colonial project stemming from the different national origins of
the colonizers, the cultures of the colonized, or the specificities of the colo¬
nial encounter in different world regions. Nor is that necessary for our argu¬
ment. The idea of “the colonial” here does more than reference the events of
a particular historical period. Rather, we use “the colonial” and “coloniality”

Colonial Anthropology and Its Alternatives / 19

to mark an entire structure of racialized and gendered power and social
inequality within which ethnographic research has been, and continues
to be, conducted; decolonizing is the process of undoing that inequality, of
exposing and dismantling ethnography’s deep coloniality. Thus, in what
follows we describe a theoretical framework for remaking colonial anthro¬
pology, employing some of the insights gained from a reading of feminist
theory, indigenous critique, and the decolonial turn, which we consider to
be underutilized resources for decolonizing anthropology. (Throughout, the
more technical aspects of the discussion can be found in the endnotes.) We
then assess anthropology and its history, reviewing its colonial origins and
the formation of its dominant variety in the twentieth century, exploring
the coloniality inherent in traditional anthropological practice. This section
is followed by a look at some alternative approaches—including feminist,
collaborative, world, and activist anthropologies—that represent precedents
for pushing back against colonial anthropology. Those approaches inspired
our own project, which we discuss in more detail in the chapters that follow.

Anthropology, Coloniality, and the Politics of Knowing

DECOLONIAL FEMINIST THEORY

In the most general sense, the colonial era can be said to have begun with the
voyage of Christopher Columbus to the “New World” in 1492. It lasted into
the mid-twentieth century, by which time most colonized lands had become
independent nations. But centuries of political, economic, and cultural rule
by Europeans and U.S. Americans over the rest of the worlds peoples left
their mark on the way all people continue to live, act, and think. Decolo¬
nial theory represents an effort to examine and challenge the many ways in
which colonial experience is embedded, not just in people’s everyday lives,
but in scholarly efforts to understand those lives and to write about them.
World history, for example, has traditionally been written from the per¬
spective of the West, for a Western audience, focusing on Western accom¬
plishments. Until relatively recently, when non-Western people appeared in
these histories it was as savage others standing in the way of civilization’s
“progress” and the unfolding of the West’s manifest destiny. Early social
scientists, concerned with contemporary realities more than historical ones,
produced similar stories, with non-Western people understood as evolution¬
ary precursors to modern Europeans, living relics of the past who might, with
proper guidance, someday attain the Europeans’ level of civilization. Western

20 / chapter 1
“Man” was taken for granted as representing the fundamentally human, and
Western experience was equated with human experience, universal and
all-encompassing (Wynter 2003).
By the mid- to late twentieth century—as the colonial era was finally end¬
ing in most of the world, with the formation of independent nations out of
formerly colonized territories—the hegemony of the Western perspective
was being questioned, significantly by non-Western scholars who rejected
the universalist posture of Western historiography and science. The interdis¬
ciplinary field of postcolonial studies drew scholarly attention to the West’s
construction of itself through its colonial encounters with non-Western
others. For postcolonial scholars like Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, and
Homi Bhabha, the West (the “occidental”) and the non-West (the “oriental”)
were not fundamental opposites but deeply intertwined and mutually con¬
stitutive (Said 1978).4 The world, in other words, is not merely the story of
the modern West, nor history solely the product of Western expansion and
its impacts (Bhambra 2014).5 Postcolonialists argued instead that the idea of
“the West” itself was a product of colonial engagement with the colonized, as
colonizers encountered difference and, in the process, invented themselves
and imagined their own inherent superiority (Said 1978,1993).6 Postcolonial
scholars inserted other histories, other narratives into the historical record,
calling on the experiences of the subjugated (the “subaltern”) to diversify and
problematize the universalist narrative of the West.7 But these postcolonial
insights came with a caveat: In the process of writing about the subaltern,
Spivak warned, scholars must be cautious about “speaking for” them, intro¬
ducing a concern with the politics of representation into the postcolonial
conversation (Spivak 1988; see also Spivak 1999).8 Spivak and other feminist
scholars criticized academics who pretended to give voice to the oppressed,
seeming to allow the subaltern to speak for themselves while obscuring the
power and privilege that permitted academics to author such accounts.
Decolonial theory shares some basic premises with postcolonial and
subaltern studies, especially in its effort to see Western experience not as a
universal project of Europe but as a particular one of engagement between
Europe and the colonial world.9 But decolonial theorists reject postcolonial
studies’ reliance on works of European philosophy, drawing instead from, and
continuing the work of, non-Western, colonized writers and intellectuals.10
Decolonial theory reaches beyond the academy to valorize the knowledges
of the colonized—ways of thinking that colonizers tried to suppress or
destroy11—and calls attention to the work of thinkers (indigenous and Black

Colonial Anthropology and Its Alternatives / 21

people, among others) not ordinarily recognized as such within the Western
canon.12
Most significant for our discussion is decolonial theory’s distinction
between colonialism and coloniality. Colonialism is a system of political,
economic, and cultural domination in which one nation or people estab¬
lishes sovereignty over another. Coloniality is what endures, long after the
formal systems of colonial rule have disappeared.13 It includes structures of
and ideas about race, gender, and sexuality characteristic of colonialism and
is animated by its logics of rationality, heteronormative patriarchy,14 white
supremacy, and Eurocentrism. For cultural theorist Nelson Maldonado-
Torres, coloniality refers to the enduring patterns and systems that emerged
during the colonial era and that continue to define cultural meanings, eco¬
nomic organization, social relations, and knowledge production: “Thus, co¬
loniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria
for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the
self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our
modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all
the time and every day” (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 243).
Sociologist Anibal Quijano observes that coloniality “is still the most
general form of domination in the world today, once colonialism as an ex¬
plicit political order was destroyed. It doesn’t exhaust, obviously, the condi¬
tions or the modes of exploitation and domination between peoples. But it
hasn’t ceased to be, for 500 years, their main framework” (Quijano 2007,170;
see also Quijano 2001). Or, as Ranajit Guha puts it, “The colonial experience
has outlived decolonization and continues to be related significantly to the
concerns of our time” (Guha 2001, 41-42).
Examples of coloniality in contemporary society abound. To mention
but one, take the prevalence of white Western standards of female beauty-
lightness of skin, straightness of hair, thinness of nose, and so on—in many
places, both within and outside the West (Bryant 2013; Svitak 2014). Non-
Western women purchase skin lighteners, hair straighteners, and other cos¬
metics in an effort to approximate the Eurocentric ideal, while global popular
culture valorizes that ideal through entertainment, advertising, beauty pag¬
eants, and the like (Cohen, Wilk, and Stoeltje 1995; Goldstein 2000). The per¬
sistence of these beauty standards—established in colonial times and existing
well beyond the end of colonialism in most of the world—demonstrates the
coloniality of beauty today. Importantly, however, conformity with West¬
ern ideals is not universal: Women in many societies (including Western
women of color) have challenged white Western standards, valorizing the

22 / chapter 1
beauty of non-Western and nonwhite features, often through organized
movements, education and ad campaigns, and documentary films (Feminist
Africa 2016; Sefa-Boakye 2015; Steele 2016). This fact points to another element
of coloniality: It is not uniform and all encompassing, but often fragmented
and contains spaces for resistance (see figure 1.1).
Decolonial theory takes seriously the role of race in the colonial proj¬
ect. The concept of race was critical to the founding and maintenance of all
colonial institutions, beliefs, and behaviors. Racist assumptions about the
natural superiority of the European over the non-European served to or¬
ganize the entire colonial framework of rule, what Quijano calls the “co¬
lonial matrix of power.”15 Colonized peoples were defined within the racist
colonial matrix as savages, “the ultimate locus of inferiority,” reduced to the
category of natural objects and so inherently governable by the civilized.16
As Boaventura de Sousa Santos et al. observe, the non-Western person was
“constituted as an intrinsically disqualified being, a collection of character¬
istics that were markers of inferiority towards the power and knowledge of
the West and, thus, available for use and appropriation by the latter” (Santos,
Nunes, and Meneses 2007, xxxv). Being inherently inferior to the European
forms of knowledge and belief, non-Western forms could be replaced—by
force, if necessary—with colonial understandings. This was a critical dimen¬
sion of colonialism that complemented its exploitive, extractive side with a
“civilizing mission” intended to uplift the non-European through education,
religion, and reform. Christianity, European language, Western styles of
dress, of sexual modesty, of personal deportment—all of these and more
were presumed to be superior to the local varieties and so would replace
them. “Race” located native inferiority in the body of the colonized, destin¬
ing nonwhites to servitude and abuse. Intellectual ability was also supposed
to coincide with race: Colonizers viewed themselves as capable of rational
thought, colonized peoples as only able to respond to base urges and emo¬
tions.17 Those unable to think for themselves, consequently, were considered
disposable—rapeable, killable fodder for colonial armies and factories and
farms (Mbembe 2003).
Feminist decolonial theorists further complicated these insights by
applying them to considerations of gender, sex, and sexuality. If race was
introduced in the colonial context as a way to identify the colonized as radi¬
cally different from the colonizer, gender was an equally important system
for drawing such distinctions, both between colonizer and colonized and
within those groups as well. Feminist decolonial scholar Maria Lugones calls
this the “modern/colonial gender system” (Lugones 2007). In contrast to the

Colonial Anthropology and Its Alternatives / 23

figure 1.1. Members of Casa Hometown march in support of immigrants’ rights;
May i, 2013. Illustration by Peter Quach.
Christian civilizing mission, which had as its ostensible aim the conversion
of savage others into modern Christians, the modern/colonial gender system
had a different if unspoken mission: to further dehumanize the colonized.
As with race, Lugones says, gender operated in the colonial context to estab¬
lish contrasts between Europeans and natives. Within the European gender
system, “woman” is characterized by her passivity, domesticity, and sexual
purity; she is responsible for the reproduction of race and capital and the
maintenance of the bourgeois family (see Stoler 1989a, 1989b.). In this role
she is subordinate to “man,” who in turn is strong, heterosexual, and Chris¬
tian, fit for public life and political rule. Within the ruling class, the gender¬
ing of white women subordinates them to patriarchal authority, within the
home and in public life, both domains also prescribing a normative hetero¬
sexuality.18 Meanwhile, Europeans judged the colonized to be more beast
than human, their bodily behaviors “promiscuous, grotesquely sexual, and
sinful” (Lugones 2010, 743). As with race, colonizers viewed the colonized as
violating European gender norms, thus requiring their subordination and
control. Colonized men, for example, were regarded as sexual predators, a
menace especially to white women by virtue of their out-of-control sexual¬
ity. As such, colonizers viewed dark-skinned men as needing strict policing,
humiliation, and monitoring by white colonial men to keep them in line.19
In these analyses, Lugones and other feminist decolonial scholars call at¬
tention to the intersectionality of race and gender, their coconstitution and
mutual perpetuation (McClintock 1995; see also Alexander and Mohanty
1997; Crenshaw 1989; Etienne and Leacock 1980; Lugones 2012; Minh-ha
1989; Mohanty 1988). Many anthropologists have provided contemporary
and historical examples that illustrate the theories described here, includ¬
ing the ways in which the colonial matrix of power contained resources
that the colonized could use to challenge their subordination. For example,
Sally Engle Merry’s work on the colonization of Hawaii provides an excel¬
lent illustration of the ways in which race and gender were key factors in
the restructuring of Hawaiian culture, politics, and economy, accomplished
through changes in the legal system implemented by U.S. colonizers.20
For all its utility, decolonial theory has been limited by its focus mainly on
the humanities. Postcolonial and decolonial theory has emerged largely
from the work of cultural studies scholars, including historians, literary
theorists, and philosophers, most of whom rely on texts as the basis of their
analyses. This approach has led to many valuable insights, some of which
have been discussed previously. But one may wonder about the adequacy of
an exclusively text-based field to achieve the goals that decolonial theorists

Colonial Anthropology and Its Alternatives / 25

have set for themselves. Anthropologists and other social researchers may
be skeptical as to how, for example, reflections on the seventeenth-century
writings of the Andean chronicler Guaman Poma (Mignolo 2011b) serve to
achieve the decolonial goal of “halting] the practices of domination and
exclusion in the world-system” (Dussel 1998, 19).21 Anthropologists should
be intrigued by the decolonial effort to think “from a subaltern perspec¬
tive,” from the viewpoint of those historically marginalized and subordi¬
nated (Mignolo 2002; see also Anzaldua 1987). But at what point does the
desire to think from the perspective of subalternity become another act of
ventriloquism, the same kind of privileged representation to which feminist
scholars have alerted us?22 Without sustained dialogue with and full engage¬
ment in the lived reality of those labeled subaltern, can scholars presume
to understand their perspectives, much less to think or speak from them?
This is perhaps what Bolivian intellectual and activist Silvia Rivera Cusican-
qui has in mind when she critiques the decolonial project as another form
of colonialism, incapable of unsettling long-standing forms of political and
social inequality: “Without altering anything of the relations of force in the
‘palaces’ of empire, the cultural studies departments of North American uni¬
versities have adopted the ideas of subaltern studies and launched debates
in Latin America, thus creating a jargon, a conceptual apparatus, and forms
of reference and counterreference that have isolated academic treatises from
any obligation to or dialogue with insurgent social forces” (Rivera Cusican-
qui 2012, 98).
Decolonial theory has sometimes aggregated subaltern people in a way
that neglects diversity among oppressed peoples and erases differences be¬
tween geographical locations. This is the case in decolonial observations
about Latin America, where “the subaltern” tend to be lumped together as
a single entity, culturally and historically homogenized. Decolonial theory
pushes us to attend to the interactions of race, place, class, and gender as
discursive categories that shape past and present social relations in the re¬
gion; yet, as Kiran Asher observes, “Latin American people and places are
assumed as categories of analysis rather than parsed” (Asher 2013, 839), the
great diversity in the region ignored in favor of homogenizing claims about
subaltern consciousness, practice, and thought. Ultimately, this approach
can universalize a particular experience, repeating the mistake of the uni¬
versalizing Western perspective it explicitly rejects. It can also reproduce an
ideology of indigenism, the attribution of a cultural purity and originality to
an imagined indigenous or subaltern subject (Simpson 2014).

26 / CHAPTER 1
 Perhaps for these deficiencies, decolonial theory has not found much
of a foothold in the social sciences. But the need for decolonization of
the social sciences remains, and despite its limitations, decolonial theory
offers some powerful tools for taking apart and reassembling contemporary
anthropology.

MODERN SCIENCE AND ETHNOGRAPHIC COLONIALITY

Within the colonial matrix of power, modern science served as the instru¬
ment by which Europeans advanced their comprehension of the world.23
As Europe extended its tentacles of economic exploitation and political and
cultural domination, science was the tool by which the world could be made
knowable to the European mind and white, male supremacy rendered as
natural and inevitable. Modern science was established on the same univer-
salist framework as colonialism, in which the European was the only fully
human being and hence the only possible subject capable of exercising
agency and possessing knowledge; all others, being inferior by nature to the
European, could only be the objects of “his” knowledge. Scientific knowl¬
edge served a variety of functions for the European, helping him to know,
understand, and therefore govern and control the world that surrounded
him (see Haraway 1991). A range of technoscientific fields—including phi¬
lology, ecology, telecommunications, and medicine, among others—served
not only to advance European domination of colonized others; science and
technology were staged to elicit admiration from the colonized and so to
affirm the appropriateness of colonial rule. “As part of the civilising mis¬
sion,” notes Suman Seth, “science played two contradictory roles in colonial
discourse, at once making clear to the ‘natives’ the kind of knowledge that
they lacked (which omission justified colonialism itself), and holding out
the hope that such knowledge could be theirs.”24 Such a promise, of course,
could never be realized, due to what Europeans believed to be the inherent
mental deficiencies of the colonized. Quijano notes that under colonialism,
the knower/known, subject/object relationship obstructed the possibility of
communication and shared knowledge production between Western and
non-Western peoples (Quijano 2007). Collaboration, in other words, was
impossible in the colonial context. The basic paradigm of Western science
recognized the Westerner as subject and the non-Westerner only as object,
capable of being known but never knowing in her own right.
The aim of Western science thus became, as Santos puts it, “knowledge-
as-regulation”: Scientific knowledge accumulated to establish a mastery of

Colonial Anthropology and Its Alternatives / 27

the world, following a trajectory from ignorance, which is understood as a
form of disorder, to knowledge, understood as order (Santos 1995, 25). But
science, then and now, does more than know the unknown—it also works
to delegitimize other, nonscientific forms of knowledge. Only modern/co¬
lonial science can be a legitimate means of knowing; non-Western systems
of knowledge and belief are discredited in the scientific model, dismissed as
unsystematic, irrational, and false. Modern science produces a “monoculture
of knowledge,” in which science serves as the sole measure of truth (Santos
2006,17). Other forms of knowing that do not fit the scientific monoculture
are rendered nonexistent in a process that Santos calls “epistemicide”: “Non¬
existence is produced,” he says, “whenever a certain entity is disqualified and
rendered invisible, unintelligible or irreversibly discardable” (Santos 2006,
15-16). This sense of nonexistence, of invisibility, is also fundamental to the
colonial racial hierarchy, at one time a scientifically valid system of human
classification; though no longer considered scientifically true, race neverthe¬
less continues to operate as part of Western coloniality, erasing that which
does not fit its criteria of worthiness. “What is invisible about the person
of color,” Maldonado-Torres says, referencing African American novelist
Ralph Ellison, “is its very humanity” (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 257).
This basic relationship has changed little from the colonial era to the
present and to this day characterizes social science research in the colonial
mode. The formative logic of the colonial ethnographic research relation¬
ship prescribes a stance of dominance and subordination between those
doing the research and those who are its objects. It is grounded in the no¬
tion, rarely reflected upon, that “scientists have the ‘right’ (and ability) to
intellectually know, interpret, and represent others” (Cannella and Manu¬
elito 2008, 49). In its early days, anthropological research entailed rendering
all that was different and other about the non-European knowable to the
West; occupying the space of rationality and superiority, the anthropologi¬
cal participant-observer became the knowing subject par excellence. Ethno¬
graphic research was—and still is—based on a unidirectional subject/object
knowledge transfer, in which information flows from (knowable) object
to (knowing) subject, with the latter able to represent that information to
others of its kind.25 The power in such a relationship lies with the one who
knows, a neat reflection of the coloniality within which such relations are
constituted. This imbalance is reproduced in the research process, in which
the one who knows also calls the shots. In the dominant variety of ethno¬
graphic research, the researcher decides what questions are to be investi¬
gated and what is important and unimportant in the data she collects. The

28 / CHAPTER 1
researcher chooses the methods to be used and decides when to use them.
The researcher analyzes the data using theory, ideas drawn from the scholarly
canon, which in dominant anthropology is remarkably narrow and Euro¬
centric. The research complete, the researcher decides what to write about
the data collected, how to write it, and for whom.26
The objects of anthropological research, meanwhile, have little role to
play in this process beyond being providers of “unprocessed data” (Comaroff
and Comaroff 2012b, 114). Dominant anthropological research is extractive
because it effectively mines local terrain for rich nuggets of raw data, which
it then exports and refines (Goldstein 2012; Lins Ribeiro 2014). In both the
colonial and postcolonial contexts, the parallels between extractive research
and other industrial processes are evident and easily recognized as a form
of capitalist production in the transnational mode. As Jean Comaroff and
John Comaroff put it, non-European peoples “are treated less as sources of
refined knowledge than as reservoirs of raw fact: of the minutiae from which
Euromodernity might fashion its testable theories and transcendent truths.
Just as it has long capitalized on non-Western ‘raw materials’ by ostensibly
adding value and refinement to them” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012b, 114).
In dominant anthropological research, the objects of research play no role in
defining the research questions and experience little to no benefit as a result
of it. In the end, the foreign researcher can build a career from this work and
enjoy a comfortable middle-class Western lifestyle, while those who provide
the raw materials for research remain in the conditions in which the anthro¬
pologist first encountered them.
Similar ideologies and practices can be found in other forms of social
research—for example, in applied research guided by a humanitarian logic.27
This kind of research aims to “help” formerly colonized peoples, enabling
them to “develop” or rescuing them from the chains of “cultural tradition.”
Even though these researchers today are often “well-meaning, hardworking,
middle-class missionaries, liberals, modernists, and believers in science,
equality and progress,” quite distinct from the “rapacious bandit-kings” of
the colonial era (Nandy 1989, xi), contemporary humanitarianism bears the
coloniality of the European civilizing mission. Humanitarian researchers
may be attached to ngos or foreign governments, whose research aims are
modernist, developmentalist, or religious, undertaken with the intent of sav¬
ing the benighted native. They may be university-based academics, whose
goals are more nebulous but whose work is somehow seen as contributing
in a general way to “humankind.” Even activist and engaged scholars, if
they are not careful, can slip into the mode of “helping” those with whom

Colonial Anthropology and Its Alternatives / 29

they collaborate, a condescension that serves the ego of the bourgeois sub¬
ject more than it does the ostensible objects of assistance.
Social researchers may have some understanding of the colonial history
of the people and places they study, but they are often unable or unwilling to
perceive the coloniality that structures their own relationship to their fields,
their employers, and their research objects. This coloniality in turn frames
ethnographic writing, which masks the modernizing masculine liberalism that
persists in the humanist research project. This represents another potential
pitfall for engaged and other anti-colonial anthropologists, who embrace cri¬
tique without actually destabilizing their own privilege. The ethnographies
produced under these conditions can embody what Mary Louise Pratt calls
anti-conquest: “The strategies of representation whereby European bourgeois
subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert
European hegemony.... The main protagonist of the anti-conquest is a fig¬
ure I sometimes call the ‘seeing man,’ an admittedly unfriendly label for the
white male subject of European landscape discourse—he whose imperial
eyes passively look out and possess” (Pratt 1992, 9; see also Coronil 1996;
Restrepo and Escobar 2005).
No wonder, then, that for many non-Western people, especially indig¬
enous people, “research” is an imperial tool, part of an unbroken chain of
domination extending from colonial times to the present (Biolsi and Zim¬
merman 1997; Deloria 1969). Just as they have long resisted colonial domi¬
nation, formerly and currently colonized peoples may resist the research
process and its coloniality, which they recognize all too clearly as racist and
extractive. Of central importance here is Western science’s dismissal of all
ideas that do not conform with its logic, a stance that is profoundly alienat¬
ing to those cast as the objects of the scientific gaze.28 Linda Tuhiwai Smith
does not use the concept of coloniality, but her critique of what she calls
“research through imperial eyes” contains a similar recognition; research,
Smith says, is:

an approach which assumes that Western ideas about the most fun¬
damental things are the only ideas possible to hold, certainly the only
rational ideas, and the only ideas which can make sense of the world,
of reality, of social life and of human beings. It is an approach to in¬
digenous peoples which still conveys a sense of innate superiority and
an overabundance of desire to bring progress into the lives of indig¬
enous peoples—spiritually, intellectually, socially and economically.
It is research which from indigenous perspectives “steals” knowledge

30 / chapter 1
 from others and then uses it to benefit the people who “stole” it. Some
indigenous and minority group researchers would call this approach
simply racist. (Smith 2012, 58)

For Smith and other indigenous researchers, racism is manifest in the

research process when they are made to serve as the objects of discovery for
knowing white outsiders (Restrepo and Escobar 2005). Being the objects
of research is insulting to their history and dignity as a people and denies
them agency in the study of their own lives. “The objects of research,” Smith
says, “do not have a voice and do not contribute to research or science....
An object has no life force, no humanity, no spirit of its own, so therefore ‘it’
cannot make an active contribution” (Smith 2012, 64).
Although her critiques are made of research in general, for Smith and
other indigenous writers anthropology remains “representative of all that
is truly bad about research” (Smith 2012,11). Despite the good will of many
contemporary anthropologists,29 they remain “the academics popularly per¬
ceived by the indigenous world as the epitome of all that is bad with academ¬
ics” (Smith 2012, 70). This is not a new observation, unfortunately: Smith’s
writing echoes that of other native scholars who have long regarded anthro¬
pology as the worst kind of hypocritical, self-interested exploitation.30

ALTERNATIVE ANTHROPOLOGIES

Also true, however, is the fact that many ethnographic research subjects,
indigenous and otherwise, are aware of the power of research to represent
the “truth” of people’s lives, and they desire a hand in shaping it. Earlier, we
described how coloniality can be seen to contain spaces for its own disman¬
tling, and so it is with colonial anthropology. Increasingly, the objects of
anthropological research are talking back, demanding a role in and control
over research about them and their societies and a say in deciding the uses to
which it will be put. Indigenous approaches to research, advanced by Smith
and other indigenous scholars, try to counter the coloniality of the research
relationship; as Kim TallBear puts it:

If what we want is democratic knowledge production that serves not

only those who inquire and their institutions, but also those who are
inquired upon (and appeals to “knowledge for the good of all” do not
cut it), we must soften that boundary erected long ago between those
who know versus those from whom the raw materials of knowledge
production are extracted. Part of doing this is broadening the concep¬
tual field.... It is also helpful to think creatively about the research

Colonial Anthropology and Its Alternatives / 31

 process as a relationship-building process, as a professional network¬
ing process with colleagues (not “subjects”), as an opportunity for
conversation and sharing of knowledge, not simply data gathering.
Research must then be conceived in less linear ways without necessar¬
ily knowable goals at the outset. (TallBear 2014, 2; see also West 2016)

Against the colonial approach to research outlined in the previous sec¬

tion, concerned anthropologists have themselves developed new approaches
and techniques for making the research relationship a mutually productive
one. In doing so, anthropologists have not only introduced new fieldwork
methodologies, but have also expanded the discipline beyond its traditional
concerns. For a long time and in a variety of ways, scholars have pushed
back against anthropological coloniality, complicating the picture of a dis¬
cipline entirely collusive with the colonial project. The research we discuss
in the next few chapters was influenced by these nondominant approaches,
and this book is an argument for their broader application in the wider
discipline.
In terms of influence, feminist anthropology represents the most long¬
standing and the most thorough challenge to dominant anthropology. Since
the very beginnings of the discipline, some women anthropologists have
employed different approaches to research and writing that challenged the
normative scientific style and have often been denigrated for doing so, their
work dismissed as unserious or nonobjective (Stocking 2001; see Hurston
1935, 1937; Mead 1928). Feminist scholars have argued for the inclusion of
women, their concerns, and labors within the scope of ethnography, con¬
tending that anthropological understanding of the world is incomplete
without attention to women and gendered forms of social ordering (e.g.,
Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974; Weiner 1976; Wolf 1972). In doing so, feminist
anthropologists have made questions of power, inequality, and difference
legitimate topics of scrutiny, while challenging the objectivist stance of
dominant anthropology. Persuasively, they have argued for an approach
that acknowledges the “positionality” of the researcher, her gendered and
identity-based location vis-a-vis the people and subjects she studies.31 Femi¬
nist anthropologists have called out the implicit male bias of the field, forc¬
ing a reconsideration not only of what anthropologists study but how they
go about their practices of fieldwork, analysis, and writing. Nevertheless,
white, Western feminist anthropologists have also been criticized for failing
to recognize their own positionality and for maintaining hierarchical rela¬
tionships with their (nonwhite) research subjects (Abu-Lughod 1990; Behar

32 / CHAPTER 1
1996; Visweswaran 1988). For many, especially feminist anthropologists of
color, these questions remain unresolved in the discipline, even for those
practicing more explicitly activist forms of research (Berry et al. 2017).
Another counter-dominant approach can be found in collaborative eth¬
nography. Developed in response to the “irrelevance of many academically
positioned interpretations” to the people being studied and the power im¬
balance inherent in the traditional researcher/researched relationships, col¬
laborative ethnography aims to include local consultants in every phase of
the research process, from inception through publication (Lassiter 2005,11).
Anthropologist Luke Eric Lassiter has documented the history of collaboration
in anthropology, tracing it to the very origins of the discipline. Lassiter makes
an important statement about ethnographic methodology in his assertion
that collaboration is fundamentally about morality: Ethnography, he argues,
cannot be purely extractive, nor can anthropologists assume for themselves
the authority to speak for others while erasing the role others play in the pro¬
duction of ethnographic knowledge (a problem whose origins can be found
in the work of such early luminaries as Malinowski and Boas).32 Instead,
Lassiter argues, “Doing a more deliberate and explicit collaborative ethnog¬
raphy revolves first and foremost around an ethical and moral responsibility
to consultants—who are engaged not as ‘informants,’ but as co-intellectuals
and collaborators who help to shape our ethnographic understandings, our
ethnographic texts, and our larger responsibility to others as researchers,
citizens [sic], and activists. Constructed in this way, collaborative ethnogra¬
phy is first and foremost an ethical and moral enterprise, and subsequently
a political one; it is not an enterprise in search of knowledge alone” (Lassiter
2005,179).
Community-Based Participatory Research (cbpr), or Participatory Ac¬
tion Research (par), has been less influential in anthropology than in other
disciplines, but these approaches contain many elements that are relevant to
decolonizing anthropology. Building in part on the earlier work in “action
anthropology” of Sol Tax and drawing on non-Western theorists like Paolo
Freire and Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, par rejects the idea of science as the
objective production of universal truth, disconnected from any social real¬
ity. Instead, par advocates argue for the need to recognize researcher bias
and bring a “moral conscience” to scientific research (Fals Borda 2001, 29).
According to Orlando Fals Borda, this requires researchers to “decolonize
ourselves”; though he doesn’t use the concept of coloniality, Fals Borda
argues that we need “to discover the reactionary traits and ideas implanted
in our minds and behaviors mostly by the learning process” (Fals Borda

Colonial Anthropology and Its Alternatives / 33

2001, 29). Fals Borda and other par scholars envision a role for social scien¬
tists as crusaders for economic development and social justice in their field-
sites. But more importantly for us—and like both collaborative and world
anthropologists—Fals Borda argues for dissolving the boundaries between
the academy and the world, authorizing research subjects themselves to be
part of the knowledge-production process. And, like Appadurai’s “right to
research” (mentioned in the Introduction) (Appadurai 2006), Fals Borda
states, “The common people deserve to know more about their own life con¬
ditions in order to defend their interests, than do other social classes who
monopolize knowledge, resources, techniques and power; in fact we should
pay attention to knowledge production just as much as the usual insistence
on technical production, thus tilting the scales toward justice for the under¬
privileged” (Appadurai 2006; see also Fals Borda 1979).
From a “world anthropologies” perspective, all Western theory and re¬
search take for granted a Eurocentric epistemology—that is, a mode of think¬
ing specific to and representative of the West (Escobar 2007). Within this
mode—constituting what Arturo Escobar and his colleagues have called
“dominant anthropologies”—all that is different from the West is rendered
knowable to the West through the lens of Western social science, and only
those situated within Western academic institutions are capable of producing
this knowledge. This results in a marginalizing of all ideas and perspectives
generated outside the West and has led to a vast inequality between U.S. and
European academic institutions and those of the non-Western world. A
world-anthropologies approach tries to change this situation by thinking
about social reality from outside the Western paradigm, from the perspec¬
tive of those on the fringes of modern life and capitalist prosperity. It calls
attention to the work of non-Western thinkers and writers by encouraging
international dialogue and publications. Most importantly to our analysis is
world anthropologies’ goal of decertifying expert knowledge, or “decoloniz¬
ing expertise” (Restrepo and Escobar 2005,114). Restrepo and Escobar have
declared world anthropologies to be an “un-academic project,” aiming to
dissolve the boundaries between the academy and the rest of the world. By
doing so, anthropologists can recognize the validity of other, non-Western,
nonacademic forms of knowledge and realize that anthropology’s “subjects
can be knowledge-producers in their own right.”33
Many of these themes have found their way into activist anthropology,
which Shannon Speed defines as “the overt commitment to an engagement
with our research subjects that is directed toward some form of shared politi¬
cal goals” (Speed 2008, 215). This definition is deliberately broad, allowing

34 / chapter 1
plenty of room to accommodate a variety of approaches, including those
mentioned earlier. Activist anthropologists practice collaboration, includ¬
ing their fieldwork “subjects” in the planning, conduct, and publication of
the research. Activist anthropology tries to engage multiple audiences, both
within and outside the academy, believing that political and scholarly ac¬
tivity joined together can be mutually productive for both researcher and
researched (Hale 2008). As we discussed in the book’s Introduction, activ¬
ist anthropology represents the thematic subdiscipline with which we most
identify and provided the framework for developing and, at least initially,
executing our research project on immigration in central New Jersey.
The picture that emerges from this brief review is one of complexity and
complication. Anthropologists, though sometimes demonized as “the epit¬
ome of all that is bad with academics,” have become increasingly conscious
of the inequities embedded in the dominant mode of research practice and
have been active in trying to create new ways of doing their work. In doing
so, feminist, indigenous, world, collaborative, and activist anthropologists
have all strived, in varied and not always effective ways, to remake the research
relationship in the field, while also making their work beneficial to their
research subjects. Their methodologies and philosophies offer guidance for
how the decolonization of anthropology might proceed.

Conclusion: The Way Forward

Westerners will never (except in make-believe) be able to act the role of savages
opposite those whom they once dominated. For when we Westerners cast them in this
role they existed for us only as objects—whether for scientific study or political and
economic domination. —claude levi-strauss, “Todays Crisis in Anthropology.”
unesco Courier 11 (1961): 12-17

To say that anthropology is a colonial discipline is more than saying that it

contains “vestiges” of the colonial past or enjoys a vague colonial “legacy”
owing to the history of its formation and development. Bland assertions of
colonialism’s “lingering” pervasiveness, of colonialism as an abstraction un¬
realizable in practices and structures, are insufficient. Such language lacks
the precision required to identify the specific ways in which the colonial is
present in the contemporary, to recognize how it manifests in daily life and
in the work of anthropology and other social sciences. Talk of a “colonial
legacy,” as Ann Stoler has noted, “makes no distinctions between what holds
and what lies dormant, between residue and recomposition, between a weak
and a tenacious trace. Such rubrics instill overconfidence in the knowledge

Colonial Anthropology and Its Alternatives / 35

that colonial history matters—far more than it animates an analytic vocabu¬
lary for deciphering how it does so” (Stoler 2008,196). Railing against colo¬
nial legacies, in other words, may make liberal academics feel better about
themselves for being historically grounded and politically astute without
requiring them to actually admit how colonialism colors their own research
and writing. As scholars and human beings, we must do more than merely
“critique” the injustices that surround us and our work; as Silvia Rivera
Cusicanqui (2012, 100) puts it, “There can be no discourse of decoloniza¬
tion, no theory of decolonization, without a decolonizing practice” (see also
Sandoval 2000).
To recognize and move beyond colonial anthropology, then, we must do
more than just acknowledge the discipline’s colonial origins. We must, in
fact, design new theories and methods—take an entirely different intellec¬
tual stance—to transcend what we have identified here as anthropology’s
basic coloniality. Thinking in decolonial terms upsets the colonial balance
by inverting and subverting the power relations fundamental to ethnographic
research and writing. It entails new orientations to anthropological theory,
requires new forms of anthropological practice, and opens up new possibili¬
ties for academic careers. Efforts to decolonize anthropology can reinvigorate
some older debates within the discipline and chart new courses for those
wishing to break with outmoded ways of seeing and acting, to push the edges
of what anthropology can be and do. Decolonizing is a way to address the
problems we identify in this book’s Introduction, to reconcile the apparent
contradiction between academic and applied work and to challenge domi¬
nant anthropology’s stance on what counts as “real” ethnographic research.
Thinking from a place of decoloniality—that is, from a place outside the
academy, outside the West, from the global periphery—is something an¬
thropologists are quite good at. It requires what Walter Mignolo (borrowing
from the poet, thinker, and activist Gloria Anzaldua) has called a kind of
“border thinking”—that is, thinking from the perspective of those pushed
to the fringes of capitalist prosperity and the modern world.34 Enrique
Dussel calls this “trans-modernity” (Dussel 2002), a project for looking at
and thinking about the world “from its underside, from the perspective of
the excluded other. Trans-modernity is a future-oriented project that seeks
the liberation of all humanity.”35 To think decolonially is to “bring to the fore¬
ground the planetary dimension of human history silenced by discourses
centering on modernity, postmodernity, and Western civilization” (Mignolo
2002, 61-62). It is to suggest the possibility of social transformation among
the world’s formerly colonized peoples as well as a shift in the priorities of

36 / CHAPTER 1
academic labor. Decolonized scholarship, in Catherine Walsh’s words, is “an
intellectual production not aimed at individual accomplishment or limited
to the confines of the academy, but rather at the shared need to confront
the colonial-racist structures, systems, and institutions of society through
a collective praxis” (Walsh 2007, 232; emphasis added). As the word shared
suggests, decolonized work requires the involvement of all parties in the
research process, a breaking down of the boundaries between academia and
the world, and a full recognition of anthropology’s so-called research sub¬
jects as thinkers and researchers in their own right.
Decolonizing anthropology, then, requires a shift in orientation and tech¬
nique, the adoption of new perspectives on both theory and method, with
the goal of enabling subalterns—-those enduring objects of anthropological
study—to decolonize knowledge practices as they become powerful actors
in their own liberation. The following chapters explore our efforts to do just
that.

Colonial Anthropology and Its Alternatives / 37

 2

JOURNEYS TOWARD DECOLONIZING

Shortly after receiving tenure at Rutgers University—feeling released from

the constraints of the traditional, colonial research model—Daniel began to
explore other possibilities, to push the boundaries of what research could be
by incorporating other, more experimental elements into his work. These
included activities that some, operating from a colonial perspective, would
regard as forms of service. One morning, for example, following a depart¬
mental meeting in which he had mentioned this new work, a senior male
colleague came into Daniel’s office, closing the door behind him. In the
strongest possible terms, he cautioned Daniel against getting involved in
these alternative forms of research, which, he warned, would surely detract
from Daniel’s professional career. Better to leave these kinds of activities to
the social workers, this colleague said, and focus our attention on scholarly
research. That, he said, is what we do best.1
Professional anthropologists have a great deal of investment in the co¬
lonial research model. Research is the basis on which they construct their
claims to knowledge and authority, the foundation on which they erect
their professional and personal lives. Ethnographic research—including
long-term participant observation, intensive interviewing, note taking,
and fieldnote writing—is not easy work, requiring many sacrifices on the
part of those who undertake it. Individuals with a commitment to tra¬
ditional modes of research may have little patience for closely scrutiniz¬
ing its politics and epistemologies. The suggestion that the way they do
research needs to be rethought will likely make many people angry and
uncomfortable.
But for a new generation of scholars discontented with the demands and
restrictions that the colonial model imposes, such a call may feel liberating.
Colonial research, grounded in the Enlightenment model of science, is a
rather limited enterprise. It imposes standards of validity that disqualify a
whole range of human endeavors from what can count as research. It de¬
mands a strict bounding of scholarship from other forms of work, producing
the famous divide in anthropology between academic and applied research
or, as is less often recognized, between scholarship and “service.” A limited
perspective on what counts as research leads to similarly limited forms of
writing—academic essays and books, laden with jargon, perpetually citing
the same authorities, speaking to a restricted audience of experts. We believe
that many young anthropologists are drawn to the discipline for what they
perceive to be its creative political potential, and the discovery that nonaca¬
demic forms of engagement may have to wait for their post-tenure release
can be shocking and disappointing.2
This chapter examines the personal and professional histories of this
book’s four coauthors. It describes the different sets of experiences that
comprise our backgrounds and provides context for understanding the per¬
spectives we each brought to the research project, described in detail in the
following chapters. We present these histories not as morality tales but as case
studies: of the kinds of experiences scholars can have as they struggle against,
and try to break free from, the constraints and limitations of colonial social
science; and of the kinds of struggles that undocumented immigrants endure
in living and working in the United States. That these very different strug¬
gles could coincide and become mutually reinforcing through a collaborative
ethnographic project was, for us, remarkable and compelling, changing the
ways all of us thought about our work, our values, and ourselves (see figure 2.1).

Undocumented, Unafraid: Mirian's Story

A snowy morning in February 2012. Caro and Daniel were at the muster
zone talking to the jornaleros when Ritas car drove up. A woman with short
black hair exited from the passenger side and greeted them in Spanish.
She had a calm way about her, a soothing voice and gracious movements,
though she held her neck and back rigid and straight. The three of them
liked each other immediately. Mirian—for that is who she was—told Caro
and Daniel that she had come to Hometown a few days prior, after having

Journeys toward Decolonizing / 39

figure 2.1. The research team: Lucy, Caro, Mirian, Daniel, circa 2014. Illustration by
Peter Quach.
worked elsewhere in New Jersey for three years. She was seeking help after
having had an accident at work, and a friend had told her about Casa Home¬
town and the services it provides to the immigrant community. She was in a
lot of pain—hence the rigid neck, which she couldn’t move without sending
agonizing flashes up and down her back and leg—but she was hopeful that
she would find assistance in Hometown.
The ninth of thirteen children, Mirian was born on a ranch in a small
town called Santa Maria Ixhuatan, in Guatemala. Her parents were farmers
and ranchers who raised horses and cattle; her father was also a comisio-
nado, the man responsible for keeping order in a town with no police pres¬
ence. At age six Mirian started school in a nearby town, and by age twenty
she had graduated college with a degree in accounting. By then her family
no longer lived in Santa Maria Ixhuatan: During Guatemala’s long civil war,
her father’s position as comisionado had brought him under suspicion as
a collaborator with the military, and when the guerrillas came looking for
him he sold their horses and cattle and moved his family to a village close to
Guatemala City. After graduating, Mirian left home and moved to the capi¬
tal, where she studied natural medicine, botany, and herbal healing at a local
institute. She soon met and married a handsome young man with whom she
had two children, both of whom loved mountain biking. But Mirian’s hus¬
band liked to drink, and when he drank, he became violent. So eventually
she left him and moved back home.
Mirian’s four older brothers lived at her parents’ ranch at the time of her
return, but soon after one of them was disappeared—by the military or by the
guerrillas, no one was sure. Fearing further violence, Mirian moved again,
this time to Santa Catalina Pinula, a small rural enclave of mud houses close
to her hometown. When she arrived she was struck by the poverty she found
there. Many of the men had migrated to the United States, so the population
consisted mostly of women, children, and the elderly. Women survived by
doing agriculture on family fields, making long trips on foot to the nearest
city to sell their produce. Mirian decided to organize them and, along with
thirty-two women from the town, she created a cooperative business. The
Cooperativa Integral Agricola Xincali was a collective bakery where everyone
rotated tasks and shared the profits. It was a big success, and Mirian worked
there for eight years. During this time she met Alvaro, a mild-mannered
farmer who treated her kindly. Shortly after they married, Alvaro decided to
migrate to the United States to search for work.
In 2008, Mirian had the opportunity to go to California to accompany
her son to a mountain biking competition, where he was participating as

Journeys toward Decolonizing / 41

part of the Guatemalan national team. Being outside of Guatemala for the
first time, Mirian realized how afraid she had been her whole life: Afraid
of her ex-husband, who continued to harass her years after their divorce;
afraid for her family and her children, for the quotidian violence with which
they lived; afraid of being disappeared like her older brother. After returning
home to Guatemala she kept yearning for that sense of safety she had expe¬
rienced in the United States and wanted to go back. But Mirian knew of the
dangers of crossing illegally: Shortly after her return from the competition,
another one of her brothers died under mysterious circumstances while try¬
ing to cross the northern border. Mirian renewed her visa, and she returned
to the United States. She left her children in the care of her mother, promis¬
ing to send money as soon as she could.
At first she was terrified to be back in the United States. When she en¬
tered the country the immigrations officer asked her many questions and
looked at her suspiciously, but eventually allowed her to enter. Her anxiety
intensified after her tourist visa expired. Suddenly, she found herself without
papers authorizing her to be in the U.S. She thought that every cop was going
to recognize her and stop her, so she changed her appearance by cutting
off her long black hair. Mirian traveled to New Jersey to join Alvaro, who
had found work on a ranch caring for horses. Once there she tried going
to a lawyer to get help applying for asylum for herself and her children, but
rather than being helpful the lawyer questioned her dedication as a parent:
If Guatemala is so dangerous, he asked, why did you leave your kids there?
Discouraged, Mirian abandoned the idea of gaining legal status and joined
Alvaro working on the horse ranch. Her sister, who had migrated to the
United States previously, joined her there as well.
Mirian would later compare working at the ranch to being in prison. The
gates to the compound were chained, and there were surveillance cameras
everywhere to make sure no workers left the premises. Their supervisor, an
undocumented Mexican man, and the horse trainer, a big Cuban guy, were
strict with the rules. One rule in particular was constantly emphasized: “No
leaving the ranch for any reason or we will think that you no longer want
your job.” The owner of the ranch, a wealthy white man who lived in New
York City, operated a company store on the premises: He bought groceries
and sold them back to his workers on the ranch, arguing that now they really
had no reason to go outside the gates. At the time Mirian couldn’t under¬
stand this restriction, but she came to realize that the ranch owner didn’t
want the authorities to learn that he was employing undocumented workers
and that he was treating them more or less as slaves. Mirian didn’t mind the

42 / CHAPTER 2
rules at first: “I was so afraid to be outside the ranch and get caught by the
police,” she said, that she didn’t even think of leaving.
For three years Mirian worked seven days a week, making $300 a week.
She lived with Alvaro and her sister in a small trailer that belonged to the
ranch, with no running water or bathroom facilities. She worked with ten
other Latin American workers, responsible for the care of ninety-two horses.
She had to be at work every day at 5:00 am to walk the horses for their ex¬
ercise, after which she would clean the main house, then walk the horses
again. She liked to read with her sister after work. She also sang and wrote
poetry, which provided her a way to express her fears and sorrows, her love
of family, and her faith in God.
The day Mirian had her accident began like any other. She headed to
the stables early in the morning and began walking one of the horses. She
had walked that particular horse, an enormous brown gelding, many times
before without a problem, but that morning something spooked him. Sud¬
denly the horse slammed his body into Mirian, knocking her to the ground.
She covered her face in terror as the panicked horse stepped on her back
and right leg. The world seemed to come to a stop, Mirian only aware of
the weight of the horse pressing her into the earth. At last the horse ran off.
Mirian lay on the ground, weeping. No one could locate the supervisor, so
eventually one of the other ranch workers defied the rules and took her to
the hospital in a taxi. A doctor gave her a shot of something and instructions
that she didn’t understand and sent her back to the ranch.
The very next day Mirian was called back to work. As she tried to rise at
5:00 am to walk the horses, she felt a bolt of lightning shoot from her foot
to her head. It was impossible to put weight on her injured leg. She simply
couldn’t walk. Her sister walked her horses for her that day, but the super¬
visor had no patience for that arrangement: “Either you work,” he said, “or
you leave.” Five days later, the wound in her leg had begun to fester, and Mirian
realized she had to go to the er as soon as possible. This time her husband
drove her there in one of the ranch vehicles. When the hospital admissions
person asked what had happened to her, Mirian told the truth. She was then
asked for the phone number and address of her employer, so that the hos¬
pital could verify her insurance coverage. Soon a hospital staffer came to
tell Mirian that he had called the number she provided but the owner of the
ranch denied having any knowledge of Mirian or her accident. The owner
even claimed he had no female employees. Mirian was puzzled, sure that
there had been some sort of misunderstanding. An er doctor gave her anti¬
biotics for the infection in her leg and again sent her back to the ranch.

Journeys toward Decolonizing / 43

 Upon her return, Mirian found the horse trainer waiting for her. He
scolded her for going to the hospital on her own, and especially for giving out
the ranch’s contact information. A few days later a nurse sent by the hospital
came to the ranch to clean Mirian’s wound, but she was denied permission
to enter the premises and had to leave without seeing Mirian. A couple of
Mirian’s friends from outside also came to visit her, but the trainer wouldn’t
let them in: “This is not a hotel,” he told her. “This is private property and I
will call the cops.” The trainer called the owner, known to all the workers as
the patron. He came to see Mirian in her trailer. “You are really screwing up
by attracting so much attention to the ranch,” he said, menacingly. “Why did
you tell the hospital you had a work accident? You should have told people
you fell off your bicycle.” Mirian responded that she didn’t know how to ride
a bike. The patron, enraged, stormed out.
A week went by, and Mirian had to be rushed to the hospital again.
This time she was sweating profusely and throwing up. In the hospital they
cleaned her wound again and sent her back home. Again the trainer was
waiting for her: “Do you understand how badly you’ve hurt us?” he told her.
Mirian didn’t understand. “El patron is furious,” the trainer said. “He would
rather spend $100,000 to make you disappear than to let you tarnish his
record with the insurance company.” As in Guatemala, Mirian began to fear
for her life, worrying that the patron would murder her. Later that day the
patron came looking for her again, but the other workers helped her hide in
the stables. The same night she escaped, climbing through a gap in the fence
to freedom.
Mirian went to a friend’s house, where she hid for two days. Her friend
told her about Casa Hometown, a local workers’ center and immigrants’
rights advocacy organization, suggesting that perhaps they could help her.
So Mirian went and met with Rita, the director of Casa Hometown, and
Helen, a lawyer to whom Casa Hometown frequently referred injured work¬
ers. After hearing Mirian’s story and seeing the wound she had on her leg,
Helen told Mirian that she could sue her employer to force him to pay for
her medical bills and compensation for lost wages. Mirian was surprised to
learn that this was a possibility, given that she was undocumented, but Helen
assured her that immigration status was not an issue for a worker’s com¬
pensation case in the state of New Jersey. They signed a power of attorney,
authorizing Helen to work on Mirian’s behalf. Rita and Mirian hit it off right
away, and, after hearing about the threat made against her life, Rita offered
to let Mirian stay at her place until she got settled. For the first time in a long
time, Mirian felt safe.

44 / chapter 2
 Mirian missed her children terribly. In her condition she was unable to
work, so she could not continue to send money home to support the family
she had left behind. Mirian bought a phone card and called her children
every day. Her son was in college now, studying to become an engineer, and
her daughter was in high school; but after Mirian’s accident her son decided
to migrate to the United States. He joined her in Hometown in November
2012 and now works there as a day laborer.
Mirian felt supported by Casa Hometown and its members. Helen even¬
tually helped Mirian to win her court case against her employer, who was
ordered to pay her back wages, his insurance company held responsible
for her medical bills. Now, no longer fearing the retaliation of her former
employer, Mirian began a protracted battle with the employer’s insurance
company and the medical establishment to receive proper care. For the next
two years Mirian was in and out of the hospital. Sometimes she would have
excruciating headaches; other times she would be up all night vomiting or
wake to find blood in her urine. She visited the er multiple times, but no
doctor could identify definitively the cause of her problem. At first she was
in physical therapy for the injured leg; later she began treatment for her right
arm, which she couldn’t raise above her shoulder. But her leg, back, and over¬
all body pain persisted. With her disability payments running out, Mirian
needed approval from a doctor to whom the insurance company referred her
to grant an extension; this doctor refused to order an mri, intimating that
Mirian was faking her injury to dupe the insurance company. Nor would he
give her a “can’t work” letter, which would obligate the insurance company
to extend her disability coverage. Finally, almost a year after her accident,
Mirian (again with help from Casa Hometown) persuaded the doctor to
order an mri. It revealed that she had ruptured the fourth vertebra in her
backbone and that it would require surgery to repair. Mirian had two opera¬
tions over the next few months to try to correct the problem. Throughout
the time of our research Mirian was regularly in pain. Though her symptoms
have eased somewhat, she is in pain to this day.

One Anthropologist's Journey: Daniel's Story

Daniel’s career trajectory in some ways reflects the path that anthropol¬
ogy itself has been traveling over the last several decades, as it has come
to embrace an engaged, activist, and now—we argue—decolonial perspective.
Like many young anthropologists, Daniel was trained in an academic an¬
thropology that knew nothing of its own history of social engagement and

Journeys toward Decolonizing / 45

political activism. A phenotypically white, heterosexual, cisgendered man,
Daniel did his graduate studies in a department that had strong cadres
of both academic and applied anthropologists, but the lines between and
around them were clearly drawn. “Applied anthropology” meant working
in “development,” for the government or an ngo. Projects were contract-
driven, their objectives dictated from the top down. Research was generally
short-term (the “rapid rural appraisal” was state of the art) and focused on
practical, material concerns like nutritional status, agricultural techniques,
and household organization of farm families, while declining to ask criti¬
cal questions about power and political economy. Even more progressive
approaches, like the “Women in Development” or “Participatory Research”
models that some were advocating, were framed by modernizing assumptions
about the “developed” and “developing” worlds that few applied anthropolo¬
gists at the time seemed to question. Like many of his cohort, in need of
money for his studies, Daniel worked part time in an office that did applied
research in arid lands studies, helping to edit a journal on farming systems
research. When he first began doing ethnographic field research in the mid-
1990s, Daniel knew nothing of activism or engagement as methodological
possibilities. He went to Bolivia for his dissertation research with a purely
academic agenda.
He was quickly disabused of that possibility. Quite understandably, the
residents of Villa Sebastian Pagador—a poor, marginal, and largely indige¬
nous barrio (neighborhood) on the outskirts of Cochabamba, Bolivia—had
no interest in him or his research unless that research had some tangible
benefit for them. All too accustomed to exploitive neocolonial relations
with outsiders—including those from the state, ngos, and international in¬
stitutions concerned with their “development”—the people of Pagador in¬
stantly recognized academic anthropology as another extractive enterprise
from which they had little to gain. Only when Daniel could persuade them
that his work would have some return for them did they allow him to stick
around and ask his impertinent questions.
Fortunately for Daniel’s project, the leaders of the barrio were eager to
have a book written about their situation and didn’t mind if it was written in
English. In Villa Pagador, Daniel had stumbled into a large-scale project of
collective self-invention, an ongoing campaign of local identity production
and publicity intended to counter the negative stereotypes that the power¬
ful held about indigenous, rural-to-urban migrants. Recognizing that being
seen (by politicians, ngos, even international institutions like the World
Bank) as an organized community active in its own self-help development

46 / CHAPTER 2
projects could attract more outside assistance, the political leaders of Villa
Pagador were very concerned to be represented publicly as unified, collab¬
orative, and modern. The leaders envisioned the book that Daniel would
eventually write as a contribution to local publicity, a way to put the name of
Villa Pagador into the minds of millions of North American readers. (Barrio
leaders greatly overestimated the size of the audience for anthropological
texts.) Although quite distinct from an applied anthropology project, a con¬
cern with development—specifically, with how the subjects of development
strategically position themselves as its worthy recipients—became a critical
dimension of Daniel’s research.
The requirements his Bolivian field consultants imposed as a basic con¬
dition of research taught Daniel his first lesson in decolonial ethnography:
a willingness to put our research to work on behalf of our field consultants
may not be an option, but a necessity for successful fieldwork. Were it not
for his promise to write a book about the community, Daniel would not have
been allowed to do research in Villa Pagador. This was a far cry from what
the applied anthropologists he knew would imagine as development. It came
from the ground up rather than the top down, expressing a desire identified
from within the community itself. It recognized development not as the
natural unfolding of human potential, but as a scarce resource for which
local communities compete, with public identity or reputation as a key ele¬
ment in that competition. Daniel’s work in Villa Pagador was definitely not
applied anthropology. What it was still lacked, for him, an identifying label.
In the end, Daniel wrote the academic book that he had originally set
out to write. That book offered an honest account of what he learned in the
field, including the realities of local violence and the conflicts and compet¬
ing agendas that existed at the heart of the local project of collective repre¬
sentation (Goldstein 2004). Daniel had fulfilled his promise to the barrio
leaders: He had published a book, in English, about Villa Pagador. But in his
heart, he felt that he had failed them. Although the book would present the
barrio’s name and its problems to a foreign audience, it would not contribute
directly to their struggle for local improvements. Daniel didn’t know what
else he could do.
When he returned to Bolivia a few years later to begin a new research
project, Daniel went with a different approach in mind. This time, from the
beginning of the project he anticipated the requirement that his research
bear some relevance to the concerns of the local people with whom he would
be working. What’s more, he intended from the outset for his work to be
reciprocal, that he would find ways to make benefits flow directly from the

Journeys toward Decolonizing / 47

project to the community. Having identified the barrio of Loma Pampa—
another neighborhood situated on the farthest southern periphery of Co¬
chabamba city—as the study site, Daniel immediately entered into discussions
with barrio leaders about the work and its possible outcomes. That was how
he met Don Miguel, the president of Loma Pampa and the man who would
become his key consultant and closest friend in the barrio. Miguel helped
Daniel to frame the broader questions of the research and introduced him to
a range of people, both within and outside of Loma Pampa, to whom he and
his team of research assistants could direct their inquiries.
Given its focus on security—-perhaps the most critical problem facing
residents of the chronically insecure barrios of Cochabamba—local people
were very enthusiastic about the project, which they perceived as an effort
to resolve the issues that plagued them. As this sort of work in the barrios is
typically performed by nongovernmental organizations, Daniel and his team
were perceived as an ngo whose principal purpose was to problem-solve.
Their appeals to being a “strictly academic” research project went unheard,
their claims to being mere researchers buried beneath the weight of people’s
expectations. And, truth be told, Daniel and his colleagues welcomed those
perceptions, as they contributed to people’s willingness to participate in
the research. They were invited to meetings and into people’s homes and
thanked everywhere they went for their efforts to solve the problems of inse¬
curity in the barrios. This was great for the research and for the researchers’
egos, but Daniel’s conscience nagged him. He wasn’t really there to solve
anybody’s problems. Was he?
The only way to do what people seemed to want him to do—tackle the
problems of insecurity, problems too big for them to resolve themselves—
was to raise funds to implement a bigger project. So, together with his
assistants and Don Miguel, Daniel and his team officially created an ngo.

Subsequently, they applied for and received major external funding to de¬
sign and implement projects to enhance access to justice and offer human
rights training for people in Loma Pampa and surrounding neighborhoods.
The results were mixed. As detailed elsewhere, embracing the ngo identity
and accepting outside money transformed the project (Goldstein 2004). No
longer doing “pure” research, the team now had the financing to undertake
more ambitious efforts to help make the local community more secure by
offering programs in law and human rights and providing legal alternatives
to violence. But their ngo also had to contend with all the challenges that
plague institutions of this type, including increasing hierarchy, internal
conflicts, accusations of corruption, and extensive administrative duties

48 / CHAPTER 2
and reporting requirements. Daniel became less a researcher than a project
manager and began to feel a growing distance between him, the project, and
the local community.
What had happened, Daniel realized in retrospect, was that in an effort
to be more engaged he had allowed himself and the project to become more
detached. As part of the worldwide nongovernmental industrial complex,
the ngo they had created was now providing services to community mem¬
bers rather than working alongside them. These services responded to local
needs and desires but came from the top down, incorporating a neoliberal,
developmentalist logic that prescribed training and self-help in confront¬
ing intolerable, perhaps irresolvable, structural challenges. What began as
a good-faith effort to fulfill his implicit promises to his interlocutors had
evolved into public service, freighted with politics and contradictions. Al¬
though the work they did benefited local people in a variety of ways, its im¬
pacts were short-lived. The structures of inequality and injustice that framed
local disempowerment remained unmoved. Exhausted and disappointed and
stressed out by the infighting that had emerged among his collaborators,
Daniel quit the ngo and left the project. Independently, he continued his
research in Loma Pampa for another five years, but he no longer worked
with the ngo he had helped to found or the project he had helped to fund.
Even before leaving the ngo, Daniel had begun working on a new proj¬
ect in Cochabamba, this time focused on insecurity in the Cancha, the city’s
enormous outdoor market where everyone shops and where many barrio
residents work. Here, he developed two parallel projects with two groups
of market vendors—the legal vendors who hold permanent stalls inside the
Cancha and the illegal street vendors, or ambulantes, who sell in the streets
and public spaces surrounding it. These groups of vendors are historically
antagonists in the market, each facing their own forms of insecurity—from
“delinquents,” from the state, and from other vendors. Again working with
some Bolivian research assistants but without the framework of an ngo,

Daniel entered into discussions with the leaders of both groups to gain per¬
mission to do research and to determine how his work might be made to
benefit them in their struggles to improve security in the market.
As in Villa Pagador, the market vendors made reciprocity a precondition
for allowing Daniel and his colleagues research access to the market. In ex¬
change for being allowed to conduct his academic research, Daniel promised
to provide each of the two groups with which he was working with a book
of their own, documenting their experiences of insecurity and presenting
their case to the state for why their security needs should be met. Ironically,

Journeys toward Decolonizing / 49

it was precisely because of Daniel’s outsider status and scholarly credentials
that the market vendors deemed him capable of writing these books. They
required, they said, an “objective” account of their predicaments, one based
on a “scientific” study of the facts of insecurity that they faced. So, over the
course of the research period, Daniel and his team worked with members
of each group of vendors to study these problems and, at the end, wrote
and self-published a short book for each group, copies of which they freely
distributed.
The work in the Cancha marketplace was unlike any of his previous re¬
search projects in Bolivia. By now, Daniel recognized what he was doing as
a form of activist anthropology, a rubric he had only recently encountered.
Unlike Villa Pagador—where he felt that he had failed to engage reciprocally
with the community—or Loma Pampa—where he felt that he had mistak¬
enly pursued a developmentalist, ngo route to reciprocity—in the Cancha
Daniel responded by providing local collaborators with resources that they
themselves requested and that emerged organically from the research pro¬
cess. Daniel and his research team worked alongside the vendors of the
Cancha, putting their anthropological knowledge to work to assist them in
their struggles. Their mutual collaboration was essential to the ethnographic
research, enabling Daniel to subsequently author his own ethnographic nar¬
rative of his experience and the lessons learned about insecurity and infor¬
mality in Bolivia (Goldstein 2016).
Over the course of three distinct research experiences, Daniel had moved
from a traditional research practice to one that was more engaged and recip¬
rocal. Each project had moved him along this trajectory, each community
or group with which he worked requiring that he take certain steps in the
direction of activism and advocacy in order for his research to be success¬
ful. And Daniel’s perspective evolved. The old boundaries between academic
and applied anthropology began to dissolve, replaced by an activist perspec¬
tive that recognized the mutual reinforcement that reciprocity provided to
research and that research could provide to activism.
These questions would evolve further as Daniel began to consider a new re¬
search project in the United States. Having long studied security issues in Bo¬
livia, in 2010 Daniel became interested in the securitization of immigration in
the United States, with a particular focus on undocumented communities
in the state of New Jersey. Daniel’s interest in this project, however, was more
than intellectual. He was concerned with how immigration had come to be
seen as a threat to national security in the U.S., one that apparently could
be resolved only through heightened illegalization and deportation of immi-

50 / CHAPTER 2
grants, militarization of the border, and intensified policing of the internal
spaces of the country. Daniel set out to understand how people in one New
Jersey town were coping with the problems of living undocumented in a se¬
curitized context, with an eye to how anthropology might contribute to their
struggles for rights, recognition, and a more secure life in the United States.
Daniel’s first contacts in the community of “Hometown,” New Jersey,
were facilitated by Robyn Rodriguez, a colleague in sociology working on
similar issues in the state. She accompanied Daniel to Hometown and intro¬
duced him to Rita, the director of Casa Hometown. Robyn also introduced
Daniel to Carolina, who had recently begun the Ph.D. program in Women’s
and Gender Studies at Rutgers and who had worked for her as a graduate as¬
sistant. Though she had not previously studied anthropology, Caro showed
an instant aptitude for ethnographic work, and she and Daniel began to con¬
template a research project in Hometown.

Becoming an Organizer: Carolina's Story

Graduate students frequently participate in the research of their advisors

and teachers, though they are rarely acknowledged for the critical role they
play in the execution of a project. In the case of our activist research in
Hometown, Carolina (Caro, as we call her) was much more than a research
assistant. Her work on feminist decolonial theory and her experience as an
activist and organizer were central elements of our project, making her an
equal collaborator in the research (for further discussion, see chapter 3).
A native of Bogota, Colombia, Carolina grew up in an affluent home. Ob¬
serving the gross economic inequality that characterizes the city, at an early
age Caro began to wonder what she could do to change the situation. At first
her concerns centered mainly on class issues: Why did some people have
more wealth than others? But soon she realized that it wasn’t only about
class. As a little girl she came to understand that there were some privileges
reserved only for men, and she wondered why things were that way, too.
After graduating from high school Caro went to Sweden to live with her aunt
and attend college. In Stockholm she learned about economic redistribution
and feminism. She also encountered undocumented immigrants for the first
time—the concept of immigrant “illegality” was not a part of Colombian
political discourse at the time. Occasionally finding odd jobs to make some
money, Caro worked with undocumented immigrants from South America
and listened to their life stories and struggles, understanding the privilege
she had as a visa holder. It was also in Sweden that Carolina became aware

Journeys toward Decolonizing / 51

of her white privilege: while a dark-skinned Colombian friend was afraid
of being attacked by racist skinheads, Caro felt no such fear, her skin color
being no different from that of a white European.
After a year in Sweden Caro returned to Bogota and enrolled in the uni¬
versity, where she studied political science and then law, having decided that
she wanted to become a lawyer and “save the world.” But during her time
in law school her career plans changed. Caro became more interested in
feminist theory and was disappointed with the slow pace of the legal system
in protecting the rights of those in need. She worked as a researcher for the
Gender and Law Institute at her university and cowrote her honors thesis
on pregnant low-income teenagers’ access to education. In 2008, when she
completed her legal training, she decided that she didn’t want to practice
law. With the help of a friend and inspired by a biography of Simone de
Beauvoir, she moved to Paris to work as an au pair.
During her time living in Paris Caro became friends with people active in
the Sans Papiers movement, fighting for the rights of undocumented immi¬
grants in France. She went to a march where she saw the police attack protest¬
ers who held their ground against the onslaught, and she felt empowered. In
2009, Caro’s dear friend, another Colombian, found herself in visa trouble
and soon became undocumented in Paris. Caro saw firsthand the fear that
comes from living without papers, as her friend struggled to regularize her
situation and avoid deportation. By that time Caro had decided that she
wanted to become a gender studies professor and had moved to London to
earn a master’s degree in gender and social policy. As an immigrant herself
she had become aware of the importance of a person’s immigration status,
especially when that status is unauthorized; so for her master’s Caro dedi¬
cated herself to studies of U.S. immigration and the problems facing undoc¬
umented people, particularly undocumented women. She wrote her thesis
on Arizona sb 1070’s impact on undocumented Latinas’ access to healthcare
and became interested in the use of state and local legislation for purposes
of immigration control.3
After arriving at Rutgers University in 2010 to pursue a doctoral degree in
women’s and gender studies, Caro discovered decolonial theory and began
applying it to her other interests in feminism, immigration, and the law.
She understood that studying the “production of immigrant illegality” (De
Genova 2002) required that she become active in the immigrants’ rights
movement, so she joined an immigrants’ rights organization in New Bruns¬
wick, NJ, and started visiting undocumented immigrants being held in the
Elizabeth Detention Center. She continued to gain more understanding of

52 / CHAPTER 2
her white privilege as a documented, gender-conforming Latin Ameri¬
can and began wondering what that meant in terms of her research. Up to
that point she had mostly studied white feminism and European philosophy.
Her professors at Rutgers encouraged her to read beyond the Western philo¬
sophical canon, and she soon found herself diving into the works of Sylvia
Wynter, Chela Sandoval, Gloria Anzaldua, Anibal Quijano, and Edouard
Glissant. Race joined gender as a main lens through which she understood
inequality and oppression in the world.
In fall 2011 Caro got involved in the protests against capitalism, corrup¬
tion, and the state that came to be known as Occupy Wall Street. Having just
moved to New York City, she began spending more and more of her time
in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, where a tent camp had been set up by
protestors. Caro met many protesters who were camping there who believed
that another world is possible beyond the normative capitalist framework,
and she got to spend time with activists from around the world who had
participated in other occupations, from the Arab Spring to the Indignados,
the anti-austerity movement in Spain. During those weeks of marching and
chanting and dancing and protesting, Caro again realized the power and
energy of collective action.
It was at this time that she started working with Daniel. She arrived
in Hometown as a second-year graduate student who took a side job as
Daniel’s research assistant to help pay expenses, given the meager pay that
doctoral students usually receive. She was not particularly interested in eth¬
nography (though she understood that to finish her Ph.D. she would be ex¬
pected to master a method for data collection) but she was very interested in
learning about immigrants’ rights activism in Casa Hometown. Though she
had no experience in ethnographic fieldwork, Caro was a quick study and
very soon was doing observations and interviews with undocumented day
laborers, the jornaleras and jornaleros of Hometown. She was a hit with the
men who waited for jobs by the roadside: one of the only women in that set¬
ting, her friendliness and warmth ingratiated her quickly to the jornaleros.
So, as she worked on the research project with Daniel doing activist work
with the Latinx immigrant community in Hometown, she began to develop
her own dissertation research on race, history, and immigration in town.
Caro, who originally planned to write her dissertation on the Colombian
peace process, decided to focus on Hometown instead. She was inspired by
the history of the creation of Casa Hometown, which was started by a co¬
alition mostly comprised of local African Americans and Latinxs (many of
them undocumented jornaleros), as recounted in chapter 3. Carolina had

Journeys toward Decolonizing / 53

been studying U.S. immigration for a while by then, and she had never read
anything about the relation between African Americans and the fight for the
rights of undocumented immigrants, and this history sparked her interest.
So for the next few years Caro read on the topic and did archival research
on the history of African Americans in Hometown, going back to the colo¬
nial era. She eventually also became interested in the history of the Lenape
(the original inhabitants of New Jersey) and wrote her dissertation on how
the processes of illegalization that excluded Native Americans and African
Americans from access to landownership during the colonial era relate to
the present-day production of immigrant illegality in Hometown. Caro’s
work on the colonial history of Hometown influenced our collective project,
as we made it a point to interview African Americans in town as part of our
ethnography.
Meanwhile, Caro and Daniel worked as volunteers in Casa Hometown,
translating for people in court, helping them to complete official docu¬
ments, taking them to doctors appointments, organizing events, going to
marches, and so on. Caro organized an alternative healing day at Casa Home¬
town featuring massage therapy, energy work, and herbal treatments for the
sick and hurting members of Casa Hometown, people injured at work who
were now looking for some kind of remedy for their pain. With Daniel and
two members of another grassroots immigrants’ rights organization, she or¬
ganized a conference at Rutgers called “Undocumented/Unafraid: Stopping
Obama’s Deportation Machine,” in which experts and immigrants spoke
publicly about their insights and experiences, educating the broader univer¬
sity community about the problems facing the undocumented. Then for two
years she stood side by side with Mirian and Lucy in Casa Hometown and
learned from their work as activists and community leaders.
Thanks to all these experiences Caro became not only an ethnographer,
but also an activist and community organizer.

An Awakening: Lucy's Story

Carolina and Daniel met Lucia (Lucy, she calls herself) on one of their first
visits to Hometown, in September 2011. They had spent the morning sitting
in Casa Hometown, people flowing in steadily through the open door, Rita
attending to them. She would frequently stop to explain to the ethnogra¬
phers what was going on. The place seemed chaotic, with children playing
on the floor, the tv blaring, women and men talking and crying and laughing.
A typical morning at Casa Hometown.

54 / chapter 2
 In the midst of it all, Lucy quietly came in and took a seat at Ritas desk.
A short woman with a round, dimpled face usually creased in amusement,
Lucy looked despondent. Rita explained to Caro and Daniel that Lucy’s hus¬
band, Lalo, had a Washington drivers license—Washington State being one
of the few willing to give a drivers license to applicants without proof of
residency—and when it expired he had returned to Washington to get it re¬
newed. Driving back, he was stopped by a cop in North Dakota. Now Lalo
was in jail somewhere outside Bismarck, and Lucy came to Casa Hometown
seeking help in getting him out and safely returned to Hometown, rather
than being deported to Mexico.
Lucy and Lalo met in Santo Tomas Mazaltepec, a farming village in Oa¬
xaca, in southern Mexico, in February 1999. Lucy’s family had moved there
from Mexico’s capital, the Distrito Federal (DF), when Lucy was eight years
old. Lucy’s mom took care of the land and raised the family while Lucy went
to school. Lucy was studying to get her ba in business administration when
Lalo came into her life. He had been living in Hometown, in New Jersey,
for a couple of years but he was back home on vacation when he asked her
to marry him. “Not until I finish my degree,” she said. “OK,” he replied, “I’ll
come back in a year and marry you then.” He did. She was twenty years old
and had just gotten her bachelor’s degree. Lucy jokes that they spent their
honeymoon crossing the desert.
Before they got married Lalo had promised Lucy he was done with his
American dreams. Lucy was very clear that she wanted to live near her
mother and never wanted to go north. But almost immediately after the
wedding Lalo changed his mind. He explained to Lucy that there were no
opportunities for farmers in Mexico and asked her to say goodbye to her
family and come with him to the United States. As instructed, Lucy went
to her mother’s house, but begged her mother to take her back. “Lucy,” her
mother said, “you are married now and must follow your husband.” Besides,
she reassured her, Lalo had crossed the border many times now; “he knows
the way.” So Lucy and Lalo went north, to the border, first to Tijuana by
bus before crossing on foot into California. The border wasn’t as militarized
then as it is now, but the first time they tried to cross they were caught by the
Border Patrol and sent back to Mexico. They tried again the very next day,
setting off in the dark of night with a group of about ten other migrants. This
time they were lucky: The Border Patrol again appeared, detaining everyone
in the group except for Lucy and Lalo, who somehow escaped detection.
They walked on alone for nine hours, feeling totally lost in the desert and
throwing themselves on the ground when they heard the Border Patrol

Journeys toward Decolonizing / 55

helicopters in the sky above them. They finally made it to a Dunkin Donuts
somewhere in southern Arizona, where someone helped them find a coyote
(smuggler) who drove them to Los Angeles, huddled under a tarp in the flat¬
bed of his truck. From there they took a flight to Newark (this was pre-9/11,
and they were able to board the plane without showing identification), and
then a bus to Hometown, where Lalo had family and where he had previ¬
ously been working. Lucy has not been back to Mexico since.
“Hometown is a tranquil but strict town,” Lucy explains. “You don’t mix
with the American community and they don’t mix with you.” When Lucy
first arrived in town there were not many Latin Americans living there, and
most of the Latin Americans were men. On her first day there she planned
to look for work as a day laborer (jornaleraj with Lalo. La Via, as people call
it, is a spot on the side of a main road leading into Hometown, at the foot
of the tracks of the freight line that runs between Hometown and the coast.
It is where jornaleros wait to be hired by people who need workers for the
day. Lucy had heard about it and was excited to go, but Lalo explained that
it is a place only for men. “You should stay home,” Lalo said. So Lucy stayed
home. She had two kids soon after and spent the next ten years caring for
them. Occasionally she would care for other people’s kids as well, when their
moms had to go to work. She would later describe this period in her life as
her time of being asleep: “I was sleeping until I found Casa Hometown,” she
said. “I had my routine as a housewife, taking my kids to kindergarten and
taking care of my home. I thought that as long as my husband had a job there
would be no need for me to leave the house.”
Her wake-up call came the day Lalo was arrested in 2011. She had begun
volunteering at Casa Hometown a couple of years earlier—she had time,
once her kids started in school—but she did not think too deeply about the
problems faced by her community. She would come to Casa Hometown and
help with tasks like sorting the clothing donations and cleaning the kitchen.
But Lalo’s arrest made her realize that she herself, like the rest of the un¬
documented community, was vulnerable to detention and deportation. She
set her mind to getting her husband out of jail and to learning as much as
possible in the process so that she could help others thereafter.
Lalo was arrested in North Dakota on suspicion of having a fake driver’s
license. Driver’s licenses are very important for undocumented people in
Hometown, as elsewhere, allowing them to get to work and live their lives
(Stuesse and Coleman 2014), but the state of New Jersey requires that appli¬
cants present valid documents (like a U.S. passport) to get a license. Lalo was
originally planning on flying between New Jersey and Washington State to

56 / CHAPTER 2
renew his expired license, but he heard of someone who had been detained
at the airport as he tried to pass through security. So Lalo instead decided to
travel with a friend by car. It was nighttime when the cop pulled them over
on the wide-open plains of North Dakota, offering no reason for doing so.
When the cop saw the men’s driver’s licenses he became suspicious, asking
them why they had licenses from Washington while driving a car with New
Jersey plates? On that basis they were arrested and taken to the local county
lockup. Lalo was denied his one phone call, despite his insistence that it was
his right to get one. “You have no rights,” he was told.
Lucy was in a panic. For two days she had no word from Lalo but was
afraid to go to the police to inquire about his disappearance. So she was forced
to wait, fearing the worst. When Lucy finally heard from her husband she
learned that he had been detained and was at risk of being deported. Lucy
immediately went to Casa Hometown to ask for help. They referred her to a
lawyer who works with the undocumented community in New Jersey, and
with her help she was able to get Lalo released. This required her to go through
an elaborate process that included getting money for the bond so that Lalo
could leave the jail. To do that, Lucy had to find someone with papers to sign
the bond guaranteeing that Lalo would come to court when summoned. Lucy
asked a Puerto Rican woman from Hometown whom she barely knew to sign
the bond, and to her surprise the woman agreed. “That’s one of the most dif¬
ficult parts about getting out of jail when you are undocumented,” Lucy said.
“Coming up with a person willing to sign the bond and put themselves on the
line is not easy, and many people are deported when they fail to find someone.”
At first, Lalo’s detention made Lucy even more afraid of the police. It also
raised an issue that many undocumented immigrants have to confront: how
to talk about these issues with their children. When Lalo was detained, he
and Lucy’s two citizen children (ages nine and seven at the time) had a hard
time understanding the situation. Lucy didn’t know how to tell them that
their father was in jail and that both of their parents were undocumented
and could be deported at any moment. “Our main preoccupation in life is
our immigration status, not so much for us but for our kids. Lalo’s immigra¬
tion process is not just his but also ours, the entire family’s.” Lucy tried to
explain to them that she and Lalo came to the United States on foot, so if
things go south with their dad’s court case they would all have to literally go
South. (Lalo disagreed, telling her that if he should be deported, she should
stay with the kids in the U.S.) The children had never been to Mexico and
had no desire to move there. Misunderstanding, they told Lucy that if she
needed a passport she should just go get one.

Journeys toward Decolonizing / 57

 Lalo now has a work permit, but his detention opened Lucy’s eyes: “I was
sleeping for ten years. Now I know the law and what to do in case of trouble.
I know how the system works and what to do in case someone is detained.
All of that has made me useful for my community. I want to keep getting
prepared and I want to work with my community towards immigration re¬
form.” With the conclusion of our project, Lucy has gotten a job at a fast food
restaurant and takes care of her home and family, while volunteering at Casa
Hometown in her spare time. She feels safe in her town. As long as she keeps
fighting for her community, she believes, nothing can touch her. She knows
immigrants have the right to be respected and treated with dignity. That
is what she is fighting for.

Conclusion

Prior to our meeting, the four of us had disparate experiences, the products
of our having been born in four different countries and being or arriving
in the U.S. with different sets of beliefs, privileges, knowledges, and goals.
Our paths intersected in an unlikely place, the small suburban borough we
call Hometown, in the heart of the “Garden State,” the great state of New
Jersey. Given our different backgrounds and perspectives, it is not surprising
that we each came to this research project with different understandings and
expectations. Yet, through our mutual engagement in the course of doing
ethnographic research, we discovered new possibilities for what we could
do in the world and for what ethnographic practice could be. In the next
chapter, we introduce the problem of immigrant worker vulnerability that
we studied in Hometown, before turning (in chapter 4) to a more detailed
account of our decolonial research process and the ways in which we joined
our research to the work of activism in support of the undocumented.

58 / CHAPTER 2
 3

REFLECTIONS ON FIELDWORK
IN NEW JERSEY

Research does not come out of nowhere. Every structured, long-term re¬
search undertaking—what researchers informally refer to as a “project”—has
a history of its own, a social, personal, and political-economic framework
within which it comes into being, grows, and develops. In this chapter and
the next, we describe the project that the four authors of this book devel¬
oped and implemented in Hometown, NJ, which we present here to illus¬
trate some of the themes discussed in more abstract terms in the preceding
chapters. We offer this account not as a prototype for how to decolonize
anthropology, nor as an example of how we think all anthropology must be
practiced, now and for all time. Nor do we imagine our work to be without
precedent: As chapter 1 showed, we acknowledge a debt to the many creative
approaches to ethnography that have preceded our own. Rather, the work
on which this book is based represents one possible avenue for decolonizing
ethnographic research, informed by the insights gleaned from other similar
attempts. In doing so, we point the way for others—always in consultation
with local collaborators—to develop their own approaches, to employ new
ideas, and to generate new possibilities for doing decolonial ethnographic
work. Ultimately, we hope to expand the spaces of experimentation that ear¬
lier practitioners of decolonial, engaged, and activist research have opened,
spaces in which more inclusive, more democratic, and more emancipatory
modes of social research can be practiced.
 By challenging the norms of ethnographic practice, our project tried to
undermine the fundamental inequities and power imbalances that charac¬
terize dominant anthropology, from the colonial period to today, which we
have identified as key components of anthropology’s coloniality. Our project
decentered the academic goals typically associated with ethnographic re¬
search, subordinating them to the aims of social transformation that con¬
stituted the “broader impacts” (see below) of the project. This required
the academic researchers on the project—Daniel and Carolina—to make
room for the insights, theories, and engaged ethnographic practices of the
undocumented community members—Lucy and Mirian—who made up
half of the research team. As time went on—and in ways unanticipated in
the original research design—Lucy and Mirian became scholars of their
own community, gaining a deeper understanding of the vulnerabilities to
which they and their friends and neighbors were exposed and mobilizing
this knowledge—and ultimately the research process itself—in their efforts
to fight back against those conditions. The results of this process illustrate
some of the ways in which ethnography can be a tool not only for privileged
outsiders to know the lives of cultural others. Indeed, the project demon¬
strates that those historically cast as “research subjects” can themselves use
ethnography for individual self-discovery, community organizing, and
political resistance.
In using an activist approach to study work accidents, wage theft, and, later,
domestic violence among undocumented workers and their families, we ar¬
rived at new understandings of what “rights” might mean to undocumented
immigrants in New Jersey. In particular, we came to understand the perspec¬
tives that immigrant-rights activists hold on workplace abuses and the ways
in which they mobilize these perspectives in their political work—from the
mundane scenes that play out in doctors’ offices and courtrooms to the more
spectacular protests and demonstrations that activists organize to display their
grievances to a broader public. Ethnography, we suggest, can be decolonial
when it enables research subjects and their communities to organize and
struggle more effectively to demand and defend their rights—however these
might be understood—in a context of racist, sexist, capitalist exploitation.
This chapter begins with a brief historical and ethnographic description
of Hometown and the problems confronting its immigrant residents—a
context necessary to understand our decision to develop an activist research
project there. We deliberately do not provide the kind of “thick description”
that many anthropologists crave, determined to keep the focus on the re¬
search process itself by presenting only the minimum of contextualizing

60 / CHAPTER 3
ethnographic detail. We then turn to a discussion of Caro and Daniel’s ex¬
periences in the community and their plans for doing research, followed by
an account of how Mirian and Lucy became involved in the project. This is
followed, in chapter 4, by a closer examination of the research itself and the
ways in which Mirian and Lucy’s participation transformed both the activist
and the academic dimensions of the project.

The Hole in the Donut: Immigration and Activism in Hometown, NJ

New Jersey is an interesting state in which to study immigration, in part due

to its history as a collection of autonomous municipalities, complicating any
attempt to generalize about the state as a whole.1 In terms of immigration
law, some New Jersey towns are highly securitized, with restrictive munici¬
pal ordinances that limit undocumented immigrants’ ability to work, rent
property, or own businesses, while others are “sanctuary cities” that exhibit
a welcoming stance toward immigrants (Rodriguez 2017). The state is thus
a patchwork of contiguous and sometimes overlapping political, legal, and
social milieus through which immigrants move in the course of their daily
rounds of work, school, socializing, and home. New Jersey ranks among the
top destinations for immigrants in the U.S.: in 2015, immigrants constituted
22 percent of the state’s population (only California [27 percent] and New
York [23 percent] ranked higher) (Zong and Batalova 2017), and New Jersey
ranks fourth in the nation (after Nevada, California, and Arizona) in the
percentage of its workforce that is undocumented (Fine et al. 2014). As a
whole, the state is relatively tolerant as far as immigration law is concerned.
But there is substantial variation across municipalities, a fact to which un¬
documented workers must attend as they travel between jobs or simply shop
for groceries in an unfamiliar town.
An island in the middle of a vast suburban sea of what used to be farm¬
land, Hometown Borough is a close-packed cluster of colorful wood-frame
houses and stone storefronts surrounding an old town hall. There is a his¬
toric Main Street, a stately courthouse with white pillars fronting a trim
green lawn, and many beautiful old homes with porch swings and U.S. flags
on display. Not far from the Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway,
Hometown is a bucolic place for commuters to reside, an escape from the
workday in New York City. More recently, Hometown has also emerged as
an ideal place for the settlement of undocumented immigrants who live in
the borough and work in the surrounding suburbs. Indeed, a predominantly
white town where racial minorities were almost exclusively African American

Reflections on Fieldwork in New Jersey / 61

until the mid-1990s, in the past twenty years Hometown has seen a large
influx of immigrants and is now about 50 percent Latinx (mostly Mexicans,
but also Peruvians, Guatemalans, and others).
Undocumented immigrants began arriving from Latin America in Home¬
town as early as the mid-1980s.2 At first only a handful of new immigrants
came to Hometown, but after the passage of nafta in 1994 more and more
workers, mainly from the Mexican states of Puebla and Oaxaca, began to
arrive. That early wave of Latin American immigration consisted mostly of
men coming to New Jersey from the Mexican countryside to do agricultural
and construction work during the warm months, returning to Mexico when
the weather turned cold. After 9/11, with the rising securitization of the U.S./
Mexico border, these trips back and forth became increasingly difficult, and
immigrant workers began settling more permanently in Hometown and
bringing their families to live with them. Many of these men found work
as jornaleros (day laborers), waiting for jobs at the bus station, at the con¬
venience store called the 6-Twelve (a local riff on the more famous 7-Eleven
brand), and at what the jornaleros call the Via, a stretch of road alongside a
train track leading into town from the north (see figure 3.1).
In response to the influx of Latin American immigrants, in 2002 the
Council of Hometown Borough created a committee they called the “Qual¬
ity of Life Enforcement Team.” The mission of the team (adopted in response
to a perceived failure by the federal government to uphold immigration
laws) was to enforce borough ordinances, New Jersey statutes, and other
rules and regulations, so as to (in the words of one township councilman)
“combat the day to day nuisances evident throughout our town that have lit¬
erally plagued our quality of life.”3 Additional police and code enforcement
officers were hired to operate this program, targeting immigrant daily lives
in an effort to encourage what in other contexts would come to be called
“self-deportation.” As part of the Quality of Life Campaign, code enforce¬
ment officers would arrive at immigrants’ homes in the middle of the night
in order to conduct surprise “house inspections,” supposedly to fight “over¬
crowding” while knowing that immigrant workers often share housing to
reduce living costs. “They would pull up in front of a house,” an immigrant
named Rosa remembered; “the code enforcer would go in to check how
many people lived in the house. Ask, how many people sleep in this bed?
They would count shoes and toothbrushes, count medicines in the medicine
cabinet, count glasses, count everything.”4 Meanwhile, a police car would
wait outside, and if people were found to be living in an overcrowded house
they would be arrested or fined.

62 / CHAPTER 3
figure 3.1. Men wait for work outside a local convenience store, beneath a “No Loiter¬
ing” sign. Illustration by Peter Quach.
 Additionally, the Quality of Life Campaign targeted undocumented work¬
ers waiting for jobs at the Via, another public “nuisance” in the eyes of bor¬
ough officials and many white residents of the town. In 2003, the town council
passed an “anti-loitering” ordinance that prohibited waiting on the street for
work, effectively closing the muster zone. Various pro-immigrant groups, as
well as the day laborers themselves, tried to meet with the council and the
mayor to discuss the closure of the muster zone, but, Rosa said, “The people of
this town were so used to having the immigrants under their thumbs that they
thought they could do whatever they wanted and no one would stop them.”5
In January 2004, a group of local residents and Latin American immi¬
grants filed a suit in federal court against the borough on behalf of its Latinx
day laborers. The suit argued that the anti-loitering ordinance prohibiting
workers from congregating in public spaces to wait for work was unconstitu¬
tional. From January to April 2004, in what a community leader later called
“a magical coalition,” members of the Second Baptist Church (its congrega¬
tion was about 90 percent African American) allowed jornaleros to use their
church as a hiring hall and community space where they could meet and
organize. In April 2004, jornaleros were able to wait for work on the street
again when a federal judge ruled in their favor, stating that the borough
was indeed violating Latinx workers’ right to seek employment. The mus¬
ter zone reopened, the Quality of Life Campaign was discontinued, and a
relative detente emerged between the borough and its immigrant popula¬
tion. The people—Latinx, African American, and white—who had united to
fight the municipality subsequently formed Casa Hometown, an immigrant
rights advocacy organization and workers’ center that offers various services
to immigrant workers and their families in Central New Jersey.
But the problems facing undocumented workers in New Jersey persist,
even as Hometown has emerged as a relatively safe place for immigrants to
live. Hometown Borough is part of the New Jersey patchwork of municipali¬
ties, and the policies and politics of one town have implications for others.
Hometown Borough is an island in the sea of Hometown Township, the
neighboring town that completely surrounds the borough of the same name.
Or, to mix metaphors, Hometown Borough is the hole in the township’s
donut, and the two places couldn’t be more different.6 Whereas Hometown
Borough is now relatively tolerant of immigrants and is less than 40 percent
white, Hometown Township is 85 percent white, and immigrants are only
welcome if they are there as contracted laborers. Immigrant residents of
the borough do not like to enter the township for fear of being stopped by
the police on any imaginable pretext. Driving with a broken taillight, for

64 / CHAPTER 3
example, or riding with too many people in the car, or riding a bike on the
sidewalk, or “loitering” can be enough to get you arrested. And once you
are arrested, you are fed into the computer of U.S. Immigration and Cus¬
toms Enforcement (ice), and from there it is a short step to detention and
deportation.7
In addition to the constant fear of this eventuality, immigrant workers
face many perils associated with being an undocumented participant in the
U.S. labor force.8 Workers in Hometown, like immigrant workers elsewhere
around the country, are involved in some of the country’s most danger¬
ous forms of employment. They work with machinery for which they have
been provided little training and no safety equipment. They are mangled by
chainsaws, burned by dry cleaning presses, crushed by falling warehouse
pallets, sickened by toxic chemicals, trampled by livestock. They fall out
of trees, off ladders, and off roofs. Immigrant workers clean up in the after¬
math of storms, floods, and other disasters, in perilous and often poisonous
conditions. They are required to inhale smoke and asbestos and fiberglass or
lose their jobs for complaining. Workers who might consider protesting these
conditions to an employer or an oversight agency are often cowed by employ¬
ers who threaten to expose their undocumented status to the authorities.
And when they are injured on the job, more often than not undocu¬
mented workers are denied the compensation and health coverage that they
are legally entitled to as workers under U.S. labor law. Many employers cut
costs by declining to carry the insurance coverage they are required to have
under New Jersey law; others who have insurance may discourage injured
workers from using it. Instead, employers of the undocumented often refuse
to recognize the injured worker as their employee, leaving her entirely un¬
supported and shirking their legal obligation to provide workers’ compensa¬
tion. Sometimes the employer will offer the injured worker a plane ticket
and a small payoff if they agree to return to their home country without
filing an insurance claim. In addition, many employers will refuse to pay
their undocumented workers at the end of a job, assuming that the worker
will be too frightened by threats to expose her to the authorities to demand
payment. In Hometown workers have been driven by their employers to a
distant jobsite, only to be refused payment and denied a ride back home.
Known as wage theft, the practice of hiring a worker and then refusing to
pay the agreed-upon salary is a common problem faced by undocumented
workers in New Jersey, as it is elsewhere in the United States.
In the work of the advocacy group Casa Hometown, cases of work ac¬
cidents and wage theft are routine. With nowhere else to turn, immigrant

Reflections on Fieldwork in New Jersey / 65

workers who have been injured on the job or have had their wages stolen
come to the center for legal help, medical attention, family counseling, and
more. It was through our volunteer work with Casa Hometown that the four
of us came together and began to collaborate on a research project into the
challenges facing immigrant workers. We aimed not only to understand
these problems and their effects but to find ways to address them.

Activist Research in Hometown, NJ

In 2011, with the intention of establishing a research project in the local im¬
migrant community, Caro and Daniel began volunteering in Casa Hometown,
initiating activities that would continue into 2015. As practitioners of activist
anthropology, their research required Daniel and Caro to spend significant
amounts of time working with local activists and immigrant people in need.
Through 2011 and 2012, they spent many hours, together and separately, work¬
ing in the office of Casa Hometown and hanging out with undocumented
people. Their duties were varied: they did intake of people reporting prob¬
lems and seeking help from the agency; translated for monolingual speakers
of English or Spanish; drove injured workers to doctors’ appointments, physi¬
cal therapy, or the emergency room; coordinated the work of other volunteers,
including Rutgers undergraduates whom they recruited and supervised—in
short, whatever needed doing. They also joined in the frequent marches, pro¬
tests, and demonstrations for immigrant rights organized by Casa Hometown
and other local and statewide associations (Goldstein 2014). Daniel was even¬
tually appointed to the board of directors of Casa Hometown and became
involved in the ongoing political and fundraising activities of the center. He
also began working with other immigrant rights groups, in nearby towns and
around the state. Caro worked with immigrant women at Casa Home¬
town, becoming involved in an effort to create a womens handicraft coop¬
erative, helping to organize workshops on natural healing and medicine, and
translating at meetings and events. She also spent time brainstorming ideas
for her own dissertation project in the community. In addition to their service
work, Caro and Daniel began doing exploratory research. They spent a lot of
time sitting around with jornaleros waiting for work at the Via, chatting about
their lives and work and the families they had left behind. In these early days
of the project, Caro and Daniel wrote fieldnotes of their experiences and ob¬
servations and did some preliminary individual and group interviewing with
day laborers and with visitors to and clients of Casa Hometown. On the basis
of the insights they developed from this initial research and in consultation

66 / CHAPTER 3
with the director, staff, and clients of Casa Hometown, Caro and Daniel began
to formulate a more specific research plan.
The research they proposed would focus on deportations, work accidents,
and wage theft as three key vulnerabilities to which immigrant workers were
exposed, to understand the sources of these threats and the ways in which
local people responded to them. As a legal anthropologist with a particular
interest in human rights, Daniel was especially keen to understand the ways
in which undocumented workers—typically understood as hiding from the
law, remaining always in the shadows to avoid detention and deportation—at
times may become active users of the law in defense of their rights as work¬
ers. Having seen many cases of this in Casa Hometown—Mirian’s battle for
health care and compensation following her accident at the horse farm was
a case in point—Daniel felt that this would provide an interesting and little-
studied angle on the immigrant experience in the United States. It would
also offer a different perspective on the undocumented who, rather than
merely being seen as the passive victims of the law, may emerge as active
users of the law and the legal apparatus in defense of their own basic rights.
Caro was interested in including people from outside the Latin American
community in our research, particularly African Americans, and on learn¬
ing about the history of race relations in Hometown. That, she felt, would
contribute to the decolonial aims of the project, as it would give us a his¬
torical background to understand how undocumented immigrants are op¬
pressed and how they resist in New Jersey. Furthermore, we hoped that the
project would aid Casa Hometown and its staff in better understanding the
challenges their immigrant clients faced on the job and offer some insights
into how they could better serve the local community.
From the outset, Daniel wanted this project to be different from his previ¬
ous work in Bolivia. He hoped to build on what he had learned from these
experiences—about the possibility of combining academic work with advo¬
cacy and activism, about the role of research assistants in data collection,
and about the potential for anthropology to contribute meaningfully to the
amelioration of injustice. To do so, he and Caro wanted to design a project
that was fully collaborative in its methodology, grounded in an engaged
perspective, and intended to produce data that would be useful not only to
academics but to the community itself. Of course, a project like that would
cost money, most importantly to cover the salaries of the paid assistants they
planned to hire. In addition to Carolina herself, these would be two local
individuals, themselves undocumented immigrants, whom Daniel and Caro
would train in the methods of social research.

Reflections on Fieldwork in New Jersey / 67

 To fund the project, Daniel and Caro wrote a grant application to the
National Science Foundation. They intended to apply as co-PIs but were in¬
formed that the nsf does not allow for professors and students to apply
together as principal investigators. So, they agreed that Daniel would be the
principal investigator of their project. The research Caro and Daniel pro¬
posed to the nsf was explicitly activist in nature, concerned not just with
studying the problems facing immigrants but struggling alongside them
to address these problems. To their credit, nsf staff and reviewers wel¬
comed this approach. Every proposal to the nsf is evaluated in terms of
both its “Intellectual Merit”—that is, its potential contribution to scientific
understanding—and its “Broader Impacts”—that is, the contributions it
makes to society at large. In the case of the latter, Caro and Daniel proposed
training local community members to become researchers themselves, a
process that would also contribute to the aims of ethnographic research as
a scientific methodology. In their proposal, the methodological justification
read as follows:

From its inception, the proposed research has been envisioned as a

collaborative effort, developed and executed in close cooperation
with New Jersey-based community organizations active in the locali¬
ties where the research will be conducted. The ideas and hypotheses
presented in this proposal have been developed in conversation and
collaboration with leaders and members of Latino [sic] migrant com¬
munities and their advocates in New Jersey. These individuals, along
with others whom the project will identify and train, will continue
to work as collaborators in the research, helping to collect the data
needed to answer the questions listed above, and to analyze the
data to interpret the final results. The project thus represents a kind
of “engaged anthropology.” ... Engaged anthropology is not merely
extractive, mining local communities for data without contributing to
the resolution of the problems that it studies; rather, it takes seriously
the possibility that through research, anthropologists can help to bring
new understandings and make material contributions that can posi¬
tively impact the people with whom they work.... From this point
of view, anthropological research is a dialogue between researcher
and research subjects, who are also stakeholders and participants in
the research project itself. This approach conforms well with the nsf s

own commitment to research that has “broader impacts” beyond its

academic contributions.

68 / CHAPTER 3
 The benefits of an engaged approach are numerous and, in the case
of the present proposal, accrue to all parties involved. For research
subjects, especially the Latino residents of Hometown, NJ, the re¬
search promises to shed light on issues of the utmost concern to them
and their families, as they struggle to make a life for themselves in the
United States. More directly, the training they will gain through this
project will prepare them to take on other kinds of employment, both
in future research projects and in other jobs that require the kinds
of skills that ethnographic research training provides, such as obser¬
vation, interviewing, computer skills, and the like. For the research¬
ers, working collaboratively with members of the Latino community
affords access to people and information that outsiders could never
adequately attain, given the inaccessibility and resistance of the un¬
documented population to standard research approaches. An engaged
methodology will enable the collection of data in new ways, leading to
new discoveries that other research plans would struggle to achieve.
Engaged anthropology of the type described here, then, is not merely
ethically imperative in the contemporary moment. It is also required
by science, as it will generate the data needed to answer the research
questions proposed. Particularly when studying populations and top¬
ics with high degrees of political sensitivity like those described here,
a traditional, extractive approach to data collection is simply inade¬
quate. The methodology that guides this project is at once ethically ap¬
propriate and scientifically necessary, both for the “broader impacts” it
will generate for the study population, and for the “intellectual merit”
of the project’s organization.

Caro and Daniel received funding from the nsf to support the project in the
summer of 2013 and officially began doing research that fall. Their first task
was to hire and train what they then thought of as “research assistants” to
assist them in their work.

On Research Assistants and Graduate Students

The role of assistants in the work of ethnography is one of the least scrutinized
elements in social research. Despite the widespread use of paid helpers—
variously described as “research assistants,” “key informants,” or, more recently,
“collaborators”—-rarely have anthropologists discussed these individuals’ roles
in the research process. Native research assistants were critical to the success of

Reflections on Fieldwork in New Jersey / 69

such pioneering anthropologists as Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski,
who used the work of their assistants as the basis for their own broader gen¬
eralizations about native “culture” (Briggs and Bauman 1999; Lassiter 2005).
With the passage of time, anthropologists began to acknowledge more explic¬
itly the role of local research collaborators in their work, though rarely did
that extend to including them as coequals in the research, analysis, and writ¬
ing of ethnography. As Middleton and Cons have observed, this elision is
ironic given the often central role of these individuals in the research it¬
self: “If research assistants are regularly written into grant proposals, bud¬
gets, and research designs, their presence tends to be conveniently erased
in the all important progressions from fieldwork to published ethnography”
(Middleton and Cons 2014, 282). Roger Sanjek has noted that the (often
deliberate) decision by (often white male) anthropologists to leave out the
contributions of research assistants (often people of color) represents “an¬
thropology’s hidden colonialism,” an observation that echoes the larger ar¬
gument of this book (Sanjek 1993).
Similarly obscure is the relationship between professors and graduate stu¬
dents and the roles that each play in the others’ work. The mentor/mentee,
advisor/student relationship in academia is usually a lopsided one. In some
disciplines the advisor is understood to be the one who possesses knowledge
and whose role it is to inscribe this knowledge on the blank slate of the
student. The student, meanwhile, is meant to absorb knowledge, sponge¬
like, and to apply it to her own empirical research. In some fields the student
is understood to be something like a bud off the advisor’s stem, the intel¬
lectual offspring of the great mind. Even in anthropology, where the student
is expected to establish herself as an independent scholar by developing her
own research project, the advisor/student relationship remains a largely pa¬
ternalistic one, the student imagined to be a product of her advisor’s guid¬
ance and intervention. This model of the teacher/student relationship is an¬
other expression of academic coloniality, colored by the deep inequality and
power embedded in the academic hierarchy, another element that divides
those who know (professors) from those who are striving to know (graduate
students) from those who are the objects of knowledge (research subjects).
Like many anthropologists, in each of his Bolivia projects Daniel had
employed local individuals to assist him in the research process. And he
had worked with many graduate students on various projects, in a variety
of capacities. But the relationship between Daniel and Carolina was rather
different, mostly because Carolina would not tolerate a strict hierarchy. This

70 / CHAPTER 3
became clear right from the start of their work together. In fall 2011, Daniel
hired Caro to be an assistant on the preliminary research in Hometown.
But it was a busy time for Caro. In addition to her graduate classes and her
work as a teaching assistant, she was actively involved in the Occupy Wall
Street movement, spending much of her time commuting from school in
New Brunswick to her home in Brooklyn and going to Zuccotti Park in
lower Manhattan. Plus, she was new to ethnographic research, having never
studied or practiced it. Daniel was cautious in assessing Caro’s abilities and
concerned about the extent of her commitment to the research project.
Their collaboration had a rocky beginning. Caro was slower than Daniel
would have liked in writing and sending him her fieldnotes, and Daniel, re¬
garding Caro as a paid research assistant, was annoyed. On October 14, 2011,
he sent Caro an email that read, in part:

I still don’t have your notes, Caro, not from this week or, more trou¬
bling, last week. I must insist that you send me your notes—without
them, all your work is for naught, as there is no record of what you
have learned to feed into the project. I will not take you back to Home¬
town on Tuesday if you have not first sent me the notes from these last
four visits. And ... henceforth I am going to require that you write
them up and send them to me within one or two days of fieldwork,
whether or not you are camped out on Wall St.

Caro replied later that night. She apologized for her late submissions, but
assured Daniel that she was taking notes while in the field and did not lose
any detail by writing up later. But she also pushed back against his tone and
his expectations, suggesting that she might leave the project if her approach
was unacceptable:

I work hard for this project. I spend all my time in the field talking to
people and getting them to talk to me. I not only write fieldnotes, but
I reflect on what can be learnt from my work.... You telling me you
won’t take me to Hometown unless I send my fieldnotes denotes a
lack of trust in me and the quality of my work that makes me feel I’m
a freshman. I really love this project and I would like to keep working
on it, this is why I’m telling you now what you can expect from me:
I can commit to sending the notes by the end of the week ... but I am
a grad student and (I would like to think) an organizer with a million
things to do and I need to manage my own time.

Reflections on Fieldwork in New Jersey / 71

To which Daniel replied:

I am sorry if my last email connoted a lack of trust. I do trust you, even

though, as you correctly observe, I barely know you. I certainly don’t
mean to make you feel like a fresh(wo)man. On the other hand, this is
an employer/employee relationship, and it is my right (my obligation,
even, to the project, the funder, etc.) to establish certain rules about
how the project will be run. However, it was wrong of me to do that
via email and in such a dictatorial manner, and for that I apologize....
We can talk in person ... about a reasonable set of expectations re¬
garding time frame of when and how you submit your fieldnotes. I
value your contributions to this project, and I’m sure we can come up
with a schedule that fits with your other obligations and still allows
you to write timely and detailed notes.

Despite Daniel’s assertion that the relationship was one of employer and
employee, that frame quickly evolved into one of collaboration and inter¬
dependence. Daniel and Carolina came to trust and respect one another,
working as equal partners in the research process. In a kind of turnabout
that is probably more common than is usually acknowledged, Caro became
Daniel’s teacher as well: even as Daniel taught Caro how to do ethnographic
fieldwork, Caro taught Daniel how to think from a perspective of decolonial
feminism. By reading Caro’s own writings—in course papers and disserta¬
tion chapters, as well as in her rich and detailed fieldnotes—and in long
conversations in the car as they drove to Hometown, Daniel became increas¬
ingly interested in these perspectives and began to read more widely in the
area of decolonial feminist theory. Caro would recommend things to read-
some of them written by her own professors, Daniel’s colleagues in other
departments at Rutgers, whose work he had not previously encountered—and
Daniel in turn would push Caro to think about how these abstract theories
might be brought to bear on what they were learning in Hometown. For
Daniel, using decolonial theory shouldn’t empower elite scholars to simply
“make shit up” (his characterization of literary analysis of the sort that
Caro had been doing); it required instead a firm grounding in social reality,
gleaned through ethnographic research. Caro laughed at this depiction of
decolonial scholarship but took the message to heart, ultimately writing her
own doctoral dissertation based on decolonial ethnographic and archival
research. Daniel served as one of Caro’s thesis co-advisors, but their rela¬
tionship was characterized by trust and mutual support, defying the tradi¬
tional power hierarchy of the professor/student relationship.

72 / CHAPTER 3
 At the same time as they struggled to establish a clear, horizontal work¬
ing relationship, Caro and Daniel also had to find other “research assistants”
(as they then thought of them) to help with data collection and analysis. For
this, they relied on their contacts and connections at Casa Hometown.

A Different Approach to Ethnography

Mirian was still wearing a neck brace when Caro and Daniel first asked her to
work with them, a result of her work accident on the horse farm described in
the previous chapter. Mirian had already been in Hometown for a year and a
half at that point, and since leaving the horse farm she had been volunteering
in Casa Hometown and serving on its board of directors. She was in constant
pain and could not work a regular job, but had won her case in court, and
her employer’s insurance was paying for her treatment and recovery. Despite
her personal struggles, Mirian was serving as an organizer in her community,
leading the monthly meetings held by the jornaleros in Casa Hometown and
working to organize support groups and a women’s cooperative. She had also
begun writing her own songs about her life as an undocumented woman
and performing them at public events. Daniel and Caro were impressed
by Mirian’s intelligence, her resilience and inner strength, and her status as a
leader among the undocumented residents of Hometown, and they invited
her to join the project as a paid research collaborator.
Lucy, meanwhile, had been in Hometown for fourteen years, and, like
Mirian, she served on Casa Hometown’s board of directors. And, like Mir¬
ian, Lucy was a leader and activist in her community. Caro and Daniel asked
her to join the project after seeing how she mobilized her community in the
aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, a devastating storm that rocked New Jersey
in October of 2012. Six months after the event, a meeting was called between
the Red Cross and the members of Casa Hometown to discuss the needs of
the community and how the Red Cross might assist in its post-storm recov¬
ery. In advance of the meeting, Lucy had taken it upon herself to assess these
needs, compiling a resource that the Red Cross could use to evaluate areas of
possible intervention. On her own initiative and with no training or prepa¬
ration, Lucy conducted a survey of forty local families. She discovered that
people in Hometown were deeply affected by the hurricane, despite the fact
that theirs is not a coastal town. Many day laborers worked tirelessly helping
with storm cleanup, and the everyday problems that undocumented workers
face—including wage theft and work accidents—were intensified after Sandy.
Although the meeting led nowhere—the Red Cross, it turned out, was only

Reflections on Fieldwork in New Jersey / 73

interested in helping homeowners whose properties were damaged by the
hurricane, which excluded the majority of undocumented people—Daniel
and Caro were deeply impressed by Lucy’s initiative in conducting the sur¬
vey and the quality of the insights at which she arrived. They asked her to
work with them on their research project.
When they joined the research team, Mirian and Lucy had no idea what
ethnography was, though they immediately understood the potential of eth¬
nographic research to contribute to their work as advocates for and activists
in the undocumented community. Both of them expressed enthusiasm for
learning more, and more deeply, about their own community and the prob¬
lems people faced. At their first official meeting in August 2013, Caro and
Daniel explained that after two years of working on their own, they were
ready to have local people join their team. Caro told them that her disser¬
tation research focused on the colonial history of New Jersey and its rela¬
tionship to present-day conceptions of immigrant “illegality.” Daniel then
explained that he was interested in work accidents and wage theft and the
ways in which immigrants use the legal system to defend themselves against
exploitation. They asked Mirian and Lucy, what would you be interested
in studying as part of this project? Here, the question of rights (part of the
original academic framing of the project) emerged as a local concern, par¬
ticularly of activists involved in immigrant rights advocacy. Lucy immedi¬
ately said she wanted to help her community to know and understand their
rights. Too often, she explained, undocumented people are afraid to defend
themselves, falsely believing themselves to be entirely without rights and so
unwilling to take action when they are abused or exploited. Lucy thought
she could use the research project to help people better understand their
rights and to act to secure them. Mirian took a similarly activist approach to
the project, saying that she wanted to help the Latin American community
in Hometown to be more united. In her work as an organizer, she said, she
found people to be too isolated from one another to act cohesively to ad¬
vance their collective interests. By learning more about the community and
communicating that knowledge to her research subjects, Mirian believed she
could foster stronger ties between individuals and families in Hometown.
In addition, Lucy and Mirian (like Caro and Daniel) hoped that their work
on the project could also benefit Casa Hometown. Casa Hometown performs
valuable work for the undocumented community of Hometown, serving as
a workers’ center and a provider of legal services. Casa’s staff are mostly un¬
paid. The organization has no stable source of external funding but is sup¬
ported mostly by the dues paid by its members. Membership recruitment is

74 / chapter 3
thus a critical component of the work of Casas staffers and activists. Mirian
and Lucy believed in the mission of Casa Hometown, understanding it to be
a central node for educating and organizing the undocumented community.
The research, they felt, would bring them into more intimate contact with
people who could benefit from Casa Hometowns services, and by encourag¬
ing these individuals to become members of the organization, they would be
serving Casa Hometown in return.
At that first meeting, the team also discussed the idea of writing a play as
a way to disseminate some of the information the project learned to the local
immigrant community. Caro had been reading about theater and activism for
one of her classes in Caribbean Philosophy and was interested in the emanci¬
patory potential of community theater. Surprisingly, Mirian said she had also
been thinking about writing a play because one of her jornalero friends had
mentioned the idea to her and, together with her songs, playwriting seemed
to be an artistic means for accomplishing some of her activist goals.
And so it was decided: The four would work together as ethnographers
and would also collaborate in the writing of a play. After discussing the plan
with the board of Casa Hometown, it was also determined that the four re¬
searchers would continue to work as volunteers in the center. This volunteer
work was a way of assisting Casa Hometown, part of the activist dimension
of the project. It also provided an opportunity for meeting more people in
town and creating new opportunities for ethnographic interviewing.
During the first few months of working together, Caro and Daniel trained
Mirian and Lucy in the basics of ethnographic fieldwork. From the grant
budget they purchased iPads with keyboards and taught them how to write
fieldnotes. They discussed the basics of observation, helping them to use all
their senses to note the fabric of everyday life, instructing them to attend
closely to everything people did and said in their daily encounters. They ex¬
plored rapport building and unobtrusive questioning and the importance of
confidentiality and anonymity in all their writings and recordings. Much of
this was obvious to Mirian and Lucy, who through their activist work already
understood the importance of maintaining good relations with the people
with whom they worked. Daniel and Caro provided them with human sub¬
jects and irb training, and they earned online certification through Rutgers
University and the citi program. After a time the four of them began doing
interviews together, so that Lucy and Mirian could understand the use of an
interview guide, the techniques of interviewing such as “letting the infor¬
mant lead,” and how to work the digital voice recorder. All of these methods
they adopted quickly, and in time they were able to begin conducting their

Reflections on Fieldwork in New Jersey / 75

own interviews. But they soon developed their own approach to ethnogra¬
phy, informed by their roles as organizers and leaders of Casa Hometown.

Conclusion

For all of the goodwill we each brought to the project, as the preceding
narrative recounts, our project nevertheless contained complex power dy¬
namics and inequalities, unfolding in a space of sometimes profound con¬
tradiction. Daniel—a phenotypically white Rutgers professor and citizen of
the United States—was the principal investigator of the nsf grant that al¬
lowed us to carry out our project; and as much as we made most decisions
collectively, all the team members knew that Daniel had control of the bud¬
get and the final say on decisions affecting the work. Caro, too, held a kind
of privilege and power that Mirian and Lucy lacked. While neither Lucy nor
Mirian is white-passing and both are undocumented, and while Mirian is
disabled due to her work accident, Caro came to Hometown with her white
skin, her abled body, her proficiency in English, and her fi visa. At the be¬
ginning of the project Carolina was under the illusion that because they had
all been friends for a couple of years, Lucy and Mirian regarded her as their
peer. But Caro realized that this was not the case when Mirian referred to
Caro as her maestra or teacher, a title that Mirian and Lucy also used in re¬
ferring to Daniel. That day Caro became aware that the power asymmetries
between them don’t only lie in the difference of their skin color, their English
proficiency, and their immigration status, but also in their institutional affil¬
iations and the access to resources and prestige that such affiliation conveys.
Thus, as much as we aimed to decolonize our ethnographic practice, our
work remained embedded within a colonial and patriarchal framework. The
one man of the group, a phenotypically white, heterosexual professor, ulti¬
mately held the reins of the project; the woman in the group with the lightest
skin enjoyed a status that the other women did not. Daniel and Caro each
explicitly recognize the privilege these gendered and racialized configura¬
tions bestow and acknowledge that such structural inequalities were part of
the context in which our project took place. The contradictions inherent in
attempting to do decolonizing work while in many ways operating within
coloniality structured Daniel and Caro’s very access to Lucy and Mirian’s
ideas and thoughts, ideas that are the cornerstone of our book. Recognition
of these facts is, we believe, critical to our efforts to overcome their effects.
For their part, Mirian and Lucy set out on their work intending to do
their absolute best as ethnographers, working to meet Daniel and Caro’s

76 / CHAPTER 3
expectations about what “data collection” should look like and striving to
learn and practice it. But Mirian and Lucy also took seriously their sense of
obligation to their community and to the organization, Casa Hometown,
with which they worked to defend immigrant rights. They readily incorporated
ethnography into their activist toolkits, finding it to be a useful instrument for
their work in community organizing and education. Mirian and Lucy did
not draw lines between or around “ethnography” and “activism” or feel the
need (as activist anthropologists, Daniel included, sometimes did) to jus¬
tify the validity of activist anthropology to anyone else. In their work on the
project, Lucy and Mirian adopted a rich and mutually sustaining blend of
ethnography and activism, focused largely on educating their ethnographic
subjects about their rights and helping them to find assistance with their
problems. They also joined their work as ethnographers to their volunteer
work with Casa Hometown, using their research to feed their organizing
and to strengthen the organization. At the same time, through their work
as ethnographers, Mirian and Lucy grew personally as they gained a better
sense of themselves as immigrants, as women, and as organizers and a deeper
understanding of the causes and consequences of the problems facing their
community. Through their work, they enacted a true synthesis of academics
and activism and in the process revealed the potential of ethnography as a
decolonial instrument of individual and collective political transformation.
All of this is clearly depicted in the fieldnotes that Mirian and Lucy wrote,
two to three entries each per week over a two-year period (2013-15), supple¬
mented by observations in the fieldnotes written by Caro and Daniel during
the same time. They wrote their fieldnotes in Spanish (excerpts quoted here
were translated by Daniel and Caro). Many of these notes record Lucy and
Mirian’s reflections on their own personal and professional growth as they
worked as ethnographers, as well as the many encounters between Mirian
and Lucy and other members of the local immigrant community as they
went about their fieldwork. Excerpts from these notes, along with Mirian and
Lucy’s explicit reflections on their experiences (elicited primarily through
informal conversations and more structured interviews that Daniel and
Caro conducted with them before, during, and after the fieldwork period)
reveal the ways in which they creatively blended activism and ethnography,
suggesting the potential of each to sustain and inform the other as part of a
decolonizing approach to social research. We explore this in more detail in
the next chapter.

Reflections on Fieldwork in New Jersey / 77

 4

UNDOCUMENTED ACTIVIST THEORY

AND A DECOLONIAL METHODOLOGY

Lucy and Mirian initially struggled to adapt to their new identity as anthro¬
pologists. They felt uncertain about what the work would entail and doubted
their ability to do it. And even though they were residents of Hometown
and members of the local immigrant community, they soon discovered that
approaching people in the role of ethnographer was different from engaging
them in their ordinary roles as community members and activists. But as
ethnographers of their own community, Mirian and Lucy had an immedi¬
ate advantage over outsiders like Carolina and Daniel. People knew them
from their work in Casa Hometown, recognized them as undocumented
like themselves, and usually showed little hesitation in speaking to them.
Some people, however, remained aloof and uncertain, refusing to trust them
or to share their stories.
Like other ethnographers, Lucy and Mirian had to draw on their personal
resources to establish rapport with their field collaborators. One morning
at the start of fieldwork, Lucy was hanging out with the men at the Via,
chatting about their experiences crossing the border from Mexico into the
U.S. But Lucy detected a certain reserve on the part of the men, who seemed
nervous about telling her these stories. So, she wrote:

I took the risk of sharing my own story with those who had spoken of
their experiences. I told them about the first time I crossed on foot, how
after ten hours of walking Immigration caught us and returned us to
 Mexico, and the following day we went back, walking for nine hours,
and that time we made it. I think [sharing] these stories helped us to feel
identified with one another.1

For the most part, Lucy and Mirian had a relatively easy time establishing
rapport, as they already had the confidence of many local people. Instead
of having to seek out informants, people would often come to them: Know¬
ing them to be advocates for the local community, undocumented people
sought them out to tell them about their work accidents or to ask their help
in dealing with various immigration-related problems. Mirian and Lucy’s
fieldnote entries often begin with statements like,

El sehor Federico called me last night, asking my help with a case he had,
for driving without a license.2

Other times, their observations emerged through their volunteer and ad¬
vocacy work:

This is the story of la sehora Adela, who came to Casa Hometown look¬
ing for help, because she was referred to us by [another organization].3

As it had been for Daniel and Carolina during their preliminary studies,
encounters in Casa Hometown became the source of much ethnographic
data for Lucy and Mirian, supplementing their efforts to contact people in
other social settings.
Lucy and Mirian’s dispositions as caring, approachable people also made
for excellent fieldwork relations. This is reflected throughout their notes
and interviews, which capture their basic orientations to the people around
them—not as the objects of research but as full human beings, like themselves,
dealing with terrible hardships as a result of their structural positions and
sometimes poor life choices. One day as she was walking around town look¬
ing for someone to chat with as part of her fieldwork, Lucy ran into a friend

who asked me to accompany her to the county courthouse, where she

had a case, her petition for a divorce. She asked me to come with her
because, according to her, I know a little more English than her, and I
said, amiga, you shouldn’t trust appearances, and we both laughed a
little. But she asked me to do her this favor, so I said ok, and we headed
to the court. On the way I asked her if she had ever been there before and
she said yes, and I said: then you already know where to go, and she said,
yes, amiga, but I’m so scared you wouldn’t believe it! I told her, you have
nothing to be afraid of, you are not a criminal, and she replied, that is

Undocumented Activist Theory and a Decolonial Methodology / 79

 true, but in these times they’ll accuse us of anything, we can’t make one
false move or we’ll be incriminated with something. And I said yes, in
that we agree, but we have to be brave.4

This note illustrates Lucy’s compassion and willingness to put herself at risk
in order to help a friend (just entering the courthouse can be a dangerous
move for an undocumented person). At the same time, the note is full of rich
ethnographic observations that bear directly on one of the project’s main
research questions: the extent to which undocumented people are willing
to use the legal system to defend their rights and advance their interests (in
this case, in a divorce proceeding). It also demonstrates the ease with which
Lucy was able to get right to the emotional and experiential aspects of being
undocumented and engaging with the state—an insight that an outsider to
the community might never gain. Lucy’s own subject position, including
her experience with the U.S. legal system, made her an excellent ethnogra¬
pher, providing her with a particular standpoint from which to observe. For
instance, on entering the courtroom that day, filled with trepidation about
exposing herself to the gaze of the state, Lucy noted with surprise that “the
security guard, instead of watching the security cameras, was very busy
checking his Facebook page, and though I stared right at him, he didn’t even
notice that we were watching him.”
Simply roaming around town to elicit random encounters was a key
research/activist strategy for both Lucy and Mirian. When they weren’t vol¬
unteering at Casa Hometown or engaged in more formal research activi¬
ties like interviewing, they might go out for a walk and inevitably become
involved in some interesting encounter in which they could provide as¬
sistance and about which they would later write in their fieldnotes. Again,
this was facilitated by their good public reputations and their willingness
to help others, as well as a developing eye for detail and a good ethno¬
graphic anecdote. It also reveals the ways in which their activist work and
ethnographic work were beginning to overlap. Mirian, for example, would
sometimes visit Open Door, a food pantry run out of a local church, where
both immigrant and nonimmigrant people would go for free produce or a
hot meal. One day, after walking around town for a while, Mirian decided
to stop by:

I encountered several people there that I know, and they asked me where
to find the office of Casa Hometown. I was talking with a mother and
daughter, the daughter had had an accident and couldn’t work, the
mother couldn’t work due to her age and because she had diabetes.5

80 / CHAPTER 4
 The conversation ends with Mirian encouraging these people to come to
Casa Hometown to receive help with their problems and an exhortation that
they become members of the organization.
On another occasion, Lucy went to the laundromat to wash her family’s
clothes and encountered an acquaintance named Alexandra, with whom she
began a conversation:

I asked her how she was doing and she said, not so good. And I said, why
not so good? Then I said, if something has happened, if I can help you
with something, and so she told me: She was having problems with her
tenants, there was a couple who had rented a room in their house, and
the husband was hitting the wife, she had bruises on her face and arms.
And I said, oh my God, and then what happened?6

At the end of the conversation, Lucy urged Alexandra to come to Casa Home¬
town for help in dealing with this situation. In both of these instances, Lucy
and Mirian used their fieldwork encounters to recruit people to Casa, en¬
couraging them to become members of the organization and to take advan¬
tage of the services it provides. These encounters in turn were documented
in fieldnotes and sometimes led to more comprehensive ethnographic in¬
terviews. Another time, Lucy spoke with a woman who was battling her
ex-husband for custody of their daughter:

She told me she was doing really badly, and for my part I told her that she
was invited to Casa Hometown, there we could help her to investigate and
do whatever we could to get her daughter back. She said that she would
come by and visit us, because she was desperate. I told her not to worry,
that everything would be ok, that the solution would soon appear.7

On another occasion, Lucy described meeting a woman named Lilia in

the supermarket. Her husband had been detained on drunk driving charges,
and Lilia was struggling to choose between spending money on her hus¬
band’s legal defense and providing for the basic needs of the couple’s three
children. Lucy’s fieldnotes of this encounter demonstrate all the themes
mentioned earlier: Lucy’s profound compassion for the woman’s situation,
drawn from her own experience of her husband’s detention; her promise to
employ her and her organization’s resources to resolve the woman’s case; and
the rendering of this experience in writing:

She told me sadly, “You know that now I am father and mother to my
three children, the little that I have been able to save I want to use for my

Undocumented Activist Theory and a Decolonial Methodology / 81

 children. It is a little selfish of me but I have to support my kids, because
my husbands situation is very insecure, we don’t know what his fate will
be." And I wanted to give her a few comforting words, and I told her that we
will try to get her an affordable lawyer, that we have lawyers that work
with us who don’t charge a cent. She said ok, that she would try, but I
could tell that she was more inclined to help her children. But I won’t
lose hope that we can fight her husband’s situation, given that they have
a citizen son and the eldest child is a Dreamer and they have a daughter
who will turn is next year and can qualify [for daca], so we agreed to
make a date with a lawyer who is expert in this subject and tell her the
case. [Until then], this note is in suspense.8

Interviewing and Educating

The blending of advocacy, activism, and research intensified as Mirian and

Lucy gained more confidence in their abilities as researchers and began to
conduct interviews unaccompanied by Daniel or Carolina. Mirian and Lucy
used their casual or work-related encounters with immigrants to initiate
conversations and, if a person had an interesting story, they would invite
that person for an interview. Here again, however, they occasionally encoun¬
tered skepticism and resistance to their ethnographic interventions. Lucy re¬
called that “people asked me why I wanted to record them; sometimes they
didn’t trust me not to use their real names. Sometimes they would ask me
again and again who I work for and what the data is for.”9 When confronted
with these doubts, Lucy and Mirian would explain that the research was part
of a project associated with Casa Hometown and that they were trying to
understand the different vulnerabilities to which immigrants were exposed
so as to better serve undocumented people.
In their interviewing, as in their less-structured encounters with undoc¬
umented people around town, Lucy and Mirian followed through on this
promise to use the information they gained through research to better serve
the community. Their interviews became amazing hybrids of data collection
and pedagogical exhortation, in which the interview subjects would narrate
their personal histories and the problems they were dealing with as undocu¬
mented immigrants (usually focused around work accidents, wage theft, de¬
tention, and deportation, though other topics frequently arose), followed
by instructions from the interviewer on how to handle these problems
successfully. Although they could have (and in the past, indeed had) done
education and advocacy work through their involvement with Casa Home-

82 / chapter 4
town, the research process created abundant new opportunities that they
would otherwise not have had, enabling them to contact people whom
they otherwise would not have encountered. Additionally, the knowledge
they gained through the research—in particular, about the extent to which
people in their community suffered in silence from work accidents and wage
theft—provided them with better information to use in their outreach. Mirian
and Lucy developed an approach that mobilized the information gathered
through ethnography to support their activist work while using the ethno¬
graphic process itself to extend their activism.
This was evident from the very beginning of their interviewing. Carolina
and Daniel accompanied Mirian on her first solo interview. The interview
subject was a woman who had suffered a work accident and was disabled
by the terrible pain in her back and neck. They sat in the woman’s living
room, sipping soft drinks that they had brought with them for the occasion,
while Mirian and the woman conversed. Although Mirian had run through
the usual protocol, asking the woman for permission to interview her and
to record the conversation, the two women spoke with the intimacy of old
friends (they had only just met). Mirian spoke from the experience of her
own work accident and listened as the woman in turn recounted her story.
As Caro and Daniel watched, both Mirian and the interviewee began to cry.
As the conversation began to wind down, Mirian advised the woman on her
rights as a worker, explaining that she had the right to compensation for her
accident, that the employer was legally obligated to carry insurance that would
provide medical care, and that she had the right to take him to court for failing
to do so. The woman sat listening in astonishment to this news. By the end of
the conversation, Mirian had recruited the woman to join Casa Hometown,
promising her legal help in pursuing her right to compensation and care.
As they left the woman’s home, Daniel asked himself what he had just
witnessed. It did not resemble any interview he himself had ever conducted
or even read about. In talking it over with Carolina, they began to realize that
what Mirian and Lucy were doing was crafting a different kind of research,
one that could not be evaluated in terms of the canonical standards. This was
activist research in which neither component took priority over the other. It
was also deeply grounded in empathy and an insider’s sense of the basic hu¬
manity of her interlocutor: a woman, undocumented and disabled just like
her. From one perspective, this clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of an
activist approach for gaining ethnographic knowledge about the topic under
study (i.e., work accidents and the rights of the undocumented). But it also
demonstrates the utility of ethnography for activists and the community

Undocumented Activist Theory and a Decolonial Methodology / 83

they serve when the academic anthropologist steps back and lets the local
activist-ethnographer do her work. In this case, and in many others that
would follow, Mirian used the semi-structured interview as an opportunity
to advise an individual in trouble while also building her organization, re¬
cruiting that individual to become a Casa Hometown member. In doing so,
Mirian (and Lucy, in her own interviews with consultants) worked to build
a coalition of people who could struggle together to demand their rights
and advance a collective agenda. An important point here is that this work
could really only be done by someone like Mirian, someone who shared an
identity and set of experiences with the person being interviewed. The emo¬
tional connection that they so readily established opened a whole new set of
insights into the lived experience of the academic questions being studied,
in this case work accidents and their effects on those who live them.
Lucy and Mirian continued to use their ethnographic research to learn
about problems in the community and then to organize people in response,
not just as individuals but collectively. Not everything they did pertained
to the themes of the research or was related to immigrants’ troubles with
the U.S. government. For example, through their interviewing and informal
conversations, Lucy and Mirian learned of a man, himself a Latin Ameri¬
can immigrant, who ran a small shipping business, sending packages to
and from Latin America for his immigrant clients in Hometown. But many
people had complaints about this man and felt that he was ripping them off.
So Mirian and Lucy organized these people to come out and protest publicly,
blocking the entrance to his store until the man relented. Again, this was an
issue that fell outside the strict purview of the project; nevertheless, it was
something that Lucy and Mirian learned about through ethnography, and
they felt compelled to act. In doing so, they again drew on their own per¬
sonal identities and emotions. Mirian wrote in her fieldnotes:

This man has a business sending packages to various countries, and he

was behaving badly toward his own clients. I found this very offensive,
given that we are from the same country, and how awful to feel that a per¬
son from your own country is creating this kind of problem. ... So I told
him that... we have had many complaints about him and that we were
contacting all the people to whom he owed money and that we would
have a protest in front of his store. This cheater felt the pressure, and after
eight days he called [his clients] to pay them what he owed them.10

Lucy and Mirian, together with Caro and Daniel, were also active in organ¬
izing events and rallying community participation in them. Often these were

84 / CHAPTER 4
political events: demonstrations, marches, and protests against U.S. immi¬
gration policy, detentions, and deportations. On May 1, International Workers
Day, many organizations that work to support undocumented workers and
their families in the northeastern U.S. gather in New York City for a march
in Union Square. There they cheer and applaud speeches, performances, and
public demonstrations. The research team collaborated with the leadership
of Casa Hometown to organize community participation in this event,
which included transportation from New Jersey to Manhattan and back.
Each year, Casa Hometown would march and Mirian would sing one of her
songs about immigrant rights and the experience of living undocumented
to the people assembled in Union Square. Other notable occasions included
marches around Hometown in support of immigrant rights; protests outside
the homes of local wage thieves; and a conference at Rutgers University called
“Undocumented/Unafraid” (organized with Unidad Latina en Accion, another
New Jersey immigrants’ rights organization), which brought together aca¬
demics and activists, including Mirian, for a discussion about undocumen¬
tation and New Jersey life. In all of these events, Lucy and Mirian (along
with Daniel and Caro) used their fieldwork encounters to build support,
recruit participants, and organize the involvement of local people in collec¬
tive action. The rally described at the end of our play in chapter 5 is a good
example of how their activist work included mobilizing the local community,
sometimes in support of individuals in crisis (see figure 4.1).
The efforts to combine fieldwork, organizing, and advocacy—and par¬
ticularly, to serve people’s needs while recruiting them to become Casa
members and so bolster the organization that provides those services—
could be stressful for the activist-researchers. In her fieldnotes Mirian often
remarked on the challenges of organizing her community. Her complaints
frequently focused on people’s failure to take advantage of the services that
she and her organization provided. People’s lack of understanding of their
own rights was critical in this regard, as was their willingness to accept Casa’s
services without becoming official members and without making an ongo¬
ing commitment to the organization. One time, for example, Mirian wrote:

A man came to Casa Hometown with tickets issued by the housing in¬
spector. He told me the police came to his house late at night with the
housing inspector. When he found 13 people in the house the inspector
said the house was only meant for seven people, so he gave them a $500
fine for every extra person living in the house. I told him that this is what
happens when people don’t come to our Casa Hometown workshops to

Undocumented Activist Theory and a Decolonial Methodology / 85

figure 4.1. Marian and Carolina perform a scene from the play Undocumented,
Unafraid (see chapter 5). Illustration by Peter Quach.
 learn about their rights. The housing inspector and the police can’t come
into your home unless you allow them to. That is the problem with some
people.. .. They only come to Casa Hometown when they have a prob¬
lem and then they disappear.11

Lucy and Mirian discovered that most immigrants who are injured on the
job or are victims of wage theft do not know that they can sue their employers
in court until they visit Casa Hometown. It is a curious feature of U.S. labor
law that, although undocumented people are not eligible for employment, if
they are injured on the job they are entitled to the same benefits as an autho¬
rized worker.12 This is enforced in New Jersey through the state’s Workers’
Compensation Act, which prohibits employers from discriminating against
employees on the basis of national origin or citizenship status and requires
them to provide medical benefits and compensation to workers injured on the
job.13 New Jersey obligates employers to carry private insurance to pay these
awards to their employees and maintains a public fund to which injured work¬
ers can apply if their employer does not abide by the law.14 Workers who are
denied these basic rights are entitled to sue their employer in court. Mirian
said that “people come to [Casa Hometown] to find help, but not legal help.
Once they come here we tell them that they have the right to go to court and
that is a very profound discovery for many people. Being undocumented
doesn’t mean having no rights, and people don’t know that.”15
Teaching people about their rights became an important part of their
work as organizers, and this mission was further extended through their eth¬
nographic research. For example, Lucy interviewed a woman who had suffered
several work accidents and other “humiliations” at the hands of her previous
employers, owing, the woman said, to her inability to speak English:

I informed her that in Casa Hometown we offer an English class, and that
she could attend and that it would help her to get ahead. She told me
that there are many people who humiliate her in horrible ways, because
she is undocumented they don’t give her any importance. I told her that
even though we are undocumented we have rights, as human beings,
and therefore it is good to educate ourselves and to attend educational
forums [at Casa Hometown] whenever they are offered.16

By the second year of our work together, Mirian and Lucy began taking
the project in new thematic directions. At the outset, Daniel and Caro had
asked Lucy and Mirian to think about topics that they might be especially
interested in studying, and in the course of their inquiries the experiences of

Undocumented Activist Theory and a Decolonial Methodology / 87

immigrant women emerged as a central concern. Lucy and Mirian began to
make domestic violence a particular focus of their attention, but they soon
encountered difficulties. Lucy wrote:

I’m looking to write fieldnotes about domestic violence, so I have been

asking women from the community who I see every day on my way to
my kids’ school. I haven’t gotten any results by just asking people. I think
it is an issue that, when it affects you, you don’t want to talk about it for
fear of being judged or for fear that people will judge your partner.17

Not to be deterred, Lucy called her comadres in the community and asked
them for the names of women who suffered from domestic violence. She
called these women and asked if she could visit them. Some of them were
willing to see her, and though no one agreed to be interviewed, Lucy was
able to write fieldnotes about their stories. “With our project I learned a lot
about domestic violence,” Lucy said. “I know things are difficult for women
in Mexico, because many times their partners abuse them and there is no
support for them from the state. But I thought things would be different
in the United States because there is more protection for women.”18 But for
undocumented women that is not the case, as Lucy learned through her
research. Because women are afraid of getting their partners deported and
being left alone to care for their children and themselves, and because of
their own fears about being undocumented, they often decline to report the
abuse they endure to the police.19 “I would talk to women and encourage
them to get help, if not from the police at least from Casa Hometown.”
Mirian spoke with a woman who had suffered domestic violence at the
hands of her intimate partner and had hired a lawyer to help her, but the
lawyer had done nothing. The woman claimed to have reported the case to
the police, but Mirian sensed that she was not telling the truth. Here was
another opportunity not only to provide individual services, but to build
her organization. Never one to pull her punches, Mirian said to the woman:

Tell me something: you suffered domestic violence, and you called the
police when it happened? And she told me no, she never called the police. Ok,
I told her the truth, that it is very necessary that you get a police report
to serve as evidence that you were the victim of domestic violence. And
she told me, yes, but the lawyer said first that I had a case and now that I
paid him he tells me I don’t have a case, but he kept my money. And I said:
that is why we have to stick together in an organization, to be informed,
and whatever questions we have, we should ask people that are in the

88 / CHAPTER 4
 organization. I invited her to join Casa Hometown, to learn some En¬
glish and to learn about her rights, because many people take advantage
of those who are afraid to confront life’s realities.20

Similarly, Lucy reported an encounter in which she also (unsuccessfully)

encouraged an immigrant crime victim to call the police and employ legal
resources to resolve her situation:

Micaela is a young woman barely 20 years old, from Mexico, who says
she is running away from her husband who is an American citizen. I met
her in the local pharmacy, I saw that she looked a little nervous, so I went
up to her and I asked if I could help her with something, and she told me:
no, thank you. I said ok, and went over to the next aisle, but there she
was at my side, and she said, yes, I do need help, and so we chatted a bit
about her history. She told me that her husband abused her physically
and verbally, and that she had endured it for a long time, but she was not
going to take it anymore, Micaela had been married for three years. So
I told her, go to the police and denounce him, but she said, No!21

In all of the preceding accounts, Mirian and Lucy demonstrated how their
activism inverted the priorities typically associated with academic research
(as described in chapter 1). Even as they investigated the topic of immi¬
grants’ engagements with the legal system—the principal thesis on which
the entire project was founded and funded—Lucy and Mirian turned the
question of immigrants’ use (or refusal to use) the legal system to advance
their rights and interests into a priority of their activism, urging their re¬
search subjects to use all resources at their disposal to defend themselves.
In each of these cases, upon learning that the victim had failed to engage
with the law to respond to domestic violence, Lucy and Mirian advised
the women they interviewed on what they should have done, exhorting
them to denounce those responsible for the wrongs done to them. This
requires victims to confront their fears of deportation, to understand that
even undocumented people have certain rights when they are the victims
of crime, and to call on authorities like the police and lawyers to help them
get the justice they deserve.22 In this work, then, Mirian and Lucy used
the context of the interview as a platform for learning about problems and
doing activist work to address them. As Lucy put it, “My work day to day
is to exhort women to denounce these types of violence.”23 Or, as she said
about domestic violence, “It is good to create consciousness in the commu¬
nity and to say: E.N.O.U.G.H.”

Undocumented Activist Theory and a Decolonial Methodology / 89

 Undocumented Activist Theory

As they grew as activists and researchers, Lucy and Mirian also developed
their own theory of undocumentation, of what it means to be undocumented
in the U.S. and wherein lie the principal sources of the problems facing un¬
documented people. Their theory in some ways conflicted with those typi¬
cally held by most academics, including Carolina and Daniel. In most critical
writing by immigration scholars and journalists, the suffering of undocu¬
mented people in the U.S. is a result of structural and systemic forces that
produce immigrant “illegality,” which disqualifies undocumented people as
rights bearers and renders them “deportable” by the state (see, e.g., de Genova
2002, 2007). Nevertheless, scholars contend, most undocumented people are
allowed to remain in the U.S. to continue to serve the needs of U.S. capi¬
tal for cheap labor (Goldstein and Alonso-Bejarano 2017; Gomberg-Munoz
and Nussbaum-Barberena 2011). This arrangement consigns immigrants to
“shadow communities” where they live more or less in hiding, their behavior
biopolitically regulated and their ability to socially reproduce severely con¬
strained (Chavez 1998, 2008; Coleman and Stuesse 2014). Immigrants in this
literature can appear passive, the victims of an unjust and exploitative system,
the enormity of which they are powerless to confront.
Mirian and Lucy accepted the basic premise of this theory. In their words
and writing they frequently referred to the unjust system of laws and polic¬
ing that detain and deport members of their community and that take no
account of the many contributions that these people make to their adopted
country. Like other immigrants, they were well aware of their importance
to the U.S. economy and pointed to these contributions as evidence of their
right to live unmolested in this country. Through their ethnographic work,
Lucy and Mirian became especially aware of the prevalence of work accidents
among the undocumented and of how these are the physical expressions of
what it means to live in the shadows.
But Mirian and Lucy rejected the implication that immigrants are right¬
less and powerless to resist the suffering that illegalization imposes on them.
In their theory of undocumentation, structural factors are only one part of
the story, one cause of immigrant suffering. The other critical factor is what
they perceived to be lack of unity on the part of the immigrant community,
a result of people’s failure to know their rights and to demand them collec¬
tively. In this, they articulated what we call an undocumented activists theory
of undocumentation, which says, “The system is indeed rigged against us,
but we can’t just lie down and take it. We can’t hide in the shadows, we have

90 / CHAPTER 4
to fight back together in defense of ourselves and our loved ones.” Theirs is
a theory that emphasizes human rights, especially the right of all people to
live and work in peace without oppression from the government. It reflects
the value of collective self-determination that lies at the heart of other deco¬
lonial struggles in the United States such as the Civil Rights and Black Power
movements. As Mirian said:

We must fight for our rights despite our fear. Fear is not a justification
for lack of action to me because if we all got together we could achieve
many things. And I think that, of course, there will be people arrested
and people deported, even killed. But I take the example of Blacks in
this country. I have heard that it used to be the case that Blacks couldn’t
sit at the front of the bus. But one day they made a decision: They said,
we need to have respect for one another. We need to have dignity. We
need to have equality between Blacks and whites. They won the fight
for equal rights because they were united. They sat at the front of the
bus together and they reclaimed their humanity.24

We call this an undocumented activist’s theory because it is a perspective

that emerged through Lucy and Mirian’s work as activists as they struggled
to rally their community to organize and defend themselves against state vio¬
lence and workplace abuses. It emphasizes activist values, including action
in the face of oppression, resistance to injustice, and empowerment against
imposed weakness and invisibility. It argues that the conditions under which
undocumented immigrants live can only be changed if they are willing to
engage in collective action by coming out of the shadows to demand human
dignity and respect.25 Lucy said, “When the community is not organized we
cannot achieve anything. If people in the community were organized and we
were all standing together in front of the cannon I think that only then would
change come, because we have to all be on the same tune to achieve things.”26
This emphasis on unity and solidarity as the only means to achieve social jus¬
tice for the undocumented was shared by Mirian: “For me our main problem
as undocumented people lies in the lack of unity among our community.
Take for instance the fight for drivers’ licenses in New Jersey. Everybody
wants their license, but when the time comes to come together and demand
that we are given access to drivers’ licenses people don’t show up. In 2016
we organized a march in Trenton for the licenses and maybe 800 people
showed up. Flow many of us undocumented folks are there in New Jersey?
Many more than that, so for me it’s just not enough.”27 Undocumented activ¬
ist theory is also evident in Mirian’s fieldnotes. At times she sounds harsh

Undocumented Activist Theory and a Decolonial Methodology / 91

in criticizing immigrant workers’ own failures to take care of themselves in
dangerous situations. For example, Daniel once asked Mirian for her per¬
spective on why immigrant workers suffer from so many accidents on the
job, expecting her to point to the exploitative nature of the U.S. labor system
or the failure of employers to provide adequate safety equipment and train¬
ing to their workers. To Daniel’s surprise, however, Mirian answered that
not enough immigrants bother to learn about safety equipment and how to
use it, and when they are injured they don’t seek the support to which they
are entitled. Another time, describing the aims of a workshop she organized
at Casa Hometown to educate workers on workplace dangers and how to
avoid them, Mirian wrote:

What we want is that they can identify the dangers and that we do it
for ourselves, that we don’t get all defensive and put all the blame on
our patrones, but that we take prudent measures in the first place, for
ourselves and for our own safety Because if we are working in the sun, and
we don’t bring water, and we don’t ask the patron for any, I believe that we,
too, have to be aware and concerned for our own wellbeing everywhere
we go, and not think like a child that makes excuses for everything, and
say: I didn’t drink [water] because my patron didn’t give me any! Making
ourselves into the victims. Nor can we risk our lives to earn a few more
pennies, we should realize that our health is the most important thing.28

Lucy shared Mirian’s perspective on these matters. In her written accounts,

Lucy’s increasingly strident exhortations of immigrants to demand their
rights seemed to emerge from a belief in the need for the undocumented to
unite and assert themselves more forcefully in the face of challenges. One
day while she was walking around Hometown distributing flyers for an up¬
coming event at Casa Hometown, a charla (chat) for mothers of children
with special needs, Lucy ran into a group of women whom she knew to have
special-needs children. One woman was the mother of a boy named Efrain:

I asked them why they hadn’t asked for help [from the school], and they
responded that because they don’t speak English, they didn’t want to be
insistent about it. I told them that that was not a sufficient reason and
that when you want to accomplish something you have to put your mind
to it, and we’ve got to move heaven and earth to get help for our kids.
Efraln’s mother said to me, but sometimes, sehora, people give you nasty
looks, and I told her, that doesn’t matter, sometimes we have to deal with
that, but we should never allow it to defeat us.29

92 / CHAPTER 4
Lucy was not merely demonstrating bravado in this instance, but acting in
accordance with her theory of undocumentation. Judging from the apathy
that she and Mirian encountered among immigrants in their activist fieldwork,
this theory was not a widely held one; nevertheless, for Lucy and Mirian, it
guided their actions and shaped their perspectives on what they observed.
In their fieldnotes, one observes a mounting frustration with these circum¬
stances, in which immigrants don’t show unity in confronting their abuse
and exploitation. Writing about a Casa Hometown workshop on resisting
deportation, Lucy said:

Well, this afternoon Casa Hometown held an immigration forum with

a very prestigious and well-known lawyer. The whole community had
been invited about a week and a half ago, it had been announced in
Casa Hometown, and I personally made phone calls. And it’s a shame
that only eight people showed up, nine counting the director of Casa
Hometown... . It’s a pity because people keep coming to Casa Home¬
town with their problems, above all because of relatives detained by ICE,
and sadly day after day the deportations and separations of families
continue. But my question is... why when there are forums like this,
don’t people attend? Really, I don’t think I understand my people all that
well.... I hope that for the next meeting we can get more people to¬
gether, because difficult times for us are coming and we really have to
educate ourselves, day after day.30

The final line of this note warns of “difficult times” ahead for undocumented
immigrants, a prediction that unfortunately came true with the election of
Donald Trump as president in 2016. Lucy’s writing was realistic about the
circumstances facing immigrants, and she was often critical of those who
prefer to live in ignorance, hiding in the relative safety of Hometown and
hoping to avoid the many dangers that surround them. For Lucy the only
option is to come out of the shadows: “If we don’t confront our fears we
will always be afraid. We must face our fears and come out of the shadows.
Besides, hiding makes no sense because if the government wants to find
you, they will find you.”31 Mirian’s thoughts echo Lucy’s in this regard. In
her understanding of the world, fear of the state should not be a reason for
undocumented people to feel that they can’t engage in collective organized
action, since the all-seeing eyes of the state are everywhere and can’t be
avoided: “That is what I tell immigrants who tell me they want to hide from
the state. This country has already found us through our phones, through
Facebook and Whatsapp, not to mention the cameras everywhere. I believe

Undocumented Activist Theory and a Decolonial Methodology / 93

that there is no hiding from the government, and that coming out into the
light to demand our rights is the only way forward.”32 This perspective empha¬
sizes a discourse on rights and individual behavior that some might critique
as neoliberal, a way to “blame the victim” and accord responsibility to the in¬
dividual for her own oppression.33 For Mirian and Lucy, however, “blame” is
not the right lens through which to interpret their theory. As Mirian put it:

It is not about assigning blame. This is about feeling that we have the
right to exist. To say, I exist and I am here. To me being afraid to take
action is not justified because the day when we have a multitude of
people fighting for the rights of the undocumented will be the day
when we get respect. I would like to see a march like the [2018 March
for Our Lives], where thousands of people across the nation take the
streets in solidarity with immigrants and with one another. This is
about people gaining consciousness of their worth and of their power,
and I don’t just mean us undocumented people.34

It is important to note here that for Mirian the lack of action in support
of the rights of the undocumented on the part of documented people is
also part of the problem. Lucy agreed that the issue at hand is not to assign
blame, but rather to raise consciousness among the community about their
rights and the importance of collective action: “This is not about blaming
people for their illegal status, but rather about raising the consciousness of
our people. Many choose not to participate in our actions for fear of losing
their job, for example, or for fear of the police. But think, for instance, about
the big 2006 marches when hundreds of people went to New York City from
Hometown. That year thousands of immigrants took to the streets every¬
where in the country. If we had continued marching in a massive way our
reality today would be very different.”35 Lucy and Mirian’s theory of undocu¬
mentation states that direct organized action on the part of undocumented
immigrants themselves is the only way to change their situation of so-called
illegality, and it makes immigrants themselves accountable for stepping out
of the shadows and demanding the recognition of their humanity.
It is important to recognize this perspective as a theory. Even if one dis¬
agrees with it, this set of ideas cannot be dismissed as a form of false conscious¬
ness, a misrecognition of the “reality” of illegalization that immigrants face in
the U.S. It is, rather, a coherent framework for interpreting the daily experi¬
ences that Lucy and Mirian have lived as undocumented people and for mak¬
ing sense out of the data they collected through their work as ethnographers.
To call their perspective on undocumentation a theory is to acknowledge

94 / CHAPTER 4
that theorizing is not the sole preserve of academics and scholars. It is a
decolonial move, recognizing that all kinds of people—including ethnogra¬
phers’ collaborators—are theorists, often developing their own explanatory
frames that make sense given their own knowledge and experience. This is
not unprecedented in anthropology: Anthropologists have long advocated
for the use of indigenous terms and concepts in understanding local cultural
realities,36 and more recently scholars have called for anthropological atten¬
tion to indigenous or “native” theory (Simpson and Smith 2014) and “theory
from the South” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012a). Recognizing this kind of
theory as theory is an important part of decolonizing anthropology.
As with other nonacademic theories—that is, sets of ideas produced by
those outside the academy and often regarded as insufficiently theoretical-
undocumented activist theory emerges inductively. It is based on and comes
out of experience and observation, rather than being an a priori set of as¬
sumptions about the meaning of social life. To that extent it might be consid¬
ered a variety of what some sociologists call “grounded theory” (Glaser and
Strauss 1967), or what some anthropologists call “lateralist” theory (Boyer
and Howe 2015)—theory that emerges through research or the experience
of being a full participant in the world about which one theorizes. Whatever
the case, to identify an undocumented activist’s theory of undocumentation
as a theory is to bring theory down from its lofty pedestal, to challenge the
coloniality of a view of theory as something beyond the grasp of ordinary
folks, something that can only be applied by experts to interpret the lives of
others. It is instead to find theory produced by people who lack a theoreti¬
cal passport, so to speak; it questions “the existence of higher levels of truth
claims beyond the particularities of fieldwork experiences and ethnographic
narratives” (Boyer and Marcus 2015, 9). Undocumented activist theory
suggests one possible set of ideas by which undocumented people—in this
case, undocumented activists—interpret their own experience.
To consider undocumented activist theory as theory also opens new in¬
sights into the worlds of undocumented immigrants. It enables us to say
something beyond the familiar academic concepts ordinarily applied to
their lives and experiences. Undocumented activist theory restores agency to
people for whom self-determination is denied, both by the state that craves
their labor but not their public presence within the nation and by those
academics who would subscribe to an overly structural perspective on the
immigrant condition. Because undocumented activist theory comes from
members of the community being studied, it can say things about that com¬
munity that well-meaning outsiders are not positioned to say. Mirian and

Undocumented Activist Theory and a Decolonial Methodology / 95

Lucy can be critical of their friends and neighbors for their lack of solidar¬
ity and their passivity in the face of oppression; Daniel and Carolina would
have more difficulty making such an assertion. Whether or not one thinks it
is correct, the theory opens new spaces for talking about undocumentation,
from the perspective of activists hoping to challenge the situations they view
as unjust. Undocumented activist theory brings new voices to the conversa¬
tion beyond those of academics, journalists, politicians, and white liberal
activists, most of them external to the undocumented community. In its
focus on the full humanization of the undocumented, undocumented activ¬
ist theory brings new questions to the debate—questions about the rights of
the undocumented, which may be overlooked by those whose main concern
is a critique of the prevailing conditions that oppress and exploit them. And
undocumented activist theory, unlike most academic theory, is inherently
activist: It identifies problems and proposes solutions, all in the same breath.
Lucy and Mirian’s undocumented activist theory of undocumentation
also recognizes the lies that immigrants have told themselves—that the
United States is a land of opportunity, where everyone can get rich and be
happy. The reality of the “American Dream,” Lucy says, is much different;
and in laying bare this reality in her fieldnotes, she reclaims it, offering an
immigrants’ take on the meaning of the American Dream. In a note titled
Sin Alivio [No Relief], Lucy wrote:

In this fieldnote I want to share with you the life story of immigrant Jose,
who came to this country in search of an American Dream and left his
family behind. Jose has been here for w years and has missed a lot of his
kids’ lives. I asked him if the sacrifice was worth it and he said it isn’t.
That’s why he’s planning on returning to his country, because he has been
waiting for too long for an immigration reform that allows him to fix his
papers. I was saddened when he told me how much he has given to this
country since he arrived. He said he only came to find a better future but
now it’s time to go back. I said I’m glad he will see his family again. Then
I asked, “What about the American Dream? Did you get it?” He replied
that his dream was to have a work permit and be here legally, but it has
already been 10 years. But he accomplished part of the dream, which was
to build a house in Mexico.37

“For many people building a house in their home country is part of the
American Dream,” Lucy wrote in another fieldnote entry. “For many it’s
about dreaming for their kids. For me it’s also about getting my papers one
day.”38 In her work, Lucy reclaims the American Dream as something that

96 / CHAPTER 4
is accessible to undocumented immigrants, even those who end up getting
deported or going home. This, too, is part of her undocumented activist
theory of undocumentation. The dream, whatever it might be, is the goal to
be achieved through organized, ongoing resistance.

Conclusion

The benefits of the project’s approach to ethnography are clear. On the one
hand, the research produced fascinating new insights into the lived reality
of immigrants in a securitized environment. Of course, having two undocu¬
mented women on the research team made access to a potentially closed
community much easier. But more important than access was the quality
of the work they did. Mirian and Lucy were excellent ethnographers, with a
keen eye for detail, a passion for inquiry and investigation, and a willingness
to take risks and confront the unknown. Though they began the project with
no knowledge of or experience with ethnographic research, they quickly
became highly adept at observing, interviewing, and writing fieldnotes. Not
everyone could do this: On several occasions the team hired other individu¬
als as research assistants—usually undocumented men, in an effort to incor¬
porate their perspectives—but these arrangements were unsuccessful. One
of the men, whom we call mgf, was himself an amateur ethnographer prior
to joining the project who, for his own amusement, would interview people
on the street about being undocumented and write up his observations in
a pocket notebook. But he never quite understood the goals of the project,
nor did he produce the kinds of data that Lucy and Mirian did. (One excerpt
from mgf’s fieldnotes, rendered in the form of a poem, appears as the
epigraph of this book.)
Mirian and Lucy, in contrast, engaged their subjects through their own
experiences as undocumented women, a status they embodied legally, phys¬
ically, and emotionally. As the victim of a work accident who carried that
burden throughout the fieldwork period, Mirian could feel the pain of un¬
documentation with every turn of her head, every movement of her leg.
Lucy knew the numbing fear of having a loved one detained and threatened
with deportation. All of this led to an ethnography that was deeply emo¬
tional, at times even spiritual, grounded in their felt, lived experiences with
work accidents, illegalization, and detention. This perspective contributed
to the quality of their fieldwork and writing. Indeed, some of their most
poignant fieldnotes reveal the depth to which violence penetrates immi¬
grant lives. Lucy wrote of her interview with Dolores, a single mother with a

Undocumented Activist Theory and a Decolonial Methodology / 97

young son who had previously experienced domestic violence at the hands
of her intimate partner and later a devastating accident in the factory where
she worked. She said:

It seems to me that sehora Dolores has lived through a very bad experi¬
ence owing to this accident and not only has it affected her but her whole
family, especially her oldest son, who has been affected psychologically.
Years ago, Doha Dolores suffered domestic violence, and the boy lived
through it all, and as a result Dolores said that her son had come to be¬
lieve that the police were bad and now he was directing his fear toward
them. But now that Dolores mentioned it I noted that something else was
going on with her oldest boy, that as a consequence of her accident her
son had become filled with rage, and crying she told me that her son had
said, that he would like to get a gun and kill whoever was responsible for
the accident. His words were very strong. I think that at the first chance
I have to speak to with Dolores, we have to find help for her son.39

In addition, Lucy and Mirian’s participation opened up new avenues of in¬

quiry that had not previously been part of the research design. The question
of domestic violence, discussed previously, was a significant example of this,
but there were others, and these, too, involved a blend of ethnography and
activism. Again, these interests emerged from their own experiences and
observations as undocumented women and their goals of raising individual
consciousness while trying to build and mobilize collective organizations.
For example, as organizers, Mirian and Lucy were interested in the ways
in which women come together socially and politically. One time Mirian
noted, “Organizing women is much more difficult than organizing men in
Hometown. Women have so many domestic duties that it is hard to get them
to attend a meeting.”40 In their research, Lucy and Mirian came to under¬
stand that, while men congregate in places like the Via owing to their work
as day laborers, undocumented women have no central meeting place. Lucy
said, “We are in the shadows and we have no place to congregate and talk
about our work like jornaleros do. We tried to create a women’s collective
but women have to tend to their houses and their jobs and they have no
time to organize.”41 However, Mirian believes that being an undocumented
woman gives her a better vantage point to talk about rights in the United
States, part of what we have identified as undocumented activist theory:
“Undocumented women know what we are talking about when we demand
our rights. We are the most vulnerable, so we know what we mean when we
say we are human and we deserve dignity.”42

98 / CHAPTER 4
 Had Carolina and Daniel chosen different collaborators, the results of
this project would likely have been different as well. As dedicated activists,
Mirian and Lucy’s approach to ethnography was crosscut by their work as
organizers in the undocumented community of Hometown. Whereas Daniel
and Carolina came to the project with a mix of academic and activist con¬
cerns, Mirian and Lucy came to it as activists whose principal concern re¬
garded how this work could contribute to and extend their activism. The
ontological status of anthropology as a social science was never among their
interests. For Lucy and Mirian, the ethnographic methodology was useful
only insofar as it could function as an instrument for community organizing
and education. Yet, through this approach to ethnography, the research team
gathered huge quantities of data. Among the four of us, we wrote thousands
of pages of fieldnotes, recorded over 100 interviews, and collected reams of
secondary documents and information. Lucy and Mirian demonstrated
something that activist anthropologists know well: that ethnography as ac¬
tivism can be powerfully productive for both social action and academic
data collection.
But more than that, Lucy and Mirian were explicit in their awareness that
ethnographic interviewing provided them a unique opportunity to identify
and advise people in trouble, and in this, too, we find the decolonial thrust
of their work. In chapter 3, we suggested that ethnography can be decolo¬
nial when it enables research subjects and their communities to organize
and struggle more effectively to demand and defend their rights, however
these might be understood, and that is what Mirian and Lucy achieved in
their work. By integrating ethnography and activism, they found an ap¬
proach that could accomplish more than either of these on their own.
Mirian noted that activist outreach, far from conflicting with the goals
of their research, underwrote and supported it: “For me an interview is a
mix of talking to people and doing activism. I tell people about their rights
as I conduct my questions so they know this is a two way street and they
can benefit from my interviews. It’s the same for me when I am observing
things to write in my fieldnotes. I don’t just observe people, I interact with
them, ask about their problems and give them advice based on my experi¬
ence.”43 Lucy, too, was very frank about combining research and activism. At
the completion of the two years of collaborative work, Lucy observed that
“when people told me about wage theft or work accidents I would tell them
to go to another lawyer, or go to this lawyer, or go to the hospital.”44 She also
used the interviews to build community and connection, putting people in
touch with others who shared their experiences: “I would tell them, go talk

Undocumented Activist Theory and a Decolonial Methodology / 99

to such and such, they had your same problem.”45 Interviewing, Lucy noted,
was always about much more than data collection: “The objective that we
want to achieve,” she said, “is to educate our community.”46
Mirian and Lucy modeled a decolonial approach to social research by
taking the goals and methods of the project into their own hands and ap¬
plying them toward their own ends. They used the tools and techniques of
ethnographic research to teach other undocumented people to challenge ex¬
ploitation, mobilizing them to step out of the shadows and to collectively de¬
mand their basic human rights. They created bonds and organized collective
responses through their ongoing recruitment to Casa Hometown and their
coordination of public protests and other events by the undocumented com¬
munity and their allies in Hometown. By providing Lucy and Mirian with
the skills, the equipment, and the financing to do this kind of research,47
the project became something much greater than an academic inquiry. It
became an exercise in decolonization, in which the subaltern became the
researchers, the researchers became the students, and the research became
an instrument of social resistance, transformation, and liberation.

100 / CHAPTER 4
 5

UNDOCUMENTED
THEATER

Writing and Resistance

As the previous chapter emphasized, to us decolonial fieldwork is about em¬

powering, educating, and communicating. For Lucy and Mirian, participant
observation and interviewing were always opportunities to inform undocu¬
mented people of their rights and to help them to defend those rights when
they were violated, at home and in the workplace. In doing so, they felt them¬
selves to be working not only as researchers collecting data or as activists try¬
ing to empower and inform members of their community. Like many critical
ethnographers, Lucy and Mirian also understood themselves to be storytell¬
ers, recording and recounting the often-invisible sufferings and struggles of
people like themselves, forced by U.S. immigration law and policing to in¬
habit the shadows of U.S. society. And in doing so, they were stepping out of
those shadows and working to enable others of their community to do the
same. In a variety of ways, all the members of our research team employed
different forms of writing to publicize the struggles of undocumented people
and, at the same time, to extend the project of decolonial engagement.
Fieldnotes became one mechanism for doing this, and Lucy and Mirian
modeled this for the rest of the team. Though neither of them had done
much writing prior to working as ethnographers, their work provoked them
to become more fluent and more prolific with the written word. They be¬
came comfortable writing on the iPad keyboards, and the practice of writing
almost daily became engrained in them. For each of them, the writing as¬
sumed a special form and function. Lucy clearly understood her fieldnotes
as a forum to tell stories about the immigrant community, and she wrote
them with her readers in mind. She began many of her notes by inviting the
reader into her ongoing narrative of local life, with statements like, “Hello
once more. We continue to work hard compiling the histories of our im¬
migrant community.”1 This style of writing was facilitated by the team’s col¬
laborative approach, in which we all wrote notes to and for each other and
shared and commented on what each other wrote. But Lucy seemed to have
a larger audience in mind, often giving her notes titles that made them
into stories or morality tales for readers beyond her research colleagues.
These stories—with titles like “American Dream?,” “False Promises,” and
“A Hard Lesson”—denounce different situations of exploitation that Lucy
learned about in her research, and in her notes she explained that she used
these situations to educate people about their rights and the importance of
organizing. On one occasion, for example, she wrote, “Today I will tell you
about Camilo, who threw his back out carrying heavy objects for his job. He
told me he needed some days off to recover but his patron said no. So I told
him to go back to his patron and demand the days off with pay.”2
Mirian, too, developed her own mode of expressive communication and
pedagogy in her writing, in her case through song. She began singing with
her father when she was very young and was always praised for her voice, but
she truly found her calling after becoming active with Casa Hometown. It was
May 1, 2012—May Day, also known as International Workers’ Day—and Casa
Hometown had been invited to participate in the celebration at Union Square
in New York City. Mirian decided she would sing a song for the occasion, but
she could not find a song that expressed what she wanted to convey about
immigrant workers’ rights and the spirit of belonging she felt in Hometown.
So, Mirian wrote her first song. Before the thousands gathered in the square
that day, she sang about the Casa Hometown “family” and the basic humanity
of the undocumented. Since then, Mirian has written thirty-five songs, which
she performs at local and national events. Like Lucy with her fieldnotes,
Mirian’s songs have an activist, outreach aim: “What I want with my songs is
for people to realize that we are all human. Singing for me is a release of all the
things I have inside, and, because everybody has a relationship with music, it
is a form of reaching out to people maybe more powerful than organizing is.”3
When she is singing, Mirian is the decolonial theorist calling attention to the
dehumanizing qualities of the U.S. immigration system and inviting her fellow
humans to act in solidarity to resist it. For example, in her favorite song, titled
“Sin Fronteras” [No Borders], Mirian advances what in the previous chapter
we called an “undocumented activist theory of undocumentation”:

102 / CHAPTER 5
Oiga, amigo y hermano
Uniendo las manos no te sueltes mas
Todos paises unidos no somos vencidos
Unamonos mas
Todo es posible haciendolo asi
No pensemos en fronteras
Que mucho dano ha pasado ya
Mira todo el racismo que en este mundo se mira no mas
Como poder instruirnos rompiendo fronteras
Uniendonos mas
Que los paises hermanos y Afro-Americanos han sufrido ya
Como poder detenernos mirando a los ninos llorar y llorar
Porque a muchos padres los han detenido para deportar
Mira, amigo y hermano
Extiende tu mano y no permitas mas
Que los derechos humanos sean violados
Como Martin Luther King
Quien fue un hombre fuerte y digno de honor
Hombre que murio en la lucha para defender su comunidad

Listen, friend and brother

Let’s join hands and not let go
Together our peoples cannot be defeated
We must be more united
Everything is possible if we all believe
Let’s stop thinking of borders
Because they have hurt so many
Look at all the racism in this world
Let’s teach ourselves to break borders together
Because our fellow countries and African American brothers
Have suffered enough
How can we hold back when we see the children crying
Because everywhere their parents are detained and deported
Listen, friend and brother
Extend your hand and don’t allow
The violation of human rights
Like Martin Luther King
A strong man with honor
Who died in the fight to defend his community

Undocumented Theater: Writing and Resistance / 103

 Here again, the lines between fieldwork and activism, fieldnotes and
other forms of writing, begin to blur. Just as Lucy’s notes are stories of im¬
migrant suffering and resistance, Mirian’s fieldnotes are songs: Not only do
her notes recount instances in which she sang at events, they are songs in
themselves, as in these notes from April 18, 20x5:

Yo soy la que canto al viento

Y lo digo muy de adentro
Me gusta la buena vida
Sin alborotarme tanto
Pues la vida es muy valiosa
Hay que disfrutarla bien
Nomas cantando canciones
Y andarme paseando en tren
Los caminos de este mundo
Yo los quiero recorrer
Cantandoles mis canciones
Y disfrutarlas muy bien
No les doy la despedida
Porque siempre volvere
Y les cantare cancines
Escuchenlas donde esten
Solo quiero ser su amiga
Y pasarla muy alegres
No necesitamos nada
Ni vino ni borracheras.

I am she who sings to the wind

And I speak from deep within
I love the good life
Without too many disturbances
Because life is very precious
We must enjoy it every day
I just want to sing my songs
And travel around by train
I want to amble along
The paths of this world
Singing you my songs
And enjoying them in full

104 / chapter 5
 I do not say goodbye
Because I will always be back
Singing you my songs
You can hear them wherever you are
I just want to be your friend
And pass this joyful time together
We need nothing more,
Not booze nor drunkenness

One of the most thrilling and remarkable days in Mirian’s life was the day
she received the official copyright for her song “Sin Fronteras” from the U.S.
government. Her and Lucy’s decision to allow their real names to be used in
this book is a similar expression of the pride they take in their writing and
their desire to be recognized for their achievements.
The idea to write a play occurred simultaneously to Carolina and Mirian
at the very beginning of our project, and they brought their idea to the rest
of the team (Figure 5.1). All quickly agreed. In doing so, our team became
part of a long history—from the ancient Greeks to Shakespeare to the Theater
of the Oppressed—in which theater is understood as a means of social trans¬
formation. In our work we contributed to the tradition of creating “theater
in the service of social change” (Prentki and Preston 2009,12), which in the
twentieth century can be traced back to the political theaters of the 1930s,
the happenings and alternative theaters of the 1960s, the popular and com¬
munity theaters of the 1970s, and the radical theaters of Bertolt Brecht and
Augusto Boal (Prentki and Preston 2009, 12). In particular, our work was
influenced by Teatro Campesino (Farmworkers’ Theater), a theatrical group
founded in California in 1965 on the picket lines of Cesar Chavez’s United
Farmworkers Union. Rooted in a radical Latin American theater tradition,
all of the original actors of the group were farmworkers, and they performed
ados, or short skits, on flatbed trucks and in union halls enacting events
inspired by their lives (Broyles-Gonzalez 1994).
In our case, the central idea—inspired also in part by the work of the
Sistren Theater Collective, a Jamaican women’s organization that creates
plays and performances drawn from the members’ life experiences (Sistren,
with Ford-Smith 2005), and by theories of “community theater” (Rodd
1988; Taylor 2003)—was to use the dramatic form as an instrument of public
political engagement, to translate some of our research findings about immi¬
grant workers’ rights into a message that ordinary people could process. This

Undocumented Theater: Writing and Resistance / 105

approach would go well beyond the academic framework—well beyond the
writing that any of us had previously attempted—in an effort to decolonize
ethnographic knowledge, extending it beyond written ethnography.
Over the course of two years, the four of us met regularly to write and
practice the play. Many other collaborators came and went during that time,
contributing to the project in various and lasting ways. In consultation with
other undocumented workers who participated, we decided to base the play
on Mirian’s work accident, recounted in chapter 2, which we developed
(a la the Sistren methodology) (Sistren, with Ford-Smith 2005) from tes¬
timony to scripted performance. We also identified other themes that we
wanted to touch upon in the play, including fear of deportation and separa¬
tion from family. The pedagogical message of the play emerged out of our
ethnographic fieldwork: that under U.S. law everyone has rights as workers
regardless of their immigration status. We wanted to show that an undocu¬
mented worker has the right to bring her employer to court if her rights are
violated and that an undocumented woman can in fact win back her rights
if she stays strong and united with her community.
Mirian wrote the initial draft of her story, which others subsequently
edited into scenes. Many of the characters in the play were based on real
people from Mirian’s experience, while others were created for dramatic
purposes. “Manuela,” for example, is a fictional character whom Mirian
(“Roberta” in the play) meets in the hospital. Like many undocumented
workers who are injured on the job, Manuela decides to return to Mex¬
ico, accepting her boss’s hush money to disappear. Manuela’s experience
embodies the situation that many immigrants face after their accidents, in
which they feel hopeless and alone, with no money and no job, and have to
choose between returning home and staying in the United States. The end¬
ing of the play is meant to communicate the dangers that people face by not
fighting for their rights.
We performed the play for the first time in August of 2015, as part of
the clausura, the formal conclusion of our research project in Hometown.
The stage was a bare floor at the front of Casa Hometown’s main meeting
hall, with some chairs and a few simple props. A capacity crowd had filled
the rows of folding chairs, eager to view this extraordinary event. The lights
dimmed.

106 / CHAPTER 5
figure 5.1. The cast of the play. Illustration by Peter Quach.
 SIN PAPELES, SIN MIEDO

Una obra de teatro de un acto

Escrito y producido por
Teatro Sin Papeles
Un proyecto de
Casa Hometown
Hometown, NJ

Reparto (en orden de aparicion)

CABALLO WILLIAM MANUELA DAISY
JULIA HECTOR DOCTORA ADRIANA
ROBERTA LUCINDA JOSEFINA

Escena 1

Hay un letrero en el escenario que dice “establo” y hay dos sillas. La cor-
tina esta cerrada y escuchamos un caballo relinchar (sfx). Luego julia
grita en la oscuridad.

julia: jSuelte al caballo! iSueeeeeltelo!

Roberta: jAyyyyyyy!

Se abre la cortina y vemos a Roberta en el piso y oimos a un caballo salir

corriendo (sfx). julia corre hacia Roberta.

Roberta: jAaaaayyyyyyyy! Me duele mucho, jno me puedo parar!

julia: jDona Roberta! ^Se encuentra bien? jVi como la piso el caballo!
Dejeme ayudarla. Sientese en este banco.

Caminan juntas hacia el banco.

Roberta: [Mira Julia como tengo mi pierna! Alguien llame a un medico

por favor.

Entra william con hector.

william: jTodos a trabajar! Esto no es nada. ;Eso es lo que te pasa por no

tener cuidado! ^Cuantas veces te he dicho que tengas bien al caballo? jEs
que ustedes no sirven para nada!

Examina la pierna de Roberta.

william: No se fracturo. Peores cosas me han pasado a mi trabajando con

los caballos. No es necesario ir al hospital.
 UNDOCUMENTED, UNAFRAID

A play in one act

Written and produced by
Teatro Sin Papeles
A project of
Casa Hometown
Hometown, NJ

Cast (in order of appearance)

HORSE WILLIAM MANUELA DAISY

JULIA HECTOR DOCTOR ADRIANA

ROBERTA LUCINDA JOSEFINA

Scene 1

On stage is a sign that reads “stable” and two chairs. Hie curtain is closed
and we hear a horse whinny (sex). Then, julia screams in the dark.

julia: Let go of the horse! Let it go!

Roberta: Ayyyyyyy!

The curtain opens and we see Roberta on the floor and hear a horse

galloping away (sfx). julia runs to Roberta.

Roberta: Aaaaayyyyyyyy! It hurts so much, I can’t get up!

julia: Doha Roberta! Are you okay? I saw the horse step on you! Let me
help you. Sit on this bench.

They walk together to the bench.

Roberta: Julia, look at my leg! Somebody please call a doctor.

william enters with hector.

william: Everyone back to work! This is nothing. This is what happens

when you’re careless! How many times have I told you to hold the horse
tight? All of you are completely useless!

william examines Roberta’s leg.

william: There’s no fracture. Worse things have happened to me working

with horses. No need to go to the hospital.
william mira alrededor a julia y a hector

william: Y mucho menos llamar una ambulancia, ^me oyen? Ustedes

saben que si viene la ambulancia les van a mandar a la migra. Y nadie aca
quiere que venga la migra.

william sale con julia. Roberta se queda en el banco con hector.

hector: Tranquila Dona Roberta, aca pasan accidentes asi todo el tiempo.
Todo va a estar bien.
Roberta: ^Y si no? Estamos totalmente aislados en esta finca y usted es-
cucho a Don William decir que esta prohibido pedir una ambulancia.

Entra julia.

julia: Aqui le manda Don William, que se ponga este hielo y se tome estas
pastillas, con esto se le va a quitar el dolor.

Le da unas pastillas y una bolsa de hielo a Roberta.

Roberta: iQue clase de medicina es esa?

julia: Es medicina para caballo. Se llama Biu. Tomese dos. Esto le va a

quitar el dolor.

Roberta no quiere tomarlas.

hector: Yo he tornado Biu a veces. No se preocupe, la va a ayudar.

Roberta (tomandose el Biu): A mi me gustaria ir al hospital...
william (desde lejos): jJulia! jHector! Vuelvan a trabajar ahora mismo. jNo
estamos en hora de descanso!
julia (mirandoa Roberta): Todo va a estar bien Dona Roberta. Solo quedese
aca sentadita hasta que yo vuelva por usted.
Roberta: ^A donde voy a ir? No me puedo mover.

julia y hector salen del escenario. Se cierra la cortina.

informe de derechos de lxs trabajadorxs4 i se proyecta en una

pantalla mientras lucinda (desde lejos) lo lee.

lucinda: Cada trabajadora, sin importar su estatus migratorio, tiene

derecho a recibir el salario minimo federal. Quien trabaje horas extra
tiene que recibir tiempo y medio del salario normal.

no / chapter 5
william looks significantly at julia and hector.

william: And we certainly don’t need to call an ambulance, you hear me?
You know that if the ambulance comes, they will send you to la migra.
And no one wants la migra to come.

william exits with julia. Roberta stays on the bench with hector.

hector: Stay calm Doha Roberta, accidents like this happen here all the
time. Everything’s going to be fine.
Roberta: And if not? We are totally isolated on this farm, and you heard
Don William say that it’s forbidden to call for an ambulance.

julia enters.

julia: Don William says that you should put this ice on it and swallow these
pills to take away the pain.

julia gives some pills and a bag of ice to Roberta.

Roberta: What kind of medicine is that?

julia: It’s for horses. It’s called Biu. Take two. This will kill the pain.

Roberta refuses to take the pills.

hector: I’ve taken Biu sometimes. Don’t worry, it will help.

Roberta (taking the Biu): I would like to go to the hospital...
william (from offstage): Julia! Hector! Get back to work right now. This
isn’t break time!
julia (to Roberta,): Everything’s going to be fine Dona Roberta. Just sit
here until I come back for you.
Roberta: Where can I go? I can’t move.

julia and hector leave the stage. The curtain falls.

workers’ rights message i is projected on a screen, while lucinda

(off stage) reads it aloud.

lucinda: Every worker, regardless of immigration status, must be paid at

least the federal minimum wage. Anyone who works overtime must be
paid at least one and one-half times the regular rate of pay.

Undocumented Theater: Writing and Resistance /ill

 Escena 2

Otro dia. Escuchamos un caballo relinchar (sfx). Se abre la cotina y

vemos a william. Roberta entra cojeando con julia.

william: jEsta tarde Roberta! Tu tienes que estar aca a las 5:00 de la ma-
nana y ya son casi las 6:00.
Roberta: Esta medicina para caballo me da mucho sueno Don William.
Ademas solo me dura el efecto un momento. No puedo permanecer parada
mucho tiempo. Llevo dias tratando de trabajar, ;pero no puedo!
william: Tienes que hacer mas ejercicio. Eso es lo que te hace falta. Ya han
pasado cinco dias desde que te caiste y tu solo te andas quejando. Ya sabes
que si no puedes trabajar pues hay muchos otros que querrian tu lugar.
julia: ^Pero no ve su pierna toda hinchada e inflamada? jApenas se puede
parar!
william: Es asi cuando uno trabaja con caballos... Roberta, ha venido
gente a visitarte. Yo ya te dije que nadie puede venir. ,;Me entiendes?
Nadie. Aca dejamos que los trabajadores vivan en la finca, pero no somos
un hotel.

Sale william del establo. julia toca la frente de Roberta.

julia: Doha Roberta, jtiene fiebre! ;Y mire! Le tiembla todo el cuerpo.

Dejeme mirar su pierna.

Roberta se sube el pantalon y julia mira la pierna de Roberta.

julia: Doha Roberta, justed tiene un hueco en esa pierna! jQue infeccion
que tiene! Creo que su vida corre peligro. No me importa lo que diga Don
William, la voy a llevar ya al hospital.

Se cierra la cortina.
informe de derechos de lxs trabajadorxs 2 se proyecta en una

pantalla mientras lucinda (desde lejos) lo lee.

lucinda: Todas las patronas tienen que cumplir con la ley de osha (el
Acta de Seguridad y Salud del Trabajo) que requiere que provean para
sus empleadas un lugar de trabajo libre de peligros o riesgos para su salud
y seguridad fisica. Cada empleada tiene derecho de trabajar en un lugar
seguro, sin importar su estatus migratorio.

112 / chapter 5
 Scene 2

Another day. We hear a horse whinny (sfx). The curtain opens and we see
william. Roberta enters limping with julia.

william: Roberta, you’re late! You have to be here at 5:00 am and it’s almost
6:00.
Roberta: This horse medicine makes me sleepy, Don William. Besides, the
effect only lasts for a moment. I can’t remain standing for long. I’ve been
trying to work for days, but I can’t do it!
william: You need more exercise. That’s what your problem is. It’s been
five days since you fell and you only go around complaining. You know
that if you can’t work there are many others who would want your place.
julia: But don’t you see her leg all swollen and inflamed? She can barely
keep up!
william: This happens when you work with horses ... Roberta, people
have come to visit you. I already told you that no one can come. You
understand me? No one. We let the workers live on the farm here, but
this is not a hotel.

william exits the stable, julia puts her hand to Roberta’s forehead.

julia: Dona Roberta, you have a fever! And look! You’re trembling all over.
Let me look at your leg.

Roberta rolls up her pants and julia looks at Roberta’s leg.

julia: Doha Roberta, you have an open wound! It looks like a bad infec¬
tion! I think your life is in danger. I don’t care what Don William says, I’m
taking you to the hospital.

The curtain closes.

workers’ rights message 2 is projected on a screen, while lucinda

(off stage) reads it aloud.

lucinda: All employers must comply with osha, the Occupational Safety
and Health Act, which requires employers to provide their employees
with work free from health and safety hazards. Employers must ensure
a safe workplace for all of their employees, regardless of immigration
status.

Undocumented Theater: Writing and Resistance / 113

 Escena 3

Se abre la cortina. manuela y Roberta estan sentadas lado a lado. Hay un

letrero con una cruz roja que significa hospital.

Roberta: Que dolor que tengo, Dios mio. No se que voy a hacer. ;Y tengo
miedo de que venga la migra por mi!
manuela: ;Por favor no hable tan duro! Vi a la policia afuera hace rato y yo
no quiero problemas con Migracion.
Roberta (a ella misma): iQue voy a hacer?

manuela: Cuenteme de su vida. ^Cual es su nombre? ^ Usted tiene familia?

Roberta: Si. Me llamo Roberta. Tengo tres hijas, que ahora se quedan solas
en Guatemala. Yo trabajaba alia haciendo medicinas naturales, sin em¬
bargo la plata no me alcanzo para pagar los gastos de la casa y del colegio,
ademas del costo de la universidad. Mi hija mayor, Josefina, quiere ser
ingeniera. ^Y usted? ^Como se llama?
manuela: Me llamo Manuela. Soy de Mexico. Deje a mis cinco hijos alia.
Como usted, vine para ganar mas, para que ellos tengan una vida mejor.
Roberta:,;Hace cuanto tiempo esta aqui?
manuela: Diez anos. ^Y usted?
Roberta: Llegue hace cuatro anos, la mayor parte aqui en Nueva Jersey.
Trabaje seis meses en la finca de los caballos, antes de mi accidente.
manuela: Que horror. ^Donde le duele?
Roberta: Me duele todo el lado izquierdo del cuerpo. Desde el cuello hasta
la pierna. Esta es la segunda vez que vengo al hospital. La primera vez me
trajo una companera y me pusieron una inyeccion. Tambien me recetaron
medicina para el dolor. Pero no me ha servido. ;No puedo trabajar!
manuela: ^Y su patron que le dice?

Roberta: jja! Es terrible el patron. ;Si fuera por el patron yo no podria

venir al hospital! Si le contara ...
manuela: Puedo imaginarmelo.
Roberta: Estoy esperando a mi companera que me lleve de vuelta al tra-
bajo. ^ Usted por que esta aca?
manuela: Mire, yo tuve un accidente tambien. Estaba trabajando en una
fabrica y me cayeron unos estantes en la espalda. Creo que me rompi la
pierna. Me duele mucho. El patron me trajo al hospital esta tarde y se fue
para su casa. Me dijo que diera un nombre falso y dijera que me cai en
mi casa. Le hice caso, porque tengo miedo de que me pidan mis papeles.
Roberta: iQue va a hacer?

114 / CHAPTER 5
 Scene 3

The curtain opens, manuela and Roberta are sitting side by side. There
is a sign with a red cross.

Roberta: This pain, my god. I don’t know what to do. And I’m afraid la
migra may come for me!
manuela: Please keep your voice down! I saw the police outside a while
ago and I don’t want problems with Immigration.
Roberta (to herself): What am I going to do?
manuela: Tell me about your life. What is your name? Do you have a
family?
Roberta: Yes. My name is Roberta. I have three daughters, now living alone
in Guatemala. I worked there making natural medicines, but the money
wasn’t enough to afford the home, school, plus the cost of college. My old¬
est daughter Josefma wants to be an engineer. And yourself? What’s your
name?
manuela: I’m Manuela. I’m from Mexico. I left my five children there. Like
you, I came here to earn more, so they’d have a better life.
Roberta: How long have you been here?
manuela: Ten years. You?
Roberta: I arrived here in New Jersey four years ago. I worked for six
months on the horse farm before my accident.
manuela: So terrible. Where does it hurt?
Roberta: The whole left side of my body hurts, from my neck to my leg.
This is the second time I’ve been to the hospital. The first time a friend
brought me and I got an injection. They also prescribed pain medication.
But it hasn’t helped me. I can’t work!
manuela: And your boss, what does he say?
Roberta: Ha! He’s a terrible boss. He wasn’t even going to let me go to the
hospital! If I were to tell you ...
manuela: I can imagine.
Roberta: I’m waiting for my friend to take me back to work. Why are you
here?
manuela: I had an accident, too. I was working in a factory and some
shelves fell on my back. I think I broke my leg. It hurts a lot. My employer
brought me to the hospital this afternoon and went home. He told me to
give a false name and to say that I fell in my house. So I did, because I’m
afraid that they’ll ask for my papers otherwise.
Roberta: What are you going to do?

Undocumented Theater: Writing and Resistance / 115

manuela: Creo que voy a ir a la Casa Hometown. Es un sitio que queda

cerca de aca en donde ayudan a las personas como nosotras.

Roberta (pensando): Casa Hometown? Hm, me suena familiar ...

Entra una doctora con julia.

doctora: Senora Roberta, tenemos un problema. Llamamos al numero de

telefono que nos diste del lugar donde trabajas y alia nos dicen que ellos
no saben quien eres tu. Dicen que ninguna mujer trabaja alia. Necesita-
mos que alguien pague tu cuenta en el hospital. Como tu accidente fue en

el trabajo, el seguro de tu patron debe cubrir tus gastos. Pero si no tienes

patron, tu misma tienes que cubrir los gastos.
ROBERTA:^Como es que yo no trabajo alia? ;Yo claro que trabajo alia! ^Como
mas me iba a pisar un caballo? Dejeme ir a hablar con mi patron. Ojala
que sea un malentendido.
doctora: Esta bien. Pero necesitas un tratamiento y no podemos darte el
tratamiento hasta que se aclare el malentendido.

La doctora sale, manuela pone su mano en la mano de Roberta.

manuela: Buena suerte Dona Roberta.

Roberta: Buena suerte a usted Dona Manuela.

Se cierra la cortina.
informe de derechos de lxs trabajadorxs 3 se proyecta en una
pantalla mientras lucinda (desde lejos) lo lee.

lucinda: Todas las patronas tienen que dar a sus empleadas el equipo nece-
sario para protegerse contra los peligros que enfrentan en su trabajo. Las
patronas pueden recibir multas en caso de no proveer el equipo necesa-
rio, sin importar del estatus migratorio de sus empleadas.

Escena 4

Escuchamos relinchar un caballo (sfx). Se abre la cortina. Esta el letrero

“establo” y los dos sillones. Roberta esta entrando con muletas. En el
establo esta william.

william: [Roberta! iQue estas pensando? ^Como es posible que dieras mi

nombre y el numero de aqui en el hospital? ^Sabes el problema que
me has causado? Yo te dije claramente que no dieras mi nombre -en el
hospital.

116 / chapter 5
manuel a: I think I’ll go to the Casa Hometown. It’s a place near here where
they help people like us.
Roberta (thoughtful): Casa Hometown? Hm, that sounds familiar ...

A doctor enters with julia.

doctor: Ms. Roberta, we have a problem. We called the phone number

you gave us for where you work, and they say they don’t know who you
are. They say that no women work there. We need someone to pay your
bill at the hospital. As your accident was at work, your employer’s insur¬
ance should cover your expenses. But if you have no employer, you your¬
self have to cover the costs.
Roberta: How could I not work there? Of course I work there! How
else would a horse step on me? Let me talk to my boss. Hopefully it’s a
misunderstanding.
doctor: That’s fine. But you need treatment and we cannot treat you until
this misunderstanding is resolved.

The doctor exits. Manuela puts her hand in Roberta’s.

manuela: Good luck, Dona Roberta.

Roberta: Good luck to you, Doha Manuela.

The curtain closes.

workers’ rights message 3 is projected on a screen, while lucinda

(off stage) reads it aloud.

lucinda: All employers must provide workers with safety equipment for
hazards faced in their jobs. Employers can be fined for not providing
proper equipment to all workers, regardless of immigration status.

Scene 4

A horse whinnies (sfx). The curtain opens. There is the “stable” sign
and the two chairs. Roberta enters on crutches, william is in the barn.

william: Roberta! What were you thinking? How could you give my
name and this phone number at the hospital? Do you know the trou¬
ble you’ve caused me? I told you clearly not to give my name at the
hospital.

Undocumented Theater: Writing and Resistance / 117

Roberta: Me perdona patron, pero cuando me preguntaron como me ac-
cidente les tenia que decir. Y luego me pidieron su nombre para que su
seguro cubra mis gastos.
william: jMuestrame tu Green Card y yo cubro tus gastos! es que qui-
eres que te eche a la migra? Mira Roberta, yo no voy a permitir que tu me
perjudiques. Te prohibo absolutamente que hables con nadie, que recibas
visitas o que saigas de esta finca. Tu no eres nadie. Te podria matar como
si fueras un mosquito, ^me entiendes? Tu no eres nadie.

Sale william furioso. Entra julia.

julia: ;Don William esta furioso! Yo escuche lo que le dijo ahorita. Ro¬
berta, creo que su vida esta en riesgo. El patron la quiere matar. ;Se tiene
que escapar!
Roberta: Dios mio, ^que voy a hacer? Ni siquiera puedo caminar.

julia: Escondase en el establo de atras. Yo voy a distraer a Don William.

Dentro de unos pocos minutos la saco a escondidas de aca.

Roberta se sienta al lado de los banquitos. julia sale del establo.

Roberta: Dice el patron que no soy nadie, que no valgo nada. Pero, tengo
mis suenos. Tengo mi musica ...

Roberta canta “Le Doy Gracias a Mi Dios que Esta en el Cielo.”

Le doy gracias al Senor que esta en el cielo

Que me dio otra oportunidad
De estar siempre en esta tierra linda
Aunque soy discriminada de verdad
De estar siempre en esta tierra linda
Aunque soy discriminada de verdad
Inmigrante, asi soy y asi he sido
Pero siempre asi he de luchar
Y aunque sufra, yo un dia triunfare
Con mi Dios al frente yo voy a ganar
Si yo soy inmigrante, pero tengo mi valor
Si yo soy inmigrante, pero tengo mi valor
Camine yo por el desierto
Diez dias yo no comi
Atravese las fronteras y me escape de morir
Atravese las fronteras y me escape de morir
Solo Dios que esta en el cielo un angel mando por mi

118 / chapter 5
Roberta: Patron, forgive me, but when they asked how the accident hap¬
pened I had to answer them. And then they asked your name so your
insurance could cover my expenses.
william: Show me your green card and I will cover your expenses! Or do
you want me to give you to la migra? Look Roberta: I will not allow you
to slander me. I absolutely forbid you from talking to anyone, receiving
visits, or leaving this farm. You are nobody. I could kill you like you were
a mosquito, you understand me? You’re nobody.

william storms out. julia enters.

julia: Don William is furious! I heard what he told you just now. Roberta,
I think your life is in danger. The patron wants to kill you. You have to
escape!
Roberta: My God, what am I going to do? I can’t even walk.
julia: Hide in the back of the barn. I’ll distract Don William. In a few
minutes, I’ll smuggle you out of here.

Roberta sits next to the benches, julia leaves the barn.

Roberta: The patron says I’m nobody, that I’m worthless. But I have my
dreams. I have my music ...

Roberta sings “I Give Thanks to My God in Heaven.”

I thank the Lord who is in heaven

Who gave me the opportunity
To be in this beautiful land
Though it’s true I’m discriminated against
To be in this beautiful land
Though it’s true I’m discriminated against
An immigrant, who I am and always will be
That’s how I’ll always fight
Though I suffer one day I’ll triumph
With God leading the way, I will win
Yes, I’m an immigrant but I have value
Yes, I’m an immigrant but I am brave
I walked across the desert
For ten days and didn’t eat
I crossed borders and escaped death
I crossed borders and escaped death
But God who is in heaven sent an angel for me

Undocumented Theater: Writing and Resistance / 119

 Solo Dios que esta en el cielo un angel mando por mi
Solo Dios que esta en el cielo un angel mando por mi
Solo Dios que esta en el cielo un angel mando por mi

Entra julia en silencio.

julia (llevandose un dedo a los labios): Shhhhh.

julia ayuda a levantar a Roberta y salen los dos en silencio del establo.

informe de derechos de lxs trabajadorxs 4 se proyecta en una

pantalla mientras lucinda (desde lejos) lo lee.

lucinda: Todas las patronas tienen que dar a sus empleadas la capacitacion
necesaria para realizar todas las tareas en sus trabajos en un idioma que la
trabajadora entienda. Las patronas pueden recibir multas en caso de que
no capaciten a sus empleadas, sin importar su estatus migratorio.

Escena 5

Se abre la cortina a una casa en Ciudad de Guatemala, adriana y daisy

se sientan en el comedor de su casa en una mesa. Hay un letrero que dice

“ciudad de Guatemala.” josefina entra a la casa cargando una caja de
carton mediana.

josefina (entrando a la casa): Finalmente pude hablar con nuestra mami

hoy.
daisy (preocupada): iQue le paso?

josefina: Tuvo un accidente en el trabajo. Me dijo que no les cuente a us-

tedes para que no se preocupen. Pero nosotras tenemos que apoyarnos
entre nosotras y apoyar a nuestra mama.
daisy: que dijo? ^Pero esta bien?
josefina: Tiene mucho dolor en su espalda y su pierna, por ahora necesita
encontrar un sitio en donde vivir. Ya no se puede quedar mas en la finca
en donde estaba trabajando.
daisy: ^Que va a hacer?
josefina: Despues hablamos de eso. [Hoy nos llego esto! jRegalos de Navi-
dad de mama! (senala la caja).
adriana: jSiiii! jRegalos! Pero Navidad fue hace meses ya.
daisy: jYo le habia dicho a mami que no nos mande regalos y se compre
cosas para ella!
josefina: Tu sabes como es ella, Daisy. Si esta en Estados Unidos es para
podernos dar una mejor vida.

120 / chapter 5
 But God who is in heaven sent an angel for me
But God who is in heaven sent an angel for me
But God who is in heaven sent an angel for me

julia enters silently.

julia (putting her finger to her lips): Shhhhh.

julia helps Roberta get up and they both leave the stable silently.

workers’ rights message 4 is projected on a screen, while lucinda

(off stage) reads it aloud.

lucinda: All employers must provide workers with proper training for any
job they are asked to perform. Training must be provided in a language
the worker understands. Employers can be fined for not providing proper
training to all workers, regardless of immigration status.

Scene 5

The curtain opens on a house in Guatemala City, adriana and daisy are
sitting at the dining room table. A sign reads “Guatemala city.” jose-

fina enters the house carrying a medium-size cardboard box.

josefina (entering the house): I was finally able to talk to our mom today.
daisy (worried): What happened to her?
josefina: She had an accident at work. She told me not to say anything so
you wouldn’t worry. But we’ve got to stick together and support our mom.
daisy: And what did she say? Is she okay?
josefina: She has a lot of pain in her back and leg, and now she needs to
find a place to live. She can’t stay on the farm where she was working.
daisy: What is she going to do?
josefina: We’ll talk about that later. Today we got this. Christmas gifts
from mom! (she indicates box).
adriana: Yes! Presents! But Christmas was months ago.
daisy: I’d told mommy not to send gifts for us and to buy things for herself!
josefina: You know how she is, Daisy. She’s in the United States to give us
a better life.

Undocumented Theater: Writing and Resistance / 121

Ponen la caja sobre la mesa y la abren.

adriana (sacando un celular): jUn celular!

josefina: Si. Tiene una pantalla para que podamos hablar con ella y verla.
^Te gusta Adriana?
ADRIANA: jSl!
adriana (sacando una chamarra de la caja y tratandosela deponer): Parece
que es muy pequena para mi.
josefina (ayudandole a quitar la chamarra): Si, es muy pequena. Es que ya

eres una nina muy grande. Has crecido muchisimo desde que mami se

fue. Dame la chamarra, se la podemos dar a la hija de dona Aurelia.

adriana (sacando una muheca de la caja): ^Es que mami no sabe que ahora

soy grande?
daisy: Claro que sabe. Pero cuando se fue eras muy pequena y los ninos
crecen muy rapido. Cuando hablemos con ella le pedimos una chamarra
mas grande para que sepa cuanto has crecido.
adriana (mirando la muheca): No, no le digamos nada de la chamarra. No
quiero que se ponga triste. ^Puedo ir a jugar con mi muneca?
josefina: [Ve a jugar, pues!

adriana sale por una puerta hacia otro espacio de la casa. Se quedan jose¬

fina y daisy hablando en la mesa.

daisy: ,jQue le paso entonces a mama?

josefina: La verdad no entendi bien. Estaba mala la comunicacion. Se que
no puede trabajar Daisy. Dice que tal vez se devuelva para aca.
daisy: ^Pero quien la va a curar aca? Tienen que curarla en el trabajo.
josefina: Eso le dije yo. Pero esta muy preocupada. No por ella, por nosotras.
Daisy, mami no nos va a poder seguir mandando plata. No en mucho
tiempo. Hasta que pueda trabajar otra vez.
daisy: ^Que vamos a hacer?
josefina: Bueno, manana voy a ir a la universidad a retirar mi matricula.
Voy a hablar con Dona Aurelia y le voy a pedir que me de trabajo.
daisy: ^Te vas a salir de la universidad y te vas a poner de costurera?
josefina: No hay nada mas que pueda hacer. Tenemos que pagar los gastos
de la casa, de tu colegio y el colegio de Adriana. Tu sabes que tenemos que
mantener la casa estable para ella. He estado pensando. Si esto tarda mucho
tiempo y mama no puede trabajar, tal vez pueda irme yo tambien para los
Estados Unidos. Asi podria tener un trabajo que me paga en dolares y
mandarles suficiente plata para la casa y la escuela de ustedes dos.

122 / chapter 5
They put the box on the table and open it.

adriana (taking out a cellphone): A cell phone!

josefina: Yes. It has a screen so we can talk to her and see her. Do you like
it Adriana?
adriana: Yes!
adriana (taking out a jacket from the box and trying it on): This is very
small for me.
josefina (helping her take off the jacket): Yes, it is small. That’s because
you’re a big girl now. You’ve grown a lot since mom left. Give me your
jacket, we can give it to Doha Aurelia for her daughter.
adriana (taking a doll from the box): Mommy doesn’t know how big I am
now?
daisy: Of course she does. But when she left you were very small, and
children grow fast. When we talk to her we’ll ask for a bigger jacket so
she’ll know how much you’ve grown.
adriana (looking at the doll): No, don’t say anything about the jacket.
I don’t want her to be sad. Can I go play with my doll?
josefina: Go play!

adriana exits through a door into another room of the house, josefina
and daisy continue talking at the table.

daisy: So what happened to mom?

josefina: Actually, I didn’t quite understand. The connection was bad.
I know she can’t work, Daisy. She says maybe she’ll come back here.
daisy: But who’s going to help her here? They have to help her at her work.
josefina: So I told her. But she’s very worried. Not for herself, for us. Daisy,
mommy is not going to be able to keep sending us money. Not for a long
time. Not until she can work again.
daisy: What are we going to do?
josefina: Well, tomorrow I will go to the university and cancel my registra¬
tion. I’ll talk with Doha Aurelia and I’ll ask her to give me work.
daisy: You’re going to leave college and go work as a seamstress?
josefina: There’s nothing else to be done. We have to pay for the house, for
your and Adriana’s school. You know we have to maintain a stable home
for her. I’ve been thinking. If it takes a long time and mom can’t work,
maybe I can go to the United States. That way I could have a job that pays
me in dollars and send you enough money for the house and school for
you both.

Undocumented Theater: Writing and Resistance / 123

daisy: Y yo me quedo sola con Adriana?
josefina: Hay veces en que lo unico que queda es irnos pal Norte.

adriana entra al comedor con la muneca.

adriana: jMeencanta mi muneca! ;Vengan ajugar!

josefina abraza a adriana.

josefina: jVamos entonces a jugar!

Salen las tres del comedor. Queda encima de una silla la chainarra demasi-
ado pequena. Se cierra la cortina.
informe de derechos de lxs trabajadorxs 5 se proyecta en una
pantalla mientras lucinda (desde lejos) lo lee.

lucinda: Todas las trabajadoras, sin importar su estatus migratorio, tienen

derecho a recibir compensacion en caso de lesion o muerte en el trabajo.
En el estado de Nueva Jersey, la patrona o su empresa de seguros tiene
que pagar los gastos medicos de sus empleadas, asi como sus salarios
perdidos por discapacidad temporal o permanente.

Escena 6

Hay un escritorio con una silla al frente a un letrero que dice “casa home¬

town.” lucinda esta sentada en un escritorio. Roberta esta sentada al

frente del escritorio.

Roberta: Muchas gracias por recibirme Doha Lucinda. Yo conod a Doha

Manuela en el hospital y ella me mando para aca. Me dijo que ustedes
depronto me puedan ayudar.
lucinda: Si, para eso estamos aca. Para ayudarnos entre la comunidad
inmigrante. Yo recuerdo cuando llegue a este pais, no tenia nada. Fue
gracias a la comunidad que yo me pude superar. Unidos logramos mas.

Lucinda saca una carpeta del escritorio y la abre.

lucinda: Cuando hablamos por telefono usted me conto que tuvo un acci-
dente de trabajo hace unas semanas y tuvo que salir huyendo. Ha hablado
con un abogado ya?
Roberta: Fijese que un amigo me llevo a consultar con un abogado, pero el
quiere cobrarme $500 antes de hacer nada. No tengo plata. Pero todavia
a mi me duele mucho la espalda. Al principio era mi pierna, pero ahora
sobre todo me duele aca (se toca el hombro izquierdo).

124 / chapter 5
daisy: And I’d stay alone with Adriana?
josefina: There are times when the only thing left to do is to go to the North.

adriana enters the dining room with the doll.

adriana: I love my doll! Come play!

JOSEFINA hugs ADRIANA.

josefina: Let’s play then!

The three leave the dining room. On a chair, the too-small jacket remains.
The curtain closes.
workers’ rights message 5 is projected on a screen, while lucinda

(off stage) reads it aloud.

lucinda: All workers, regardless of immigration status, are entitled to re¬

ceive workers’ compensation benefits in case of an injury or death on the
job. In the state of New Jersey, the employer or its insurance company
must pay for the worker’s medical treatment, temporary disability ben¬
efits in place of wages lost, and benefits for permanent disability.

Scene 6

There is a desk with a chair in front of it, and a sign that says “casa
hometown.” lucinda sits at the desk. Roberta sits on the chair in front.

Roberta: Thank you very much for seeing me, Doha Lucinda. I met Doha
Manuela in the hospital and she sent me here. She said that maybe you
can help me.
lucinda: Yes, that’s what we’re here for. To help each other in the immi¬
grant community. I remember when I came to this country, I had noth¬
ing. It was thanks to the community that I could overcome my struggles.
United we achieve more.

lucinda takes out a desktop folder and opens it.

lucinda: When we talked on the phone you told me you had a work ac¬
cident a few weeks ago and had to flee. Have you spoken to a lawyer yet?
Roberta: My friend took me to see a lawyer, but he wants to charge me $500
before doing anything. I don’t have any money. But my back still hurts a
lot. At first it was my leg, but now it especially hurts here (she touches her
left shoulder).

Undocumented Theater: Writing and Resistance / 125

lucinda: En este caso la vamos a llevar otra vez a la doctora. Tambien
puede consultar con una buena abogada, la que colabora con nosotros.
Usted tiene derechos en este pais, aunque no tenga papeles. ^Donde esta
viviendo actualmente?
Roberta: Tuve que salir de la finca corriendo. No tengo casa. Me estoy que-
dando en donde una amiga en Lakewood. Pero ella comparte su casa con
otras dos familias, entonces no se por cuanto tiempo me pueda quedar alia.
lucinda: Todo va a estar mejor ahora. Se puede quedar en mi casa hasta
que encuentre algo.

Se cierra la cortina.
informe de derechos de lxs trabajadorxs 6 se proyecta en una
pantalla mientras lucinda (desde lejos) lo lee.

lucinda: Ninguna empleada puede ser despedida por pedir compensacion

despues de un accidente de trabajo. Es ilegal que una patrona despida a
una empleadoa por exigir su derecho de compensacion y de trato medico
despues de sufrir una lesion.

Escena 7

Se abre la cortina. Estan las dos sillas y el letrero del hospital. En una silla
esta Roberta. La doctora esta a su lado.

Roberta: Doctora, digame por favor que tengo. Han pasado unos meses
desde mi accidente, pero me duele tanto la espalda que todavia no puedo
caminar.
doctor: Sabemos finalmente lo que te pasa, Roberta. Estas herida en tu
columna vertebral donde te piso el caballo. Necesitas un trasplante del
cuarto disco vertebral.
Roberta: ^Me van a operar? ^Cuando podre trabajar? No puedo mandarles
plata a mis hijas y la mayor quiere venirse para aca a trabajar.
doctora: Si, te vamos a operar. Tardaras varios meses en poder caminar
bien. Pero tu patron todavia niega que tu hayas trabajado anteriormente
en su finca. No quiere pagar nada de los gastos. Ademas, tienes una deuda
pendiente con el hospital de la primera vez que viniste, cuando te paso
el accidente. No podemos seguir adelante hasta que no pagues tu deuda.
Puedes ir a tu casa mientras tanto.
Roberta: [Pero ni siquiera tengo suficiente para vivir! Vivo hace meses de
la caridad de Doha Lucinda y solo he podido hacer unos ahorritos de lo
que me pagan por ahi por cantar canciones en la calle.

126 / CHAPTER 5
lucinda: We’re going to take you back to the doctor then. You can also
consult a good lawyer who works with us. You have rights in this country,
even if you don’t have papers. Where are you living now?
Roberta: I had to run away from the farm. I don’t have a place to live. I’m
staying at a friend’s place in Lakewood. But she shares her home with two
other families, so I don’t know how long I can stay there.
lucinda: Everything will be okay now. You can stay at my house until you
find something.

Curtain closes.
workers’ rights message 6 is projected on a screen, while lucinda

(off stage) reads it aloud.

lucinda: A worker cannot be fired for seeking compensation following an

injury. It is illegal for an employer to fire a worker who seeks her right to
compensation and medical care following an injury.

Scene 7

Curtain opens on the two chairs and the red cross hospital sign. Roberta

is seated in one chair. The doctor is at her side.

Roberta: Doctor, please tell me what I have. It’s been months since my
accident, but my back hurts so much that I still can’t walk.
doctor: We now know what happened to you, Roberta. You injured your
spine when the horse stepped on you. You need a transplant of the fourth
vertebral disc.
Roberta: You’re going to operate on me? When can I work? I can’t send
money to my daughters, and my eldest wants to come over here to work.
doctor: Yes, we will perform surgery. It will take you several months to be
able to walk properly. But your employer still denies that you previously
worked on his farm. He refuses to pay any of your expenses. You also
have a debt to the hospital from the first time you came, when you had
your accident. We can’t go forward with the surgery until you pay your
debt. You can go home until then.
Roberta: But I don’t even have enough to live! I’ve survived on Doha Lu¬
cinda’s charity for months now, and I’ve only been able to save a small
amount of the money I get singing my songs on the street.

Undocumented Theater: Writing and Resistance / 127

doctor: Hay Charity Care para los que no pueden pagar, pero no cubre
todo. No se que mas decirte.

Se cierra la cortina.

Escena 8

Se abre la cortina al letrero de “casa hometown.”

Roberta esta sentada en el escritorio con un cuello ortopedico. Apenas se
puede mover, manuela esta sentada frente a ella, tambien le cuesta mo-
verse, su pierna esta inmovilizada al lado de muletas. lucinda esta hablando
por telefono atras.

Roberta: ^Pero que se va a ir a hacer a Mexico Doha Manuela? Su pierna

todavia no esta bien.
manuela: Estoy cansada Doha Roberta. Cansada de luchar. La abogada
dice que no me puede seguir ayudando porque di un nombre falso cu-
ando llegue al hospital y el juez ahora no me cree nada de lo que digo de
mi accidente. El patron me ha ofrecido pagarme el tiquete de vuelta a
Mexico ademas de i,ooo dolares en efectivo.
Roberta: jPero precisamente por eso! El le ofrece el tiquete y la plata
porque sabe que le va a tocar pagarle mucho mas al final por el accidente.
manuela: Pero es que mi patron no tenia seguro a diferencia del suyo.
Roberta: iQue importa que no tenga seguro? Eso es problema de el. La ley
dice que cualquier empresa o empleador tiene que tener seguro y si no lo
tiene pues el personalmente le tiene que pagar a usted. Sea paciente Doha
Manuela. ^Quien la va a curar en Mexico? ^E1 Estado? jja! iQue va a hacer si
su pierna no lo deja trabajar? Si se va cierran su caso y todo estara perdido.
manuela: No aguanto mas esta situacion. Llevo casi un ano sin trabajar y
mi familia necesita que envie dinero. Hoy por la tarde salgo para Mexico.
Vine a despedirme de usted y a desearle suerte en su recuperacion.

Roberta se para con mucho esfuerzo y manuela tambien se para con

esfuerzo. Roberta camina hacia ella y la abraza. lucinda se acerca y las
abraza tambien.

Roberta: Vaya con Dios, Doha Manuela.

manuela sale.

lucinda: Roberta, hable una vez mas con su abogada. Por fin la corte ha
aceptado su caso y va a haber un juicio contra su ex patron.

128 / CHAPTER 5
doctor: There is Charity Care for those who cannot pay, but it doesn’t
cover everything. I don’t know what else to tell you.

Curtain closes.

Scene 8

Curtain opens on the sign for “casa hometown.”

Roberta is sitting at the desk with a neck brace. She can barely move, ma-

nuela is sitting across from her next to a pair of crutches. She also has trouble
moving and her leg is immobilized, lucinda is behind them on the phone.

Roberta: But what are you going to do in Mexico, Doha Manuela? Your leg
is still not right.
manuela: Doha Roberta, I’m tired. Tired of fighting. The lawyer says he can’t
keep helping me because I gave a false name when I arrived at the hospital,
and now the judge doesn’t believe anything I say about my accident. My em¬
ployer has offered to buy me a return ticket to Mexico plus $1,000 in cash.
ro b e rta : But that’s just why you should stay! He’s offering the ticket and cash
because he knows that in the end he’ll pay you a lot more for the accident.
manuela: But unlike yours, my employer was uninsured.
Roberta: It doesn’t matter that he has no insurance! That’s his problem.
The law says that any employer must have insurance and if he does not
then he will personally have to pay you. Be patient Dona Manuela. Who
will heal you in Mexico? The state? Ha! What will you do if you can’t work
because of your leg? If you leave, your case will be closed and all will be lost.
manuela: I can’t bear this situation any longer. I have spent almost a year
without work and my family needs me to send money. This afternoon I am
leaving for Mexico. I came to say goodbye to you and wish you luck in
your recovery.

Roberta gets up with great effort and manuela also stands with effort.
Roberta walks over to her and hugs her. lucinda approaches and hugs
them, too.

Roberta: Go with God, Dona Manuela.

MANUELA exits.

lucinda: Roberta, I spoke with your lawyer again. The court has finally
accepted your case, and there will be a trial against your former employer.

Undocumented Theater: Writing and Resistance / 129

Roberta: ,jEs posible que una corte de los Estados Unidos me va a apoyar?
No tengo papeles ni visa. ,;C6mo me va a apoyar en contra de un ciu-
dadano, hombre bianco y rico que habla bien el ingles?
lucinda: No debe importar Roberta. Toda persona tiene derechos en este
pais. Sin embargo, para presionar al juez vamos a organizar una protesta
frente a la corte antes del juicio.
Roberta: jOjala que el juez sea justo!

Se cierra la cortina.
informe de derechos de lxs trabajadorxs 7 se proyecta en una
pantalla mientras lucinda (descie lejos) lo lee.

luc in da : Ninguna empleada puede ser despedida por denunciar ante o sh a

la existencia de una violacion de su seguridad en el lugar de trabajo. Cada
trabajadora, sin importar su estatus migratorio, tiene el derecho de pedir
una inspeccion de osha cuando corre peligro en su lugar de trabajo.

Escena 9

Se abre la cortina. Varias personas estan marchando frente a la corte. Cargan

pancartas con mensajes exigiendo el apoyo de la corte para los inmigrantes
y para Roberta, lucinda pide a la gente que escuche.

lucinda: Senoras y senores, gracias por venir para apoyar a nuestra com-
panera Roberta, quien sufrio una lesion grave hace varios meses. Su
patron no queria pagar sus gastos medicos y Roberta no ha podido tener
una operacion que necesita para curarse. Ahora, con la ayuda de Casa
Hometown y nuestra amiga la abogada, esperamos los resultados del
juicio para decidir el caso.

La gente gritando, apoyando, aplaudiendo.

lucinda: Ahora quisiera presentarles a la persona que ha sufrido tanto por

ser trabajadora indocumentada en este pais. Roberta, por favor.

La gente aplaude. Roberta se aproxima.

Roberta: Gracias a todas las companeras y companeros que me han apo-

yado hoy en dia. Quisiera cantarles algo, si me permiten. Esta cancion
trata de una amiga que se llamaba Manuela. Nos conocimos en el hos¬
pital, las dos heridas de accidentes de trabajo. Yo me quede para exigir
mis derechos, mientras Doha Manuela volvio a Mexico para estar con su
familia. Ayer, recibimos noticias de que Manuela fallecio en Mexico

130 / chapter 5
Roberta: Is it even possible that a court in the United States will support
me? I have no papers or visa. Would they support me against a citizen, a
rich, white man who speaks good English?
lucinda: It shouldn’t matter, Roberta. Everyone has rights in this country.
However, to pressure the judge, before the trial we will organize a dem¬
onstration outside the courthouse.
Roberta: Hopefully the judge will be fair!

Curtain closes.

workers’ rights message 7 is projected on a screen, while lucinda

(off stage) reads it aloud.

lucinda: A worker cannot be fired for reporting a safety violation or

workplace hazard to osha. All workers, regardless of immigration sta¬
tus, have the right to request an osha inspection when facing a danger
at work.

Scene 9

The curtain rises. A crowd of people is demonstrating in front of the court.

They carry banners with messages demanding that the court support mi¬
grants and support Roberta, lucinda asks them to listen.

lucinda: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming to support our com-
pafiera Roberta, who suffered a serious injury several months ago. Her
employer refuses to pay her medical expenses, and Roberta has not been
able to get the surgery she needs to get better. Today, with the help of Casa
Hometown and our friend the lawyer, we await the results of the trial to
decide the case.

people shouting, supporting, applauding.

lucinda: Now, let me introduce you to the person who has suffered so
much for being an undocumented worker in this country. Roberta, please.

people applaud. Roberta approaches.

Roberta: Thank you to all of you who have supported me today. I’d like
to sing you a song, if I may. This song is about a friend of mine named
Manuela. We met at the hospital, both of us injured in work accidents. I
stayed here to demand my rights, but Dona Manuela returned to Mexico
to be with her family. Yesterday, we received news that Manuela died in

Undocumented Theater: Writing and Resistance / 131

 por complicaciones medicas relacionadas a su accidente. Esta cancion la
dedico a su memoria.

Roberta canta “Las Accidentadas.”

Voy a contarles la historia

De una mujer especial
Que se llamaba Manuela
La encontre en el hospital
Eramos accidentadas
Y nos fuimos a curar
Manuela no dio su nombre
Tampoco sus apellidos
Ni direccion de su casa
Su patron le habia prohibido
Perdio todos sus derechos
Por aceptar la mentira
Su patron tambien le dijo
Acepta este dinero
Te comprare tu boleto
Y te vas para tu pueblo
Te comprare tu boleto
Y te vas para tu pueblo
No duro ya mucho tiempo
Y hoy Manuela esta muerta
Adios Manuela querida
Hoy te estamos despidiendo
Adios Manuela querida
Hoy te estamos despidiendo
Y su patron ni en cuenta
De lo que hoy esta pasando
Patron, que Dios tome en cuenta
La injusticia que has dado
Patron, que Dios tome en cuenta
La injusticia que has dado

lucinda esta hablando por su celular. La gente aplaude. Una vez que
termina Roberta, lucinda se aproxima una vez mas muy animada.

lucinda: Roberta, acabe de hablar con su abogada. jUsted gano! ;Gano

su caso!

132 / CHAPTER 5
 Mexico from medical complications related to her accident. This song is
dedicated to her memory.

Roberta sings “The Injured.”

I will tell you the story

Of a special lady
Whose name was Manuela
We met at the hospital
We were both injured
And wanted to get well
Manuela didn’t give the hospital
Her real name
Nor her home address
Her boss had forbidden it
She lost all her rights
For agreeing to lie
Her boss also told her
Accept this money
I’ll buy you a ticket
To go back home
I’ll buy you a ticket
To go back home.
It wasn’t that long ago
And now Manuela is dead
Farewell dear Manuela
Today we tell you goodbye
Farewell dear Manuela
Today we tell you goodbye
And her patron has no idea
Of what’s happened to her
Patron, may God take account of
The injustice you have done
Patron, may God take account of
The injustice you have done

lucinda is talking on her cell phone, people applaud. Once she finishes,
lucinda approaches again, excited.

lucinda: Roberta, I just talked to your lawyer. You won! You won your case!

Undocumented Theater: Writing and Resistance / 133

Roberta: Dios mio, ^como es posible?
lucinda: Segun la ley, cualquier obrera u obrero tiene derecho de atencion
medica en caso de un accidente sufrido en el transcurso de su trabajo. No
importa si es ciudadana o no.
julia: ^Entonces el patron tiene que pagar los gastos medicos?
lucinda: Si Julia. El patron tiene que pagar todos los gastos medicos, incluso la
deuda de la primera visita. En otras palabras, usted puede tener su operacion.

Muchos aplausos.

Roberta: jQue maravilla!

lucinda: Ademas el patron tiene que pagar un monto por todo el salario
perdido mientras usted esta incapacitada.
Roberta: jTengo que llamar a mis hijas! Josefina no tiene que migrar y
puede volver a la universidad. Muchas gracias Dona Lucinda. Nada de
esto hubiera pasado sin la ayuda de Casa Hometown.
lucinda (hablando al publico): Pero asi debe ser la justicia Roberta. No
sale asi todas las veces. Muchos sufren por sus accidentes y despues son
victimizados por segunda vez por la policia, la migra, y la corte que no les
ayudan, sino mas bien los perjudican por no tener papeles. Todos los que
estan aqui corren riesgos siempre. Sin embargo, la ley dice que todos los
que trabajan en este pais tienen ciertos derechos en comun.

INFORME DE DERECHOS DE LXS TRABAJADORXS RESUMEN Se prOVecta

en una pantalla mientras lucinda lo lee.

lucinda (a la audiencia): Todas los trabajadoras, sin importar su estatus

migratorio, tienen estos derechos:

• El derecho a un salario minimo, con tiempo y medio para las

horas extras
• El derecho a un lugar de trabajo seguro y saludable
• El derecho a recibir equipo y capacitacion
• El derecho a recibir trato medico y compensacion en caso de
lesion o muerte en el trabajo
• El derecho a reportar violaciones de sus derechos a osha, sin
miedo de ser despedida

Roberta: Es esencial que tengamos el coraje para exigir nuestros derechos.

No nos los van a dar sin que luchemos.

todos: jSin papeles, sin miedo! ;Sin papeles, sin miedo!

Roberta, julia y lucinda se abrazan. Se apaga la luz, las voces siguen

gritando hasta que se desvanecen lentamente.

134 / chapter 5
Roberta: My God, is it possible?
lucinda: Under the law, any worker is entitled to healthcare in case of
an accident in the course of their work. No matter if you are a citizen
or not.
julia: Then, the employer has to pay her medical expenses?
lucinda: Yes Julia. The employer must pay all medical expenses, including
debts from the first hospital visit. In other words, you can have your surgery.

Much applause.

Roberta: How wonderful!

lucinda: In addition, the employer must pay the full amount of lost wages
while you are disabled.
Roberta: I have to call my daughters! Josefina doesn’t have to come and she
can go back to college. Thank you so much, Dona Lucinda. None of this
would have happened without the help of Casa Hometown.
lucinda (to the audience)-. But this is how the justice system should work,
Roberta. It doesn’t always work this way. Many people suffer from their
accidents, and then are victimized a second time by the police, the immi¬
gration office, and the court. Instead of helping, they harm them further for
being undocumented. Everyone here is always at risk. However, the law says
that everyone who works in this country has certain rights in common.

workers’ rights message summary is projected on a screen, while

lucinda reads it aloud.

lucinda (to the audience): All workers, regardless of immigration status,

have these rights:

• The right to be paid minimum wage and overtime

• The right to a safe and healthy workplace
• The right to safety equipment and training
• The right to medical care and compensation in case of an injury or
death on the job
• The right to report violations of their rights to osha, without fear
of employer retaliation

Roberta: It is vital that we have the courage to demand our rights. We will
never get them without a fight.
all: Undocumented, unafraid! Undocumented, unafraid!

Roberta, julia, and lucinda embrace. The lights go out, the chanting
continues and fades out.

Undocumented Theater: Writing and Resistance / 135

 Conclusion

The panorama we face as scholars and intellectuals concerned and critical of the forma¬
tion, transformations, and current persistence of the colonial matrix of power is not
so much the “study of colonialism” or “postcolonial studies” around the world but the
need to “decolonize knowledge.” And decolonization of knowledge can hardly be at¬
tained from within Western categories of thought—neither Spinoza nor Nietzsche will
do. We need to move in different directions.

—MADINA T LOST A NOVA AND WALTER MIGNOLO,

Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas

The principal contention of this book has been that anthropology and, more
generally, social science as a set of ideas and practices—despite decades of
introspection, deconstruction, and auto-critique—remain deeply colonial,
embodying, benefiting from, and contributing to the maintenance of
Western imperial power. Aside from its institutional hierarchies and gate-
keeping strategies, anthropology’s coloniality is expressed in its characteristic
method of ethnography and reproduced through its forms of theorizing and
writing. We have suggested that the best and only way to counter colonial
anthropology and its principal method, ethnography, is to rethink research
at every level, from conception to practice to write-up and dissemination.
Perhaps most critically, an anti-colonial social science decenters the scien¬
tist as the principal actor in designing and enacting research. It recognizes
the historical “subjects” of anthropological research—themselves often the
subjects of (neo)colonial aggression and exploitation—as more than merely
the objects of ethnographic investigation. Rather, it acknowledges them as
capable producers of knowledge and theorists of their own experience. A
decolonial anthropology decenters academic knowledge as the exclusive
goal of social research and decenters academic writing as its exclusive result.
Instead, it locates a project of engaged political action—what earlier deco¬
lonial anthropologists termed liberation or, more recently, activism—at the
heart of its practice (Allen and Jobson 2016; Gordon 1991; Harrison 1991a).
This, we believe, is not only a productive way to do research, but an ethi¬
cal imperative facing contemporary social science. As Andre Gunder Frank
put it in 1969, it is the responsibility of the researcher “to use anthropology
only as far is it is sufficient, while doing whatever is necessary to replace
the nearly worldwide violent, exploitative, racist, alienative capitalist class
system, which embraces most anthropologists and the people they study”
(Frank 1969,137). We would offer the same assertion today.
As we have discussed throughout, this approach did not originate with
us, the authors of this book. Our intervention stands on the shoulders of the
many individuals, schools, and perspectives variously labeled feminist, na¬
tive, Black, collaborative, World, applied, engaged, practicing, and activist,
to name but a few. What we have tried to do in this book is to draw upon
the innovations and insights of these various anthropological approaches
and to recenter them within a broader, synthesized twenty-first-century
ethnographic methodology that can supplant that of dominant colonial an¬
thropology. In the course of our discussion, we have explored one way of
enacting a decolonial, anti-imperial approach, in our case by providing the
basic instruments and perspectives of ethnography to nonprofessional re¬
searchers involved in our project and offering them the opportunity to join
their ethnographic practice to their work as activists for social justice. We do
not mean for this methodological suggestion to be prescriptive, but rather to
stand as one example of how ethnography can be combined effectively with
liberation work. In our case, this approach emerged as a creative expression
not from the imaginations of the social scientists but from the lives, experi¬
ences, and goals of two inspiring women who participated in the research.
In undertaking ethnographic work of the kind described in the preceding
chapters, it was critical to attend to the various labels and social positions
that mark the research participants. This project focused on undocumented
immigrants in the United States, who may be counted among the most
oppressed and harassed people living within the national space of North
American society. This political and subject position oriented the perspec¬
tives of the various research collaborators, particularly those of Lucy and
Mirian, who became integral members of the research team. We also tried
to call attention to the positionalities of the other team members, Daniel

CONCLUSION / 137
and Carolina, recognizing the need to mark what typically passes as the un¬
marked subjectivities of outsider ethnographers, and in doing so acknowl¬
edged our projects’ embeddedness in the nearly inescapable coloniality of
modern life. Thus, the racialized and gendered subjectivities of the research¬
ers were of central relevance to the project’s outcomes, another point we
raised throughout the book.
Chela Sandoval and other feminist decolonial scholars argue that the
subjectivities of women of color are especially impacted by what we have
identified here as coloniality.1 As a result, these scholars contend, in their
everyday lives and the strategies they adopt women of color can especially
embody the techniques and actions needed to disrupt overlapping systems of
oppression. Through their embodied existence as undocumented women—
and particularly as undocumented women of color—Lucy and Mirian dis¬
rupt the liberal rights discourse that excludes them in this country by mo¬
bilizing a theory of undocumentation that emphasizes a need for solidarity
and collective action. When they pulled together to organize the work¬
ers and immigrant residents of Hometown—their activism fueled by the
knowledge and interpersonal connections developed through their ethno¬
graphic work—Lucy and Mirian created the pathways necessary to unsettle
the racist, capitalist, patriarchal discourse on citizen rights in the United
States. Their assertion that immigrants do have rights—against the state
and capitalist employers seeking to deny them those rights—represents a
stance, embodied in the physical form of the injured worker, against the
limits that citizenship supposedly places on who can be a legitimate rights
bearer. In other words, by claiming rights for injured undocumented work¬
ers, Lucy and Mirian are challenging the claim that only citizens are en¬
titled to rights in the United States. They are instead proposing a counter¬
claim that grounds those rights in the contributions made by those workers
while referencing their basic humanity as entitling them to fair treatment
under the law.

Personal Transformations

The project described in this book had powerful impacts for all four of us
who participated in it as ethnographer activists. As the outsider ethnogra¬
phers on the research team, Carolina and Daniel came to Hometown with
certain expectations and goals in mind. These were both academic and ac¬
tivist in nature—Caro hoped to conduct her dissertation research as part

138 / CONCLUSION
of the larger project, Daniel to collect data for a book on immigration and
workers’ rights, both of them concerned to make this information somehow
productive for the local community and its advocates.
In their years working in Hometown, however, these priorities shifted.
After studying for her dissertation on the coalition between African Americans
and jornaleros that resulted in the creation of Casa Hometown (narrated
in chapter 3), Caro became very interested in the relation between African
Americans and the immigrants’ rights movement, a topic that is at the center
of her research today. Also, after working with Mirian, Lucy, and Daniel in
writing a play and inspired by Mirian’s songs, Caro became interested in
the use of different forms of “artivism” in the U.S. immigrants’ rights move¬
ment (see Nossel 2016), another focus of her current research. Today, hav¬
ing finished her degree, she is a professor in the Department of Latino and
Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, teaching about feminism, artiv¬
ism, and community organizing. As an activist-scholar, she organizes with
a community center that offers services to the Latinx community in New
Brunswick, where Rutgers is located, and she is imagining and implement¬
ing ways to use her class as a means to go beyond the division that exists
between Rutgers students and the broader New Brunswick community. She
now sees herself as an ethnographer, too, and ethnography as inseparable
from activism, but Caro ultimately remains skeptical about anthropology as
a discipline, and disciplinary boundaries in general. Although she believes
in the potential for social transformation and decolonization of an activist
ethnographic practice, Carolina remains uncertain about the possibility of
decolonizing anthropology, as she believes that the decolonization of disci¬
plinary knowledge requires a turn toward inter- and transdisciplinarity.2
For his part, Daniel believes ethnography to be a powerful tool for social
change, a vision reinforced by his experiences with this project and this
group of researchers. He has faith that disciplinary anthropology can trans¬
form itself in ways imagined in this book, through close scrutiny of its own
coloniality and a willingness by its practitioners to change their ways of
doing research and writing. However, despite four years of intensive study,
Daniel has become cautious about writing academically about immigrant
suffering, unwilling to pursue scholarship that would profit from the un¬
acceptable conditions immigrants experience in U.S. society. Although he
recognizes the many important contributions made by anthropologists and
other scholars of immigration, he no longer feels comfortable doing that
work himself. During the life of the project, Daniel’s main objective shifted

CONCLUSION / 139
away from academic research and toward collaboration, working with
local advocacy organizations in support of immigrant rights while providing
mentorship for the less-experienced researchers on the team. He now hopes
to explore other genres of writing, including fiction and (inspired by this
project) drama, to discuss the situation facing undocumented immigrants
in the United States, with the hope of reaching audiences outside academia.
As previous chapters illustrated, Lucy and Mirian made extensive and
invaluable contributions to the research project. Perhaps more remarkable,
though, were the impacts that Lucy and Mirian’s work as ethnographers
had on them individually. As mentioned, at the outset of the project Mirian
was in constant pain as a result of her work accident and had lost the ability
to send money home to her children in Guatemala. Lucy, meanwhile, had
been deeply disturbed by her husband’s arrest and had only recently begun
to awaken (as she put it) to the problems facing the undocumented com¬
munity. While they were both happy to have the well-paying jobs that the
project offered them, at the outset they were very uncertain about their abil¬
ity to do the work that it required. But through patient mentoring and their
dedication to the project, Mirian and Lucy discovered that they were capable
of doing research and doing it well. Both Lucy and Mirian reported feelings
of anxiety about doing ethnographic work, but they felt sustained by the
other members of the research team. The four of us had weekly meetings
and conversations, shared our findings and emerging interpretations, and
helped navigate tricky situations that arose. We also socialized, getting to
know each other’s families and personal lives. The result was a spirit of
camaraderie, with a shared commitment to the research project and to the
defense of immigrants’ rights. As Mirian wrote in her fieldnotes toward
the end of the project, “When we did the first interview I felt extremely ner¬
vous, but I took comfort that I had my beautiful teachers and my great com-
panera de batalla [fellow combatant; sister-in-arms—i.e., Lucy] and when I
forgot something, she would help me with it. Each month that passed was a
great experience and a blessing for me, and my knowledge kept improving
all the time.”3
Following her accident, Mirian said, she felt badly about herself and un¬
happy with life. But through this project, she said, “I came to alleviate the
conflicts in my life, including to improve my self-esteem. It helped me to
write much better, as well as to read and to communicate with other people.”4
Part of this improvement came from doing what Mirian called “mental”
as opposed to physical labor, and the way this freed her to express herself
musically:

140 / CONCLUSION
 The personal advancements I made were many, like the free expression
of thought. If you don’t use it, it will get slower each time, so I thank God
and you [Caro and Daniel] for the ability to write some of the songs that
are now being requested at different sociocultural events or that are re¬
lated to some human need. And with the passage of time I keep learning
and it makes me really happy to be able to learn to use my mind better.
After a year I still felt like [I didn’t know how to use] my mind, but with
the passing of time I got better and better so that today I feel like my
mind is working really well.5

Mirian and Lucy both described their increased confidence and believe they
learned new skills through our project. Mirian said, “Now I have the con¬
fidence required to walk up to a person, introduce myself and ask them to
come to Casa Hometown. For example the other day I saw a person being
stopped by the police. I simply walked up to him and gave him the Casa
Hometown card. In the old days I would have run away.” When reflecting
upon the two years we worked together, Lucy said that doing ethnography
empowered her to better help her community and herself: “[Ethnographic
work] gave me the opportunity to think about what I wanted to do and
what I wanted to learn about. I learned about my own people and other
communities, and I learned how to identify the needs of my community. I
also learned about myself’ Mirian said, “I learned to be observant and to write
down my observations, which has helped me in writing my songs. Think¬
ing about other people’s work accidents helped me realize how many
people suffer accidents here in Hometown and helped me overcome my
own accident, and writing a play about my fear of the police and of my old
boss also helped me overcome that fear, and I am not afraid” (see figure 6.1).
Lucy and Mirian’s personal transformations are evident in their field-
notes. For one, they discovered new things about their own community and
the town in which they reside. Some of this had to do with racial diversity,
a particular concern in Caro’s dissertation research that merged with the
work on our collaborative project. Lucy, for example, learned to see how
different communities live in Hometown, including the African American
and Puerto Rican communities: “Each community has different traditions
and now I am more able to see those traditions without passing judgment.”
Furthermore, the project brought her closer to different people around
town, especially African Americans: “Relations between Latin Americans
and African Americans have always been very tense here in Hometown,
but after interviewing a few of them and observing them for my fieldnotes

CONCLUSION / 141
figure 6.1. Mirian performs an original song as part of the play at Casa Hometown.
Illustration by Peter Quach.
I now wave to people and they wave back.” Mirian shared this experience:
“Ever since we took interest in African Americans for this project I started
inviting them to Casa Hometown and some of them have actually accepted
my invitation and come to visit us.”
As time went on, Lucy’s and Mirian’s voices became more confident and
composed, their observations more infused with critical interpretations. In
addition, as they learned more about the topics under investigation, their
descriptions of their activities showed them to be taking a greater role in
the activism, advocacy, and educational work of Casa Hometown. For ex¬
ample, after conducting many interviews with people who had suffered work
accidents, Mirian became active in organizing workplace safety demonstra¬
tions for immigrant workers, including collaborations with osha (the U.S.
government’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration) to train work¬
ers in proper use of safety equipment and to inform them of their rights as
workers in the United States. Mirian wrote with the authority of one who has
herself suffered a work-related injury when she described the lessons these
trainings imparted to workers:

I explained to them that really, to earn $100 a day, if the patron doesn’t give
us protection, we are putting our lives in danger, and it isn’t worth it, not
even for $500 a day, to enter a basement contaminated with mold... which
can in turn contaminate our lungs and reproduce inside of them; and that
for all the people that, after working in this beautiful country without any
protection for their health, and then go back to their country sick and some¬
times just to die, and it isn’t worth all the effort we have made in the long
run. If we don’t protect ourselves we won’t be able to enjoy the fruits of our
effort.... It is incredible that all these jornaleros come here to risk their
lives, so that their families will have a better life.6

Mirian’s militancy also grew considerably during the course of our project.
In the two years that we worked together she rose as a public figure and
community leader, not only in Hometown but also nationally. In Septem¬
ber 2013 she answered an invitation by the National Alliance of Domestic
Workers to go to Washington, DC, and take a course on self-sufficient co¬
operatives. In Washington she joined other women and they fasted for nine
days in support of immigration reform. She became a member of the National
Alliance and in 2015 she walked 100 miles to Washington, along with ninety-
nine other women, as part of the Alliance’s 100 Miles 100 Women campaign
to ask Pope Francis to support immigration reform in the United States.
She spent twelve hours in jail after the group blocked an intersection near

CONCLUSION / 143
Capitol Hill in an act of civil disobedience. But Mirian is no longer afraid
of being deported: “I am good for this country,” she says. In September 2015
she went to Dallas, invited by the National Day Laborer Organizing Net¬
work (ndlon) to attend a course on training organizers. She then spent a
month in Texas and learned about the struggles of undocumented women
there, writing songs about the experience. She has since then been to many
ndlon workshops in New Jersey and New York, learning how to organize
day laborers and how to inform people about work accidents.
Lucy also showed remarkable personal growth in the course of the re¬
search project. Quieter than Mirian by nature, Lucy also emerged as a leader
in her community (even though she dislikes the word leader and prefers the
term organizer). Through the years we worked together she helped organize
many of Casa Hometown’s events, including the popular polladas, where
members cook chicken and sell it to raise funds for the organization. Today
she continues to participate in marches and immigration workshops. She is
a volunteer at a local church which helps newly arrived immigrants, and is
still a member of the board of directors of Casa Hometown.
Lucy’s sense of outrage and her willingness to stand up for her own rights
and the rights of others emerged in part from her work as an ethnographer
studying work accidents. At one point during the project Lucy took on a
second job, working as a seamstress in a local garment factory. In her field-
notes, she described in detail one experience in which she displayed her
newfound sense of personal empowerment:

I had an accident, to the middle finger on my left hand, changing the

bobbin on the sewing machine. The bobbin needs to be changed when
the thread runs out, but because it is located on the underside of the
machine you cant see it. I pricked my finger on that sharp piece of metal.
I told the boss of my area, and he yelled at me, “Go to the kitchen!" There
are Band-Aids there. So I went to the kitchen. ... The personnel director
heard me, and asked me what had happened. I explained and he offered
to help me, he washed my hand and put some cream and a Band-Aid
on it, and then he said: “Now get back to work.” So I did that, but once
I was back at work, my finger was afraid to touch the fabric that I was
sewing, my finger trembled and hovered over it, and I thought, “Don’t be
afraid, finger!” With my right hand I pushed on my left, to try to main¬
tain contact with the machine, but I think that was a bad idea because
it started to bleed from the force and pressure that I was putting on it.
And I told my friend sitting behind me what had happened to my finger,

144 / CONCLUSION
 and she said, “Does it hurt?” And I answered yes.... I kept working but
because of the accident I was kind of slow. After about 20 or 30 minutes I
felt a presence behind me, but I kept working, and soon I realized it was
the manager, because he began to shout at me, “Why are you so slow!”
He asked me twice. I kept sewing, and he said, “Go faster! Go faster!”
Shouting at me!
When he said that, I stopped my machine, I turned and looked him
in the face, and I said, “Forgive me, but I cant go any faster, I had an
accident and my finger hurts.” Then he said: “Do it faster now. This isn’t
the first time you’ve worked with this material. Go faster!”. .. I imme¬
diately got up and shut off my machine and unplugged my phone that
I was charging, and I just said, “Ok.” The whole time he was shouting
at me.... I gathered up my things and got ready to leave, but then I
thought to myself, “Lucia, you can’t just leave without saying something.”
Near the exit door are some stairs leading to the patron’s office, and
without a second thought 1 went up, and I thought to myself, it doesn’t
matter if they run me off, but the patron has to know about this. When
1 first started working there my friends told me that the patron doesn’t
get involved in things, that the manager never tells him anything. .. .
[The door opened] and it was the patron himself, and he said to me very
kindly, “Can I help you with something?” And I said yes, but first I asked
him, “Do you speak Spanish?” He answered, “No!” “Ok,” I said, “I only
speak a little English, but you are going to understand me.” So I told him
all that had happened, about how the manager had spoken to me and
how he was pressuring me. He asked me for some details, and I asked
him to speak to [the manager], ... He said he would, and told me to take
the rest of the day off and get better. I thanked him for his time and I left.
The most curious thing is that my English is not good, but in that mo¬
ment it just came right out of me, and I left feeling satisfied that I had
told the patron about how the manager had behaved.7

In another note, she recounted how, following her accident, she decided to
leave the job in the sewing factory, where she continued to experience physi¬
cal and psychological abuse:

I felt confident [about the decision to quit] and I told Ines [a coworker]
that we have to demand that the manager is dismissed, and she said to
me, I don’t think he will go. And I said: of course he will, we just have
to speak up. And she told me, no, leave things as they are. Then I said
to her, I can’t work any longer in an environment that is emotionally

CONCLUSION / 145
 harmful to me, and 1 told her, I am going to quit. But when you and the
other workers are ready to collaborate, give me a call and we will take
action. In my opinion, better times will come. ... I wanted to take this
decision [to quit] because, out of necessity we shouldn’t have to permit
psychological abuse. Obviously not! We should value our rights, and one
of them is to be respected!s

When we first began our research, Mirian and Lucy knew almost nothing
about anthropology or the practice of ethnography. After two years, how¬
ever, they believe they should receive a degree in anthropology. Anthropol¬
ogy, Lucy says, is “putting yourself in the shoes of someone else.” But more
than that, ethnography enables her to do something about the problems
she encounters: “It’s a beautiful experience, knowing you can help people
through your fieldwork.”9

The Future of Anthropology?

Given the many and varied critiques of qualitative social science detailed in
this book, one might ask: Is there any hope for anthropology? We believe
that anthropology, for all its coloniality, remains a disciplinary space within
which new possibilities can arise and take root. Projects of the kind that we
describe in this book offer a new generation of researchers the space to think
creatively about what research is, how it is conducted, and what its purposes
are. As Restrepo and Escobar have suggested in arguing for “other anthro¬
pologies and anthropologies otherwise” (Restrepo and Escobar 2005, 102),
a pluralizing of what counts as anthropology and an expansion of who can
serve as knowledge producers can transform the discipline while also making
it into a more powerful tool for action and critique: “Anthropology could
indeed be in the avant-garde of the transformation of modern intellectual
division of labor ... if such a project were ever to be entertained seriously”
(Restrepo and Escobar 2005,118).
In terms of theory, a decolonial anthropology can look to other sources
of ideas beyond the oft-cited, elite theorists of European philosophy—for a
decolonial anthropology, as Tlostanova and Mignolo observe at the open¬
ing of this chapter, “neither Spinoza nor Nietzsche will do” (Tlostanova and
Mignolo 2012, 57; see also Visweswaran 1988,1994). Nor Foucault nor De-
leuze nor Agamben, for that matter. Alternative theorists would include some
of anthropology’s own forgotten ancestors and critics, especially indigenous
intellectuals and scholars of color (Allen and Jobson [2016] cite Antenor

146 / CONCLUSION
Firmin, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Frederick Douglass; we also mention work on
indigenous methodologies and theories by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Margaret
Kovach, Audra Simpson, Kim TallBear, and others); earlier anthropologists,
also scholars of color, who inspired what Allen and Jobson call the original
decolonizing generation (Harrison [1991b] mentions Allison Davis, St. Clair
Drake, Zora Neale Hurston, and Katherine Dunham as important early influ¬
ences); and the non-Western theorists and writers who have been fundamental
to the formulation of decolonial theory, those academics, critics, novelists, and
historians writing from the space of the “colonial wound” (including scholars
we reference in chapter 1, such as Gloria Anzaldua, Maria Lugones, Sylvia Wyn-
ter, Enrique Dussel, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Anibal Quijano, and Boaven-
tura de Sousa Santos; others frequently mentioned include Emma Perez, Chela
Sandoval, Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, and Lewis Gordon)
(Tlostanova and Mignolo 2012, 35-36). Turning to theorists outside the usual
Western canon is a way to challenge the authority of colonial anthropology,
which tries to limit who can be considered worthy of citation, and in doing so
sets the terms of the debate over anthropological theory and practice (see
Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Kant de Lima 1992; Krotz 1997).
In addition to alternative scholarly and literary sources of ideas, decolo¬
nial ethnographers can also turn to the traditional “subjects” of anthropo¬
logical research, not only as sources of unprocessed data but as producers
of theory. To consider the ideas of the subaltern as theory poses another
challenge to dominant anthropologies, helping us to avoid the problems that
emerge when we try to process colonized realities through colonial concepts.
As Restrepo and Escobar put it, theorizations of the dominant kind “more
often than not [operate] as technologies for the domestication of alterity—
translating subaltern worlds into Eurocentric terms” (Restrepo and Esco¬
bar 2005,118). Instead, the subalterns become “knowledge-producers in their
own right” (Restrepo and Escobar 2005,118), valued interpreters of their own
realities. Calling on theories like what we have termed undocumented activ¬
ist theory can further enhance our border thinking, provoking contempla¬
tion and analysis from outside, from the margins, from below. It is a critical
element of the decolonial turn, for even if we disagree with the content of the
theory itself, recognizing it as theory is a move toward recognizing historical
subalterns as fully human and equal. Decoloniality, as Maldonado-Torres
says, “is about making visible the invisible and about analyzing the mecha¬
nisms that produce such invisibility or distorted visibility in light of a large
stock of ideas that must necessarily include the critical reflections of the
‘invisible’ people themselves. Indeed, one must recognize their intellectual

CONCLUSION / 147
production as thinking—not only as culture or ideology.”10 Our discussion
of undocumented activist theory in chapter 4 is an attempt to do just that.
In terms of method, as we have argued throughout, a decolonial approach
requires us to move away from the traditional extractive model of social re¬
search, in which non-Western others are mined for data by colonial outsid¬
ers who export their riches for consumption abroad. This does not mean
dispensing with ethnographic fieldwork, as we have shown in the preceding
chapters, or limiting ourselves to the resources found in the archives. Rather
than, or in addition to, studying texts, anthropologists can study the situa¬
tions in which those texts are constructed and the processes by which they
become meaningful.11 Many excellent decolonizing strategies already exist
and are in use by anthropologists and other researchers. The perspectives of
a decolonial ethnography enable us to translate ideas into practices, to make
our research work for the benefit of our fifeld collaborators, bridging the
divide that separates academic work from the struggles of subaltern popula¬
tions. In doing so, the techniques of collaborative and participatory research
can dissolve some of the historical barriers that centuries of colonialism and
coloniality have constructed between researchers and researched. Above all,
decolonial ethnography is about enabling local people—historically the ob¬
jects of research—to become subjects in the research process and to use the
knowledge they produce to advance their own decolonizing struggles.

148 / CONCLUSION
 INTRODUCTION

1. See the contributors to Harrison 1991a.

2. The critiques of an earlier generation of anthropologists analyzing the disciplines
colonial roots were inspirational to the decolonizing anthropologists; see, e.g., Asad
1973; Gough 1968,1990; Huizer and Mannheim 1979; Hymes 1972; Lewis 1973.
3. The scholars associated with the “writing culture” movement in anthropology
were influential here; see, e.g., Clifford and Marcus 1986.
4. The bibliography on applied anthropology is much too large to summarize in a
endnote. For a history, see Singer 2008. For a discussion of applied and more recent
forms of engaged anthropology, see Rylko-Bauer, Singer, and van Willigen 2006.
5. Academic and applied anthropology present themselves as fundamentally antago¬
nistic. Applied anthropology can appear anti-intellectual or atheoretical, disdainful
of the work of scholars who don’t attempt to apply their findings to the real world.
For its part, academic anthropology often dismisses the value of its applied variant,
contemptuous of its desire to take ideas out of the ivory tower. Such conflicts suggest
that the goals of academic and applied anthropologists are irreconcilable. But neither
approach examines their shared coloniality or the privilege that enables them to
conduct their research as they do. See Escobar r99i, 1995; Fluehr-Lobban 2003; Stilltoe
2007; Willis 1974.
6. Our depiction of academic anthropology as “colonial,” though polemical, should
not be understood as ironic. For one thing, some would point out, anthropology can¬
not be described as a particularly powerful discipline, either in the academy or outside
it. Within the social sciences—perhaps the most marginalized of the major academic
subdivisions—anthropology is among the most marginalized of disciplines. Com¬
pared with other disciplinary scholars, anthropologists have relatively little voice in
the larger world of politics and policy making, a fact that anthropologists lament (e.g.,
Okongwu and Menchner 2000). And anthropologists have been among colonialisms
most articulate critics, denouncing imperialism and its impacts on the world s history
and its many societies and cultures. But (we would counter) anthropology as a whole
has yet to confront the colonial dimensions of its own practice and privilege and con¬
tinues to profit implicitly from what many of its practitioners explicitly renounce.
7. Particularly influential for us have been Charles Hale (2008); Jeffrey Juris (2008,
2012); Jeffrey Juris and Alex Khasnabish (2013); Stuart Kirsch (2002, 2010, 2014);
Shannon Speed (2006, 2007, 2008); and Angela Stuesse (2016). For a history of
“activist anthropology,” see Stuesse (2015). Useful sources include both writing about
activists and activism as well as writing from an activist perspective, sometimes in
the same text. Examples of some of these approaches include Goldstein 2016; Graeber
2009; Howe 2013; Juris and Khasnabish 2013; Lyon-Callo 2008; Razsa 2015; Sanford
and Angel-Ajani 2006; Scheper-Hughes 1995.
8. For just a few examples from a broad set of fields, see Allen and Jobson 2016;
Cox 2015; Craven and Davis 2013; Dave 2012; Harrison 1991b; Hunt and Holmes
2015; Morgensen 2011; Perry 2013; Pierre 2012; Smith 2012. On indigenous and critical
methodologies, see Brown and Strega 2005; Chilisa 2011; Denzin, Lincoln, and Smith
2008; Kovach 2009. Indigenous writing on settler colonialism and its impacts repre¬
sents another important field of scholarship that has had limited uptake by anthro¬
pologists; see, e.g., Coulthard (2014) and the articles in Simpson and Smith (2014).
9. “Public anthropology” is a particularly slippery term, referring to a wide range of
ethnographic work. The series in Public Anthropology at the University of California
Press and the recurring column in American Anthropologist exemplify the breadth
of this field and what it can encompass. For more direct inquiries into the nature,
prospects, and consequences of public scholarship, see Beck and Maida 2015; Borofsky
2011; Burawoy 2005; Fassin 2013; Gans 2010; Lamphere 2003; Osterweil 2013; Scheper-
Hughes 2009.
10. Joel Robbins (2013) calls this the construction of anthropology’s “suffering sub¬
ject.” For a native perspective, see Tuck and Yang (2014).
11. The ethnographic method has been widely employed beyond the discipline of
anthropology. Scholars from a range of fields—including sociology, geography, political
science, public health, and so on—incorporate ethnography into their research design
and wrestle with problems of interpretation and representation in their writing. This
discussion, then, has relevance for many researchers outside anthropology.
12. We use the term Latinx to refer to people of all genders who live in the United
States and are from, or descended from those, Latin America. On the term Latinx, see
Scharron-Del Rio and Aja 2015.
13. “Cultural critique” can be part of a broader “engaged anthropology,” as Low
and Merry (2010), among others, have made clear; for a critique of critique, see Hale
(2006). And for those who “study up,” focusing their ethnographic attention on the
socially and economically privileged, critique can be a productive form of engagement
(Nader 1972). The scenario we describe here is intended for the many anthropolo¬
gists who work with the disadvantaged and marginalized—the historical objects of
anthropological inquiry.
14. Maldonado-Torres 2006. Theory in the decolonial turn shares much with post¬
colonial theory, even as it diverges from that work in significant ways. This is explored
in more detail in chapter 1.

150 / NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

 15- Having learned something from the postmodernists, this dominant anthropol¬
ogy might reflect on its own positionality to comment on the role of the anthropo¬
logical self in the data-collection process. But that is as far as it goes. See Clifford and
Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986.
16. For an exploration of the many complexities of reciprocity and “giving back” in
field research, see TallBear (2014) and the other essays in a special issue of the Journal
of Research Practice (10 [2]).
17. The diversity of what counts as “engagement” can be seen in the list of books in
“engaged ethnography,” on a website maintained by Angela Stuesse and her students:
Engaged Ethnography, http://engagedethnography.weebly.com/ethnography-list.html,
accessed January 16, 2018.
18. Scholars in the field of education have been especially generative in developing
activist methods for decolonizing what they call “qualitative inquiry” (e.g., Paris and
Winn 2014).
19. Although they may not discuss their individual activism in their published writ¬
ings, many if not most anthropologists of immigration take on some kind of activist
or engaged work in the course of their research. For explicit discussion of this, see
Gomberg-Munoz 2016; Holmes 2013; Stuesse 2010, 2015.
20. As we write, undocumented student activists are engaged in a range of projects
and protests for immigrant rights, again demonstrating the potential of research and
activism to create social change for and by noncitizens.
21. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.

1. COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND ITS ALTERNATIVES

1. The influence of Michel Foucault was fundamental to this move; see Foucault
1977.1978.

2. Abu-Lughod 1991; Behar and Gordon 1996; Visweswaran 1994.

3. Maldonado-Torres 2008, 2011. For some of the greatest hits in postcolonial stud¬
ies, see Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (2006). A useful introduction to the study of co¬
lonialism and postcolonialism is Loomba (2015). For a synthesis of work in decolonial
studies, see Morana, Dussel, and Jauregui (2008).
4. Said 1978.
5. Bhambra 2014.
6. Said 1978,1993.
7. Bhabha 1994,199. Members of the “subaltern studies group” made significant
contributions to this project in their attempts to excavate and examine what Ranajit
Guha called “the politics of the people” or the “subaltern classes” (Guha 1982, 4, 8;
see also Chakrabarty 2000; Chatterjee 1993). Guha himself, for example, authored
historical accounts of peasant uprisings against British colonial rule in India,
specifying the peasants’ own perspectives on and explanations of their political
activity—at the time a radical break from the norms of conventional historiography
(Guha 1999).
8. Spivak 1988; see also Spivak 1999.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 / 151

 9. Wynter (2003, 262) describes the continued problem of Western hegemony as
one of “over-representation,” mistaking a specific set of ideas and values (those of the
West, or “Man”) as universal: it enables “the interests, reality, and well-being of the
empirical human world to continue to be imperatively subordinated to those of the
now globally hegemonic ethnoclass world of‘Man.’” See also Wynter 2006; Gordon
2013.
10. E.g., Fanon 1967,1991; Cesaire 1972. Decolonial theory differs from postcolonial
theory in other ways as well. Decolonial scholars tend to focus on Latin America
instead of South Asia and take as their historical frame the entire period of colonization,
beginning with the conquest of the Americas (in contrast to postcolonial studies,
which tend to focus on the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries). See Coronil 2004,
2008. Most anthropological studies of colonialism, incidentally, also tend to privilege
these later centuries; Gough (1968,12), e.g., in an early critique, identified the period
of colonialism most relevant to anthropology as the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. See also Bhambra 2014,115; Mignolo 2007a.
11. Epistemologies of the colonized were targeted for destruction under “modernity/
coloniality,” which Mignolo (2011a) describes as fully intertwined, two sides of the
same historical coin. Modernity is unthinkable without coloniality, from a decolonial
perspective, just as coloniality is unthinkable without modernity.
12. Maldonado-Torres (2008) cites W. E. B. Du Bois as the pioneer of decolonial
studies; see Du Bois (1903 [1997]).
13. Ann Stoler (2016) writes of “imperial durabilities” and “imperial entailments,”
ideas that do similar work to “coloniality.”
14. On heteropatriarchy and its relation to white supremacy, see Smith 2006.
15. Quijano 1993; see also Mignolo 2007b, 156. Holding this matrix together is what
Quijano calls the “coloniality of power,” described by Grosfoguel (2007, 217) as the in¬
tersection of “multiple and heterogeneous global hierarchies (‘heterarchies’) of sexual,
political, epistemic, economic, spiritual, linguistic and racial forms of domination and
exploitation where the racial/ethnic hierarchy of the European/non-European divide
transversally reconfigures all of the other global power structures.”
16. Santos, Nunes, and Meneses 2007, xxxv. Gonzalez Casanova (1969) has dis¬
cussed the phenomenon of colonialismo interno, which might also be interpretable in
terms of this matrix of power. Castro-Gomez and Grosfoguel (2007,13) describe the
current global system as the sistema-mundo europeo/euro-norteamericano capitalista/
patriarcal moderno/colonial, to emphasize its multistranded complexity and integra¬
tion; see also Grosfoguel (2005).
17. Maldonado-Torres argues that the entire formation of Western rationality—the
basis, ultimately, of Western science—is predicated on the racist distinction between
those capable of rational thought and those for whom such thinking is impossible.
The Cartesian cogito ergo sum—I think, therefore I am—contains two unacknowl¬
edged qualifiers: “‘I think (others do not think, or do not think properly) therefore
I am (others are-not, lack being, should not exist or are dispensable)”’ (Maldonado-
Torres 2007, 252). The first part of this statement refers to the “coloniality of knowl¬
edge”: only the European is capable of rational (i.e., proper) thought; the second part

152 / NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

refers to what Maldonado-Torres identifies as the “coloniality of being”: only the
European is worthy of recognition as fully human. What Maldonado-Torres calls the
“non-ethics of war” (the dehumanization of the enemy as a killable object, lacking
in true subjectivity and worthiness) is translated to ordinary life through the idea of
race, which naturalizes the objectification and abuse of those it classifies as inferior
(Maldonado-Torres 2008; see also Arias 2015; Gordon 2004).
18. On queer de- and postcolonial theory, see Anzaldua 1987; Mignolo 2000; Perez
1999, 2003; Spurlin 2001.
19. As another mechanism for subordinating the colonized as a nonhuman or
subhuman form of life, the gender system is fundamental to the organization of the
coloniality of power and so key to understanding broader political, economic, and
sociocultural practices and systems. These understandings give gender and sexual¬
ity a central place in the analysis of coloniality past and present, a corrective to other
decolonial scholarship that either ignores their primacy or reduces gender to the
colonizers’ “sexual access” to colonized women. Lugones (2007) in particular .critiques
Quijano’s (2000) original formulation; see also Maese-Cohen 2010; Rivera Cusicanqui
2010; Schiwy 2007.
20. Legal anthropologist Sally Engle Merry (2000) illustrates how all of these di¬
mensions of colonialism operated in tandem—Quijano’s “colonial matrix of power”—
in the U.S. colonization of Hawaii. Prior to the arrival of Euroamericans, Hawaii had
a rich and complex political and legal system under which local cultural standards of
morality were legislated and enforced. Hawaiians viewed nudity and sexual play as
harmless (while also indicating rank and social status, e.g., who could touch whose
body revealed ones place in the political hierarchy), and marriage as a loose and flex¬
ible union; native Hawaiian women had a great deal of autonomy compared with West¬
ern women. Property was often communally owned, and peoples work lives were not
terribly strenuous. For Europeans and U.S. Americans, these differences from Western
norms meant that native Hawaiians were savage and uncivilized, like children not yet
fully formed. But this view also implied that Hawaiians, like children, were capable of
improvement, if certain changes were implemented: “Hawaiian natives needed to be
clothed, their work habits disciplined, their land privatized, their children schooled,
their religion churched, and their family lives readjusted so that marriage was held
sacred and women and children were properly subordinated to men” (Lazarus-Black
2000,141). This was accomplished through changes in the Hawaiian legal system. At
first, Hawaiian law shifted to follow principles introduced by the Christian missionaries;
later, the legal system became modeled on that of the United States. During this later
era, Hawaii became an important production site for the sugar industry, and the islands
adopted a plantation system run by wealthy, mostly white elites, with native Hawaiians
and Asian immigrants employed as farm labor. The law changed in response, allowing
colonizers to enforce labor contracts, defend private property rights, and prosecute
disturbances of the public order. New laws also emphasized monogamous marriage
and severely restricted womens liberties, including the right to divorce.
The overlap of gendered and racialized forms of discrimination and control—what
Merry calls “paternalistic racism,” or “power that is gendered as well as raced” (Merry

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 / 153

2000,139)—is clear in the changing laws of colonized Hawaii. But what is perhaps
most interesting in Merry’s account is her demonstration that the colonial process
was not a straightforward, linear transformation from non-Western to Western ways
of life. Faced with the threat of complete domination—that is, of being absorbed into
the United States, their own forms of self-government destroyed—Hawaiian lawmak¬
ers and politicians willingly adopted Western social and legal norms, hoping that by
doing so they might demonstrate themselves to be “civilized” to Western eyes. In the
end, of course, this effort failed, as the traditional monarchy fell and Hawaii became
the fiftieth U.S. state. But Hawaiians were not merely the passive victims of colonial¬
ism: As Merry shows, they were actively engaged in negotiating the terms of their
subjugation, surrendering traditional modes of living in exchange for, they hoped, a
measure of political autonomy. And indeed, even as the new legal system undermined
womens freedoms and emphasized protections for elite landowners at the expense of
commoners, it also introduced a language of individual rights, which workers could
use to challenge their exploitation in court.
21. Mignolo (2011b, 54) contends that these writings were somehow foundational
to the decolonization of the Bolivian state by that country’s Constitutional Assembly.
Daniel, whose work focused on Bolivia for many years, considers this to be a highly
debatable assertion.
22. Spivak 1988; Mohanty 1988, 2004. For an excellent critique of decolonial theo¬
rists’ refusal to engage the work of postcolonial scholars, and of Spivak in particular,
see Asher (2013).
23. When considering modern science and its relationship with Europe, it is impor¬
tant to remember that we are referring to the project of the European Enlightenment
and the scientific model that emerged in that context. This does not mean that science
originated in Europe. On the myth of science as a European invention, see Dussel,
Krauel, and Tuma 2000.
24. Seth 2009, 377. The performance of Western technological prowess sat uneas¬
ily alongside the colonizers’ desire for the secret knowledges they believed “exotic”
conquered peoples to control; see, e.g., Taussig 1991.
25. See Castro-Gomez (2005) on the “hubris of the zero point” (hybris del punto
cero).
26. To some extent this is beyond the individual researcher’s control, as it is embed¬
ded within the coloniality of the Western academy. The research process itself is gov¬
erned by academic institutions, whose decisions determine whether or not to approve
and fund the research, and whose rules regulate it to ensure its conformity with sci¬
entific convention. At each stage of the process, a coterie of scientific gatekeepers far
removed from ethnography’s objects shape how ethnographic knowledge is collected,
interpreted, and distributed. For example, before an ethnographic research project can
begin, the anthropologist must describe her research in a proposal, presented to a re¬
view panel for vetting and, hopefully, funding. In anthropology, the research proposal
is a deeply conservative document, requiring researchers to render their ideas and
plans in terms of established categories of knowledge production—questions, theory,
methods, budget, and so on—that must be approved before research may proceed.

154 / NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

Approval is contingent on the ability of the evaluators to recognize the research plans
as legitimate (and perhaps even fundable) according to disciplinary norms. Numer¬
ous revisions are often demanded. Institutions within academia further regulate the
process, most notably the irb (Institutional Review Board), which ostensibly exists
to protect the safety of the researched but more importantly protects the university
against legal action should something go wrong with the research; and the orsp
(Office of Research and Sponsored Programs, or some variation thereof), which
requires research plans, proposals, and applications to be presented according to
precise yet arbitrary guidelines. Failure to comply with the many rules and regulations
can delay the start of the project and jeopardize funding. By the time the researcher
has run this gauntlet of approvals and permissions, she has a fully realized vision of
the research to be transacted; funders, irbs, and orsps resist deviations from what
has been approved. First-time researchers are inculcated in the norms of institutional
science through the proposal process.
The dominant research paradigm thus requires the researcher to determine the
aims and goals of the project, to ask the questions, and record the answers. Variations
from this norm can render the process moot: Data collected outside the bounds of
prior irb approval, for example, maybe disallowed, the researchers barred from in¬
cluding them in their analyses. Another form of regulation occurs at the end of the re¬
search process, when the researcher writes up her results. Flere again, deviation from the
norm can render the written product unrecognizable to another set of reviewers, those
who vet the research for publication. Not citing the right people—including the famous
theorists and the less well-known but equally important regional or topical experts—can
disqualify a publication, requiring revision and resubmission until the author gets it
right. A successful academic career depends on approval from these institutions and
gatekeepers; researchers who fail to present themselves in a form recognizable to review¬
ers and administrators will not advance to the next level of their profession.
27. On humanitarianism, see, e.g., Fassin 2007; Malkki 1996; Redfield 2012.
28. For Santos et al, “the self-constitution of science as a universal form of
knowledge that claims the right to legislate over all other forms of knowledge leads
to it being frequently regarded in the non-Western world as a Western particularism
whose specificity consists of holding the power to define as particular, local, contex¬
tual, and situational all knowledges that are its rivals” (Santos, Nunes, and Meneses
2007, xxxv).
29. Internal critiques of anthropology’s coloniality are not new, either. As we
mentioned in this book’s introduction, similar criticisms, in different language, were
brought by scholars beginning in the 1960s, when anthropologists became increas¬
ingly critical of how the discipline’s colonial past continued to color its present and
began to imagine steps to a “liberation anthropology” (see Diamond 1979; Gordon
1991; Huizer and Mannheim 1979; Nzimiro 1988); other critiques have come out of
Latin America (see Jimeno 2005; Krotz 1993,1997; Restrepo 2007; Restrepo and Esco¬
bar 2005). And those scholars were themselves part of a longer chain of auto-critique
that went back even further and that included some of anthropology’s greatest minds,
including Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Franz Boas, and Claude Levi-Strauss. See

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 / 155

the discussion in Stocking (1992). Castro-Gomez (1998) suggests that the scholarly
anticolonial discourses of the 1960s and 1970s failed to consider the epistemological
status of their own thought and so failed to recognize the extent to which their own
critiques harbored a colonial logic.
30. Deloria 1969; King 1977; Trask 1991. Indigenous anthropologists have also been
active in reorienting the discipline toward decolonial practice; for an early example
from Latin America, see the discussion of the Declaration of Barbados in Dostal
(1972) and Hale (2006).
31. Haraway (1988) famously wrote of “situated knowledges” against the supposedly
neutral and objective stance of modern science; see also Harding (1991, 2008); Mascia-
Lees, Sharpe, and Cohen 1989.
32. Briggs and Bauman 1999. Lassiter calls attention to the work of the anthropolo¬
gist and biographer Paul Radin (1933), an early proponent of collaboration in ethno¬
graphic work and a writer who emphasized the significance of individual knowledge
and experience in the production of cultural knowledge.
33. Restrepo and Escobar 2005,118. Escobar (2007,185) describes this as “the need
to take seriously the epistemic force of local histories and to think theory through
from the political praxis of subaltern groups.”
34. Mignolo (2002, 71, 91) describes “border thinking” as “an epistemology from
a subaltern perspective,” “an other logic” that is part of a broader assessment of the
“geopolitics of knowledge.” See Anzaldua 1987.
35. Escobar 2007,187. See also Dussel 1996. On the Modernity/Coloniality Research
Program, see Escobar 2004.

2. JOURNEYS TOWARD DECOLONIZING

1. This story was originally recounted in Goldstein 2012.

2. Tenure and review processes vary across institutions. At some, faculty are
reviewed every two to three years, both pre- and post-tenure, meaning that even
scholars with tenure may feel the constraints of the academic track.
3. The Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act (sb 1070) was
an anti-immigration law passed by the Arizona Senate that, among other things, made
it a federal misdemeanor for immigrants in Arizona to fail to carry their immigration
documents with them at all times. For a discussion of Arizona sb 1070, see Chin et al.
2010.

3. REFLECTIONS ON FIELDWORK IN NEW JERSEY

1. For a comprehensive history of New Jersey, see Lurie and Veit (2012).
2. Prior to this wave of Latin Americans a Puerto Rican community had existed in
town since World War II.
3. Town Hall Council Meeting, January 5, 2003.
4. Interview with Rosa D„ conducted by Carolina, February 25, 2015.
5. Interview with Rosa D„ conducted by Carolina, February 25, 2015.

156 / NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

 6. Compare with Coleman’s (2012) work in North Carolina communities.
7. Federal policy under pep (which came into effect in July 2015) was originally
intended to target only the most dangerous or criminal immigrants. However,
this changed under the Trump administration with the issuing of a dhs memo
in February 2017, “Enforcement of the Immigration Laws to Serve the National
Interest” (http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house
/articlei336o7784.ece/BINARY/DHS%2oenforcement%2oof%2oimmigration%20
laws). It states that “the Department no longer will exempt classes or categories of
removable aliens from potential enforcement.... Unless otherwise directed, De¬
partment personnel should initiate enforcement actions against removable aliens
encountered during the performance of their official duties. This includes the arrest or
apprehension of an alien whom an immigration officer has probable cause to believe
is in violation of the immigration laws.”
8. The writing on undocumented immigration and labor is extensive, and we can¬
not mention it all here. Particularly influential works for us in the anthropology of
immigration, activism, and immigrant workers’ rights include Chavez (2008); Coutin
(2000, 2003, 2016); Gomberg-Munoz (2010); Heyman (1998, 2016); Horton (2016);
Inda (2006); and Stuesse (2016).

4. UNDOCUMENTED ACTIVIST THEORY

AND A DECOLONIAL METHODOLOGY

1. Fieldnotes, January 3, 2014, written by Lucy. All notes were originally written in
Spanish; translations were done by Daniel and Carolina.
2. Fieldnotes, March 5, 2014, written by Lucy.
3. Fieldnotes, February 13, 2014, written by Lucy.
4. Fieldnotes, January 14, 2014, written by Lucy.
5. Fieldnotes, February 28, 2014, written by Mirian.
6. Fieldnotes, May 31, 2014, written by Lucy.
7. Fieldnotes, January 2, 2014, written by Lucy.
8. Fieldnotes, September 12, 2014, written by Lucy.
9. Interview with Lucy, May 11, 2015, conducted by Carolina.
10. Fieldnotes, January 8, 2014, written by Mirian.
11. Fieldnotes, April 29, 2015, written by Mirian.
12. An undocumented immigrant’s right to benefits under federal law is guaranteed
through the National Labor Relations Act (nlra) of 1935, the Fair Labor Standards
Act (flsa) of 1938, and the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection
Act (mspa) of 1983, among others. The Wage and Hours Division of the U.S. Depart¬
ment of Labor continues to enforce the flsa and mspa “without regard to whether
an employee is documented or undocumented”; “Wage and Hour Division,” United
States Department of Labor, https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs48.htm;
accessed January 5, 2018.
13. State of New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development, http://www
.nj.gov/labor/; accessed January 5, 2018.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 / 157

 H. “New Jersey courts have held that the effect of ones immigration status has
no bearing on the injury suffered or the need, or right, to medical treatment for an
injury derived during employment. It is worth noting that benefits paid under the
New Jersey Worker’s Compensation Act are not government funded but rather paid
for through an insurance policy maintained by the employer. Requiring the employer
to bear the financial responsibility of workers compensation further encourages the
employer to ensure workplace safety for all workers. Injured workers in New Jersey
should seek lawyers experienced in workers compensation law who can help any
injured employee obtain the benefits they are entitled to, even permanency ben¬
efits, regardless of immigration status”; http://callagylaw.com/employment-rights
-undocumented-workers-federal-new-jersey-law/; accessed January 5, 2018.
15. Interview with Mirian, May 21, 2015, conducted by Carolina and Daniel.
16. Fieldnotes, September 8, 2014, written by Lucy.
17. Fieldnotes, October 11, 2013, written by Lucy.
18. Interview with Lucy, May 11, 2015, conducted by Carolina.
19. Undocumented womens reluctance to take domestic disputes to court has
intensified under the Trump administration, as the courthouse has become a place for
ice agents to target undocumented petitioners; see, e.g., Katz 2017.
20. Fieldnotes, April 23, 2014, written by Mirian. It should be recalled that this work
was done prior to Donald Trumps election as U.S. president, which initiated a period
of intensified policing, detention, and deportation of undocumented immigrants. It is
unclear whether some of these recommendations would still be advisable under the
new administration. For further discussion on this, see the preface.
21. Fieldnotes, August 2, 2014, written by Lucy.
22. Again, it is important to remember that this research was being conducted dur¬
ing the Barack Obama administration, which, despite a record number of deporta¬
tions, introduced measures like daca (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and
other policies that seemed to be moving the country toward a greater tolerance of the
undocumented immigrant presence. That quickly changed with the election of Trump
and the introduction of a much harsher approach to immigrant policing. But at the
time, recommending people to pursue their grievances through the police and the
courts was not out of line, as the risks of doing so were much less than they were later
to become.
23. Interview with Elena, August 6, 2014, conducted by Lucy. In addition to record¬
ing the interview, Lucy and Mirian wrote commentaries and reflections about the inter¬
view they had just recorded. This quote, for example, is drawn from Lucy’s written
commentary on the interview of August 6, 2014.
24. Interview with Mirian, April 10, 2018, conducted by Carolina.
25. This program has been followed by undocumented youth across the country
organized around the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (dream)
Act (see Corrunker 2012).
26. Interview with Lucy, April 10, 2018, conducted by Carolina.
27. Interview with Mirian, April 10, 2018, conducted by Carolina.
28. Fieldnotes, May 28, 2014, written by Mirian.

158 / NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

 29. Fieldnotes, December 9, 2014, written by Lucy.
30. Fieldnotes, March 2, 2014, written by Lucy.
31. Interview with Lucy, April 10, 2018, conducted by Carolina.
32. Interview with Mirian, April 10, 2018, conducted by Carolina.
33. We thank Angela Stuesse for raising this point.
34. Interview with Mirian, April to, 2018, conducted by Carolina.
35. Interview with Lucy, April 10, 2018, conducted by Carolina.
36. For example, in a famous debate with Max Gluckman, Paul Bohannon argued
for the use of indigenous legal principles and terms instead of their English equiva¬
lents in the anthropology of law; see Mertz and Goodale 2012.
37. Fieldnotes, January 27, 2015, written by Lucy.
38. Interview with Lucy, May 11, 2015, conducted by Carolina.
39. Interview with Dolores, June 5, 2014, conducted by Lucy. Interview commentary
written by Lucy.
40. Interview with Mirian, May 25, 2015, conducted by Carolina.
41. Interview with Lucy, May 11, 2015, conducted by Carolina.
42. Interview with Mirian, May 21, 2015, conducted by Carolina and Daniel.
43. Interview with Mirian, May 21, 2015, conducted by Carolina and Daniel.
44. Interview with Lucy, May 11, 2015, conducted by Carolina.
45. Interview with Lucy, May 11, 2015, conducted by Carolina. Upon learning of this,
we went back and identified the data produced by these interviews and excluded them
from analytical consideration, in deference to irb requirements and guarantees to our
research subjects of confidentiality.
46. Interview with Marcelo, June 12, 2014, conducted by Lucy. Interview commen¬
tary written by Lucy.
47. Mirian and Lucy were salaried employees during this entire period.

5. UNDOCUMENTED THEATER

1. Fieldnotes, January 23, 2015, written by Lucy.

2. Fieldnotes, January 30, 2015, written by Lucy.
3. Interview with Mirian, May 21, 2015, conducted by Carolina and Daniel.
4. We use the word trabajadorxs to go beyond the binary construction of the Span¬
ish language and be inclusive of people of all genders (see Scharron-Del Rio and Aja
2015).

CONCLUSION

1. Chela Sandoval (2000) engages with Frederic Jamesons (1991) analysis of

postmodernism, as he argues that contemporary forms of resistance, oppositional
consciousness, and social movements are no longer effective under the imperatives of
neocolonial globalization. In Jameson, the previously centered (First World) modern
citizen-subject is now absolutely disoriented and in need of a new “cognitive map”
capable of pinpointing her within postmodern globalizing cultural conditions. This

NOTES TO CONCLUSION / 159

decentered postmodern subject, Sandoval argues, finds herself in the position long oc¬
cupied by the always already historically decentered subaltern citizen subject—“being
a woman of color is an everyday battle against the state”—and it is therefore relevant
to turn to those historically oppressed peoples and analyze their forms of survival
(and resistance) if one wants to grapple with Jamesons “postmodern condition.” A
“differential” form of consciousness, much like Gloria Anzalduas (1987) “mestiza
consciousness,” emerges among women of color in the passing between and among
different oppositional ideologies. This praxis of border crossing and liminality and
the recognition of the many ways in which women of color negotiate day-to-day
experience provide a threshold for the creation of an alternative mode of being. In this
regard, poet Aurora Levins Morales writes, “This tribe called ‘Women of Color’ is not
an ethnicity. It is one of the inventions of solidarity, an alliance, a political necessity
that is not the given name of every female with dark skin and a colonized tongue, but
rather a choice about how to resist and with whom” (2001, 22; cf. Walia 2013,14). From
this point of view, solidarities among women of color are based on the recognition
that their subjectivities are the most impacted by coloniality and that they embody the
pathways necessary to concurrently disrupt overlapping systems of oppression. In this
context, “facilitating space for other women of color warriors is an intentional politi¬
cal practice, an offering in the spirit of decolonization” (Walia 2013,14).
2. On the relation between coloniality and disciplinary/transdisciplinary ap¬
proaches to knowledge production, see Maldonado-Torres 2012.
3. Fieldnotes, February 6, 2015, written by Mirian.
4. Fieldnotes, February 4, 2015, written by Mirian.
5. Fieldnotes, February 6, 2015, written by Mirian.
6. Fieldnotes, September 30, 2014, written by Mirian.
7. Fieldnotes, June 3, 2014, written by Lucy.
8. Fieldnotes, May 5, 2014, written by Lucy.
9. Interview with Lucy, May 11, 2015, conducted by Carolina.
10. Maldonado-Torres 2007, 262. See also the essays in Grosfoguel and Hernandez
(2012); Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013).
11. Borneman 1995, 669. Taking a swipe at text-based scholars of “culture,” Borne-
man pointedly adds, “Study of written texts and participant-observation are distinct
practices that offer different insights. They should not be collapsed together into
trendy cultural studies, where they are often used as an alibi by bourgeois academics
to avoid the discomforts and uncertainties inherent in face-to-face interaction with
strangers.”

160 / NOTES TO CONCLUSION

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 Index

academy, the: coloniality and, 3-10,17,19-21, ment, 19. See also anthropology; ethno¬
38-39,70; gatekeeping and, 4-5,11-12, graphic methods; feminism
94-95; knowledge production and research American Dream, ix, 55, 96-97
within, 7-8, 28-29, 33-39; 59-6i. See also anthropology, 10-13,16, 50-51, 59, 67-68, 77;
cultural studies; tenure academic vs. applied, 2-3, 6, 36, 39, 46-50;
activism, 3-6, 9-14, 34-35, 50-53, 66-68, colonial, 1-7,17-20, 27-33, 35, 60, 70, 95,
74-77,82-85, 90-91. 99.137-39- See also 136-39,146-47; crisis in, 1,18, 35; cultural
civil disobedience; collective action; com¬ critique through, 4-6; epistemicide and, 28;
munity organizing ontological turn in, 4; research processes
African American: solidarity with Latinx and, 37-39, 76,148; role of anthropolo¬
undocumented immigrants, 53-54, 61-62, gist in, 2-9,11,15-19, 29-36, 38-39, 45-47,
64, 67,103,139.141.143 69-70, 78, 84,137,148; service and, 38-39,
Alonso Bejarano, Carolina, xi, 5-16,39-40, 66, 99. See also alternative anthropologies;
60-61, 83-87, 90, 96, 99,105; life as orga¬ ethnographic methods; ethnography
nizer and scholar, 51-54; personal journey anti-objectivism, 2, 8,19, 32-34. See also
toward decolonial ethnography, 138-39; role objectivism
in research and book project, 66-77 Anzaldua, Gloria, 26, 36, 53,147,156034,
alternative anthropologies: activist anthro¬ 160. See also border thinking; mestiza
pology, 3, 5-6, 9-11.19-20. 29, 33-35. 45. consciousness
50, 60-61, 66-68, 75, 77, 80, 83-85, 89, 99, Appadurai, Arjun: “right to research,” 12
137-39; anthropologies otherwise, 146; Arizona sb 1070, 5203
applied anthropology, 2-3, 6, 29, 36, 39, artivism, xi, 75,102-6,139. See also activism;
46-50,137; collaborative anthropology, 3, poetry; songwriting; theater
6, 9,19-20, 33-35. 39. 67-69,102,137,148; Asad, Talal, 18
engaged anthropology, 3, 5-6, 9,19, 29-30, Asher, Kiran, 26
45. 49-50, 59-60, 67-69,137; feminist authorship, 12-15
anthropology, 1-2, 4, 6, 9,18-23, 32-33,
35.137-38; indigenous anthropology, 4, 6, Benedict, Ruth, 30129 ■
9, 20-22, 30-32, 35, 95,146-47; liberation Black Power Movement, 91
anthropology, 31029,139; postmodernist Boal, Augusto, 105
anthropology, 1-2,19; world anthropology, Boas, Franz, 31029, 33, 70
4, 6, 9, 20, 34-35,137; “writing culture” mo¬ Bolivia, 26, 46-50
border, the, 42, 51,55, 62, 78,103,119,138m courts, xiii, 45, 54, 57, 60, 64, 73, 79-80, 83, 87,
border thinking, 36,147. See also Anzaldua, 106,129-31,135. See also immigration policy
Gloria; Mignolo, Walter (U.S.): justice system and
Brecht, Bertolt, 105 cultural studies, 25-26,148ml; decolonial turn
in, 6-7,15-16,19-20,147. See also decolonial
capitalism, 1, 34-36,53; and ethnographic theory
research, 17-19,137-38; and the university, 7,
10, 29. See also inequality decolonial theory, 3, 6, 21-25, 51—52, 72; an¬
Casa Hometown, 24f, 41, 44-45, 51,53-58, thropology and, 8-12,15-16,19-20,36, 45,
64-67, 73-78,102,106,142-44; as fieldwork 47. 59-6o, 136-38,146-48; civil rights and,
and activism site, 78-89, 92-93,100; por¬ 91; critique of, 26-27,36,152013; fieldwork
trayal in Undocumented, Unafraid play, 109, and, 101-2; and undocumented activist
117,125,129,131,135; transformative impact theory, 94-95, 99-100,147. See also anthro¬
on authors, 139,141. See also Hometown, NJ pology: colonial; coloniality; feminism:
Casanova, Pablo Gonzalez, 33,152m6 decolonial
Castro-Gomez, Santiago, 152016,154025,156029 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
Christianity, 23, 25,153020 (daca) Program, xii, 82,158022. See also
civil disobedience, xi, 91,143-44. See also immigrants’ rights movement; immigra¬
activism; collective action; community tion policy (U.S.); Obama, Barack; Trump,
organizing Donald
Civil Rights Movement, 91 dehumanization, 4, 25,102, i52ni7. See also
collective action, 12,53, 84-85, 90-94, 98-100, human, the
138. See also activism; civil disobedience; deportation, xi-xiii, 10,50-57, 65, 67, 82, 85,
community organizing 97,103,106,144; accounts from fieldnotes,
colonialism, 3-4, 23-24, 26-27, 30-33,136, 88-93
147-48; colonial era and, 2,17,18, 20-22, derechos de lxs trabajadorxs, 110,112,116,120,
28-29, 54; critique of “legacy” or “past” 124,126,130,132,134. See also workers’ rights
framing of, 2,19, 35-36; difference and, Descartes, Ren£, 23017
21; Hawaii and, 25. See also anthropology: detention, 52,56-58, 65,67,81-82,85, 97,158020
colonial; coloniality; decolonial theory; developmentalism, 29, 49-50; as critique of
postcolonialism development discourse, 19, 46-47. See also
coloniality, 2-7,15-16,19-20, 24-25, 28-30, non-Western epistemologies; Western
33, 36, 60, 70, 76,136,138-39,148; of being, hegemony
23ni7; of knowledge, 23017, 29026, 31-32, Development, Relief, and Education for Alien
95; of power, 23015, 25019; standards of Minors (dream) Act, 158025. See also
beauty under, 22-23. See also anthropology: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
colonial; colonialism; decolonial theory; (daca) Program; immigrants’ rights move¬
feminism: decolonial ment; immigration policy (U.S.)
colonial matrix of power, 23-26,136. See also direct action: political demonstrations and
Quijano, Anibal protests, xii-xiii, 52-53, 66, 84-85,100,132,
community organizing, 54, 60, 64, 66, 73-77, 151020. See also activism; civil disobedience;
81, 90-91, 98-100,138-39,143-44; Casa community organizing
Hometown fieldwork as, 84-89, 92-94. domestic violence: undocumented experi¬
See also activism; civil disobedience; collec¬ ences of, 41, 60, 88, 89, 97-98
tive action driver’s license: access by undocumented,
community theater, 75,105-6. See also Un¬ 55-57. 79. 9i
documented, Unafraid (theatrical work) Du Bois, W. E. B„ 147,152012
Coronil, Fernando, 30, i52nio Dussel, Enrique, 26, 36,137,151113. *541123

180 / INDEX
Ellison, Ralph, 28 154021; life as researcher and academic,
Enlightenment, the, 2, 39,154n23. See also 45-51; personal journey toward decolonial
science: Western epistemologies ethnography, 137-40; role in research and
Escobar, Arturo, 2, 4, 30-31, 34,146-47,14905, book project, 66-77
156035 Gomberg-Munoz, Ruth, 90,150119,15408
ethnographic methods: democratic processes Gordon, Lewis, 147,152n9,152017
within, 31, 59; experimentation with, 19, 38, graduate students. See research assistants
59, 73-76, 78-97; fieldnotes and fieldwork, Grosfoguel, Ramon, I5inni5-i6
6-7,10-14,18, 38, 53-54, 66, 69, 70-72, 75, Guatemala, xi, 13, 41-42, 62,115,121,140
77-81, 84-85, 88, 91, 93, 96-104,140-41, Guha, Ranajit, 15107, 22
144,146,148; interviewing, 10, 38, 53-54,
66, 69, 75-84, 87-89, 97-101,140-41,143; Hale, Charles, 3,14907,149013,156030,156035
participant observation, 10,17, 28, 38, 53, 66, Haraway, Donna, 27,156030
68, 75, 80, 93, 95, 97-101, i6onn. See also Harding, Susan, 156030
alternative anthropologies; anthropology; Harrison, Faye, 1, 4, 6,137,147
ethnography; science Hometown, NJ, 11,13-14,16, 39, 45,51, 53-67,
ethnography, xii, 3, 6,10-13, 32—33, 83-84, 69, 73, 78, 85, 93-94, 98-100,106,108,
136-41; role of assistants in, 69-70; decoloniz¬ 138-39,141. See also Casa Hometown
ing the practice of, 7-10,19-20, 47, 53-54, human, the, xiii, 20-21, 25-28, 30-31, 79, 83,
59- 60, 73-77, 97-99,106,146,148. See also 87, 91, 94-103,138. See also dehumanization
anthropology; ethnographic methods humanitarianism, 29. See also
Eurocentrism, 3, 22-23, 29, 34,147. See also developmentalism
science: Western epistemologies; Western humanities, the: and decoloniality, 25,30
hegemony human rights, xiii, 12, 48, 67, 91,100,103.
Europe: and colonialism, 2,17-27; and science, See also immigrants’ rights movement;
154023; and social science, 27-30, 34,146. workers’ rights
See also Eurocentrism; science: Western
epistemologies; Western hegemony immigrant illegality: production of, 14, 50-54,
90-91, 94
Fals Borda, Orlando, 33 immigrants’ rights movement, xi, xiii, 10-12,
Fanon, Frantz, 147 24, 44, 52-54, 60, 64-66, 74, 84-87, 90,
feminism: anthropology and, 1-2,4, 6, 9, 92-94,138-40; and undocumented youth,
18-20,32-33, 35,137-39; decolonial, 14, 150120,158025. See also Casa Hometown;
20-27, 51-53, 72. See also alternative anthro¬ human rights; immigration policy (U.S.);
pologies: feminist anthropology workers’ rights
fieldwork. See ethnographic methods: field- Immigration and Customs Enforcement
notes and fieldwork (ice), U.S., 42, 65, 93,158019; and Abolish
Foucault, Michel, 141,151m ice movement, xiii. See also deportation;
Freire, Paolo, 33 detention; police
immigration policy (U.S.), 85,11,15707; anti¬
gender, 2,18, 32,52, 76,138; and race, 2,53; loitering and code enforcement laws and,
coloniality of, 20-26. See also feminism; 62-65; executive orders and, xii; justice
sexism; sexuality system and, xii—xiii, 135; political rhetoric
geopolitics of knowledge, 156034. See also surrounding, xii; securitization of, 10, 50-51,
non-Western epistemologies; science: West¬ 61-62, 97. See also activism; immigrants’
ern epistemologies rights movement; immigration reform
Goldstein, Daniel M., 5,10-15, 38, 40,53-54, immigration reform, xi, xiii, 10, 58, 96,143.
60- 61, 78-79, 82-85, 87, 90, 92, 96, 99, See also immigration policy (U.S.)

INDEX / 181
indigenism, 26 ethnography, 137-44,145; role in research
indocumentados. See undocumented and book project, 73-77.
immigrants See also Undocumented Activists Theory of
inequality, 1-4,17-20, 26, 32, 34, 51, 53, 76 Undocumentation
injury. See work accidents minors, undocumented. See immigrants’ rights
Institutional Review Board (irb), 75,154026, movement: undocumented youth and
159045 modernity, 17,29-30; coloniality and, 21-23,
interdisciplinarity, 19,21,139,150ml. See also 25,36,138. See also science; trans-modernity
transdisciplinarity Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 25, i54n22
intersectionality, 25,152ni5. See also decolonial music, xi, 73, 75, 85,119,131,139-42,144; “The
theory Injured” (song), 133-34; “Sin Fronteras” [No
Borders] (song), 102-3. See also artivism
lameson, Frederic, 159m
jornalero, 14,39, 53,56, 62-66, 73,75,139,143 National Science Foundation, 13, 68, 69, 76
neoliberalism, 49, 94; and capitalism, 19;
King, Martin Luther, Jr., xiii, 103 and the university, 4. See also Western
hegemony
Lassiter, Luke Eric, 3, 33, 70 New Jersey, xii, 6,10,12, 41-44, 50-51, 54-68,
Latin America, 26, 41-44, 56, 62,156030. 73-74. 85. 87, 91,109,115,125,144; central, 13,
See also Bolivia; Guatemala; Mexico 35, 64. See also Hometown, NJ
Latinx, 6, 53, 62, 64,139 nongovernmental organizations (ngos), 29,
Levins Morales, Aurora, 159m 46, 48-50
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 35,156029 non-Western epistemologies, 4,17-18, 20-21,
Lopez Juarez, Lucia, xii-xiii, 10-15, 40, 60-61; 23, 27-30,33-34,147-48. See also alternative
development of undocumented activist anthropologies: indigenous anthropology;
theory, 90-100; fieldnotes, 78-106; life as alternative anthropologies: world anthro¬
immigrant and organizer, 54-58; personal pology; border thinking; science: Western
journey toward decolonial ethnography, epistemologies; Western hegemony
137-46; role in research and book project, North American Free Trade Agreement
73-77. See also Undocumented Activists (nafta), 62
Theory of Undocumentation nuclear family: and marriage, I54n20
Lugones, Maria, 23, 25,147
Obama, Barack, 89n22; deportation machine
Maldonado-Torres, Nelson, 22, 28,147,15in3, of, xii, 54
I52ni7, i6on2, i6omo objectification, 8
Mead, Margaret, 32,155029 objectivism, 2,32. See also anti-objectivism
Merry, Sally Engle, 25, i5oni3 Occupational Health and Safety Adminis¬
mestiza consciousness, 159m. See also tration (osha), 113,131,135,143. See also
Anzaldua, Gloria workers’ rights
Mexico, 55-57, 62, 78-79, 88-89, 96,106,115, Office of Research and Sponsored Programs
129,131,133 (orsp), 154026

Mignolo, Walter, 26, 36,136,146, i52nmo-n, organizer, xi, 51, 54, 71, 73-77. 87, 98-99.144-
I54m8 See also community organizing
Mijangos Garcia, Mirian A., xi-xiii, 10-15,
60-61, 67, 78,106; development of undocu¬ Participatory Action Research (par), 3, 33
mented activist theory, 90-100; fieldnotes, patron, 44, 92,102,119,133,143,145
79-105; life as immigrant and organizer, poetry, xi-xii, 43; “Broken Poem,” ix. See also
39-45; personal journey toward decolonial artivism

182 / INDEX
police, 14, 41; brutality, 1, 52; as enforcers of sexuality: feminist decolonial theory and, 18,
immigrant illegality, 62, 64, 85, 87,141, 22-23, 25
I58n22; fear of being involved in disputes by situated knowledge, 156031
undocumented, 43, 57, 88-89, 94. 98. H5> 135 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 7, 30-31,147,15008
positionality, 2, 32,137,15ini5 social justice, 91; activist anthropology and,
postcolonialism, 18-21, 25, 29,136, i5oni3 34-36

postmodernism, 1-2,19, 36,15U115,159m social sciences, the: coloniality and, 2-3, 8,

Powers, Nicholas, xi-xii 27-29,136-37; “savage slot” within, 17
Pratt, Mary Louise, 30 songwriting. See music
privilege, 8-10,21, 26, 30,51-53, 58, 60, 76, Speed, Shannon, 34,15007
i49nn5-6,152013 Spivak, Gayatri, 21,155022
pseudonyms, 14-15. See also authorship Stocking, George W., 2,18, 32,155029
Stoler, Ann, 25, 35-36,152013
Quijano, Anibal, 22-23, 27, 53. M7. i53nni9-20 Stuesse, Angela, 56, 90,15007,150117,151019,
I57n8,1591133
race, 53, 67; and coloniality, 22-23, 25-28 subaltern, 9,21,26, 37,100,147-48,1560033-34,
racism, xiii, 1,17-18, 23,30-31, 37, 52, 60,103, 159m. See also non-Western epistemologies;
137-38 positionality
representation, 26, 47,150ml; over¬
representation of the West, 7, 21, 30 TallBear, Kim, 31-32,147,150116
research assistants, 4-5,10,13, 48-49, 51, 53, 67, Tax, Sol, 3, 33
97; examining social research role of, 69-73 Teatro Campesino, 105
Restrepo, Eduardo, 2, 4,30-31, 34,146-47 tenure, 38-39; review processes for, 15602.
rights. See human rights; immigrants’ rights See also academy, the
movement; workers’ rights theater, 14,16, 75, 86,105-7,139.141-42.
Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia, 26, 36,153019 See also artivism
Rodriguez, Robyn, 51, 61 Theater of the Oppressed, 105
Rutgers University, 38,51-54, 66, 72, 75-76, transdisciplinarity, 139. See also
85.139 interdisciplinarity
trans-modernity, 36. See also modernity
Said, Edward, 21 Trump, Donald, xi, xii, 93,15707, i58nni9-20,
sanctuary cities, 61 158022; “zero tolerance” policy under, xii
Sandoval, Chela, 36, 53,138,149
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, 23, 27-28,147, Undocumented Activist’s Theory of Undocu¬
155028 mentation, 11-12, 78, 89-91, 95-98,102,
science, 13, 29-32,39, 69; and subjectivity, 8, 147-48
138; claim of objectivity, 2, 8,19; claim of undocumented immigrants. See immigrants’
subject/object distinction, 8, 27-28; claim rights movement
to universal, generalizable knowledge, 18, Undocumented, Unafraid (play), 54, 85-86,
20-21, 26-27, 33.155028; claim of rationality, 108-35
22, 28,152017; Western epistemologies of, universalism, 21, 27
34, 38,152ml, 152015,155023,155029
self-deportation, 62 violence, 9, 41-42, 47-48, 91, 97. See also
Seth, Suman, 27 domestic violence
sexism, xiii, 1,17-18, 25, 60; heteronormative
patriarchy and, 22, 76,138; Western stan¬ wage theft, 10, 60, 65, 67, 73-74, 82-83, 87, 99.
dards of female beauty and, 22-23. See also See also workers’ rights
decoloniality: of gender; feminism Walia, Harsha, 159m

INDEX / 183
Walsh, Catherine, 37 workers’ rights, xiii, 10-12,14-16, 42, 60-67,
Western hegemony, 1, 4, at, 30; character¬ 74, 85, 92,102,106,138-39,143-46; em¬
ization of the “savage” under, 17, 23, 25, ployer’s insurance, 43-45, 65, 73, 83, 87,
35. See also coloniality; science: Western 117,119,125,129; federal minimum wage,
epistemologies 111,135; Occupational Safety and Health
white supremacy, 22, 27; White Nationalism Act, 113; overtime pay, 111,135; worker’s
and, xiii; xenophobia and, 1. See also racism compensation and temporary disability
Women of Color: and coloniality, 138 benefits, 44-45, 65, 67, 83, 87,125,127,135;
work accidents, xi, 10,14,16, 41, 43-45, 60, messages in play about, 111,113,117,121,125,
65-67, 73-76, 79-80, 82-84, 87, 90, 92. 127,131,135
97-99,106,111-35,138,140-45 Wynter, Sylvia, 21,53,147

184 / INDEX
 ETHNOGRAPHY/ IMMIGRATION /ACTIVIS

In August 2011, ethnographers Carolina Alonso Bejarano and Daniel M. Goldstein began
a research project on undocumented immigration in the United States by volunteering at a
center for migrant workers in New Jersey. Two years later, Lucia Lopez Juarez and Mirian
A. Mijangos Garcia—two local immigrant workers from Latin America—joined Alon¬
so Bejarano and Goldstein as research assistants and quickly became equal partners for
whom ethnographic practice was inseparable from activism. In Decolonizing Ethnography
the four coauthors offer a methodological and theoretical reassessment of social science
research, showing how it can function as a vehicle for activism and as a tool for marginal¬
ized people to theorize their lives. Tacking between personal narratives, ethnographic field
notes, an original bilingual play about workers’ rights, and examinations of anthropology
as a discipline, the coauthors show how the participation of Mijangos Garcia and Lopez
Juarez transformed the projects activist and academic dimensions. In so doing, they offer
a guide for those wishing to expand the potential of ethnography to serve as a means for
social transformation and decolonization.

“The day-to-day activities of these decolonial researchers take center stage, offering a rare¬
ly seen glimpse of politically engaged ethnographic research practice. The authors’ self¬
reflexive and openhearted contribution will be much welcomed. This outstanding book
will make an important impact.”—Angela Stuesse, author of Scratching Out a Living.
Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South

“The authors present a compelling argument that ethnography can promote community
engagement and empowerment while pursuing social justice. Decolonizing Ethnography
is an innovative and insightful book.”—Susan Bibler Coutin, author of Exiled Home:
Salvadoran Transnational Youth in the Aftermath of Violence

Carolina alonso beiarano is an activist MIRIAN A. MIJANGOS GARCIA is 3 singer,

scholar and writer who teaches in the Depart¬ songwriter, and naturopath. She is also a moth¬
ment of Latino and Caribbean Studies at Rut¬ er, an ethnographer, and an immigrants’ rights
gers University. She is also a dj and an editor, activist.
translator, and collective member of Sangria
daniel m. Goldstein is Professor Emeri¬
Editora.
tus of Anthropology at Rutgers University and
lucia lopez juarez is an activist who fights author of Owners of the Sidewalk: Security and
for equal rights for all people, a domestic work¬ Survival in the Informal City, also published by
er, and a mother who cares for her home. Duke University Press.

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Cover art: Illustration and hand lettering by

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Peter Quach. Courtesy of the artist.

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS / WWW.DUKEUPRESS.EDU