The politics of translating ethnographic ideoscapes the death and life of Aida Hernandez: a border story (original) (raw)
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2021
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Grounded in Chicana feminist perspectives (Delgado Bernal, 1998; Sandoval, 1998; Villenas, 1996) that situate the Chicana researcher as a political self, and building on the concepts of cultural intuition (Delgado Bernal, 1998) and theory in the flesh (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1981), this article examines issues of power and identity that emerged from a yearlong ethnography in the city of Juárez, Mexico during the most violent drug-war era in its history. Focusing on the role of the border-crosser researcher who returns "home" to do fieldwork south of the U. S.-Mexico border, the article exposes the researcher's intimate struggles in negotiating the emotional distress involved in returning to one's own devastated community, the multiple identities that were perceived and produced during the data collection process, and the transformations and lessons learned from these experiences. The article examines the role of power inherent in the researcher's ability to control how data are interpreted and reported and the researcher-researched relations that emerge. This analysis underscores the role of power and difference embedded in the asymmetrical binational relationships of imperialism, racism, and neoliberalism between Mexico and the United States and accentuated by the dystopic conditions of the borderlands, which coalesce in the body of the border-crossing researcher. The article concludes with potential practices for Chicanas engaging in decolonizing research in the U. S.-Mexico borderlands.
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2017
The concept of borders continues to be notoriously obscure, due to its conceptual complexity, historicity and political situatedness. Equally contestable are concepts such as migrant and migration. Conceptually, I draw from Harsha Walia’s (2013) Border Imperialism and border studies that center on the context-particular histories of European colonialism and imperialism. Central to the article is the interlacing of geopolitics and the everyday in ways that show the explosion of borders and peculiar dissection of borders on particular migrants. Borders re/make bodies and bodies are made to make borders in the variety of ways across different sites. In the first half of the manuscript, I argue that these compelling conceptual and methodological approaches are pivotal to challenging Eurocentric representations of migrants and positivist research traditions, while in the second half I forge an understanding of the biopolitics of borders. My research findings are developed from 10 in-depth narratives mainly collected from Bangladeshi migrants in Madrid and Rome. Alongside participatory (action) research (P(A)R) methods and migrant narratives, I recall my own precarious work experiences and identity as a migrant, in Europe, which are parallel but quite distinct from the experiences of the participants. This research has deepened my understanding of migrants and borders and de-centered my conceptualizations prior to this field work. Notably, I strive to meet two challenges: provide a critical discussion on my use of feminist-informed methodology, and forward an analysis of the situation of migrants from the Global South in Europe through their voices by emphasizing the need for ethnographically-informed works to foreground significant aspects of migrant trajectories and their everyday lives.
Language & Communication, 2010
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International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2022
This article discusses how Mexican deportees find meaning and negotiate their agency in the borderscape and borderland of Tijuana, Mexico. Established through vice tourism, Tijuana has figured prominently as a site for expressions of migrancy. Within the expressions of migrancy, deported migrants find themselves in constant states of in-betweenness in systems of mediation. Through in-depth interviews with deported Mexican men living in temporary male-centric shelters, I identify and examine the issues of mobility ‘through the body’ of deported migrants, highlighting the politics of emotions, of being, and of seeing. Through analysis of the phenomenology of migration through Tijuana, I highlight the overreaching situated positions of permanent temporality mediating the lives of deported Mexican men. This perspective, therefore, sheds a necessary light on an often overlooked and marginalized condition of the migrant population.
The politics and poetics of migrant narratives
European Journal of Cultural Studies
Serving as the introduction to the special issue on ‘Migrant narratives’, this article proposes a multi-perspectival and multi-stakeholder analysis of how migration is narrated in the media in the last decade. This research agenda is developed by focussing on groups of actors that are commonly studied in isolation from each other: (1) migrants, (2) media professionals such as journalists and spokespersons from humanitarian organizations, (3) governments and corporations and (4) artists and activists. We take a relational approach to recognize how media power is articulated alongside a spectrum of more top-down and more bottom-up perspectives, through specific formats, genres and styles within and against larger frameworks of governmentality. Taken together, the poetics and politics of migrant narratives demand attention respectively for how stakeholders variously aesthetically present and politically represent migration. The opportunities, challenges, problems and commitments observ...
“Is it worth risking your life?”: Ethnography, risk and death on the U.S.–Mexico border
Social Science & Medicine, 2013
Every year, several hundred people die attempting to cross the border from Mexico into the United States, most often from dehydration and heat stroke though snake bites and violent assaults are also common. This article utilizes participant observation fieldwork in the borderlands of the US and Mexico to explore the experience of structural vulnerability and bodily health risk along the desert trek into the US. Between 2003 and 2005, the ethnographer recorded interviews and conversations with undocumented immigrants crossing the border, border patrol agents, border activists, borderland residents, and armed civilian vigilantes. In addition, he took part in a border crossing beginning in the Mexican state of Oaxaca and ending in a border patrol jail in Arizona after he and his undocumented Mexican research subjects were apprehended trekking through the borderlands. Field notes and interview transcriptions provide thick ethnographic detail demonstrating the ways in which social, ethnic, and citizenship differences as well as border policies force certain categories of people to put their bodies, health, and lives at risk in order for them and their families to survive. Yet, metaphors of individual choice deflect responsibility from global economic policy and US border policy, subtly blaming migrants for the danger e and sometimes death e they experience. The article concludes with policy changes to make USeMexico labor migration less deadly.
Imaginary Borders: A phenomenological Memoir on my Immigrant Journey
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The nature of the immigrant journey is one of my biggest preoccupations. The immigrant emigrates to another country from developing countries armed with a language and a culture that will not be useful in coping with the many difficulties of his new life. In my project, I combine personal narrative from a first-person perspective, poetic, and philosophical writing. It is an investigation on the question of the immigrant and his human condition as a conscious agent who exchanges one mode of being in his home country with another one in the US. In my analysis, I explore the immigrant passage as a way of learning through my phenomenological experience. A passage unique to the immigrant experience. By using my personal narrative as a child of undocumented immigrants and an immigrant myself, I argue the aforementioned points by claiming that once a person goes through a process of mental and physical uprooting, their perception of the world bifurcates. This psychic shift happens when one...
Narrating the Non-Nation: Literary Journalism and "Illegal" Border Crossings
Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, 2012
Narrating the Non-Nation: Literary Journalism and "Illegal" Border Crossings T he twenty-first century has been hailed as ushering in a new era of globalization and "post-nationalism," in which the nation-state is becoming an increasingly "obsolete" category (Appadurai 169). Such grand claims are belied, however, by the strong wave of resurgent nativism in the U.S. that has accompanied immigration reform debates of the last decade-most recently manifested in Arizona's notorious SB 1070 and similar legislative efforts in other states 1-as well as by the accompanying escalation in "boundary enforcement" at the U.S.-Mexican border (Nevins 158-59). As immigration spiked to ever higher numbers in the 1990s and early 2000s in the wake of NAFTA, policy enforcement "crack-downs" suggested a new level of border policing. Operation Hold-the-Line in 1993 and Operation Gatekeeper in 1994 implemented more rigorous enforcement at highly populated points such as San Diego and El Paso, driving border crossers through less populous areas and harsh desert conditions (Eschbach 4, 9). These developments resulted in large numbers of immigrant deaths due to dehydration, suffocation, hypothermia, and hyperthermia. The United States Government Accountability Office reports that border crossing deaths as a whole more than doubled between 1995 and 2005, although this increase was not accompanied by a corresponding rise in illegal entries. In response, the last decade has seen a flurry of books on the subject of undocumented immigrant crossings and deaths including: Dead in their Tracks: Crossing America's Desert Borderlands (1999) by John