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Ethnography has been test-driven, revised, and refined by many within and outside anthropology, and there are diverse genealogies according to our training and to ←22 | 23→the scholarly works that each anthropologist was exposed to during their graduate training. It is important to clarify that methodological choices are never separated from theoretical framings, nor from the wider vision we hold for the kinds of work we wish to create; this means that how we perceive the people, places and topics we are researching will have a direct effect how we conduct our research and the tools we select for fieldwork.

I would have not learned to be the kind of ethnographer that I am, without the interdisciplinary—and somehow chaotic—theoretical and methodological formation that I created by chance and intention. Hence, the genealogy that I share below includes sources that go beyond ethnography or qualitative methodologies. I have chosen some landmark experiences, in my own graduate education, which helped me develop a toolkit to design my dissertation project, and ever since marked profoundly research and my teaching practice. As students we are not a tabula rasa; we already bring knowledge, skills and the cultural capital of experiences that have shaped who we are becoming. I brought also resources to graduate school, acquired during my undergraduate education in Puerto Rico that also influenced the kind of academic literature that was more appealing to me. For example, I had been exposed to the powerful writings of Caribbean and Latin American scholars who had a tremendous influence in my commitment to critical research and academic writing, among them Aníbal Ponce, Eduardo Galeano, Franz Fanon, Aimée Cesaire, and Emeterio Betances, among others. I do not discuss the contributions of these “teacher-mentors” here (for details about my educational routes, see Chapter Four and the Bonus Track). Below I discuss authors that I encountered during the completion of my graduate studies in anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.

Among the classical anthropologists, Claude Levi-Strauss (1963) was the most readable for me; I enjoyed learning about his Marxist-structuralism legacy that has been so powerful and necessary for us to get to the post-structural and post-colonial de-centering of western grand narratives. He was not, however, interested in ethnography per se, but his brilliant insights in other areas compensated for that. Clifford Geertz’s concept of “thick description,” proposing the need for interpretive analysis of fieldwork data and deeper contextualization of the “realist” storytelling aspect of ethnography, had a tremendous impact in ethnographic research and writings, and was hopeful to me (see 1973). I appreciate also the way he paid attention to the “trifles” of everyday life in his fieldwork, as necessary for “thick description” (2008), and for his poetic interpretations in reporting his ethnographic findings. He published also a book (strangely invisible in debates) about the anthropologist as creative author (see 1988). It was, however, a series of chance encounters with certain authors that marked my decision to complete ←23 | 24→my degree in anthropology. As it has probably become obvious, those years of my anthropology and ethnography training were very intense; indeed, there was a lot of crying and existential crisis, that helped me grow tremendously, and for which I am deeply grateful today.

The seminal article by the Mexican-American anthropologist Renato Rosaldo (1983) about headhunters’ rage (when loosing a dear person in war), was an important landmark in my formation. In that article he reflected about his own rage about the death of his wife, during his fieldwork research with the Illongots in Luzon, Philippines in the 1960–1970s. This moving and poignant self-reflection made a great impact in my conception of the separation between “field” and “home,” and about ethnographic narratives. I saw an example of the powerful writing that can be produced when the ethnographer (who is the main instrument of research and not an objective, neutral machine) becomes a visible aspect of reporting our research findings. Dorinne Kondo’s works were a revelation to me, through her Crafting Selves book, and especially, through reading her reflexive journal article “Dissolution and reconstitution of self” (1986), both based on her fieldwork research on gender and power in a Japanese workplace. Her Japanese-American experience in the country of her parents, her approach to ethnography and her powerful writing voice, had a crucial impact in my understanding of the complexity of ethnography, in my research practice, as well as in my writings. Kirin Narayan, an Indian-American anthropologist, through one of her self-reflexive articles (1993), helped me question our roles as “native” anthropologists, who study in communities with whom we share a common language and cultural history, and to understand critically our assumptions about difference and familiarity, and how false dichotomies of self/other, home/field are even more problematic for those of us in such positions (see also Jacob-Huey 2002). In a similar fashion, the problematizing of Kamala Visweswaran (1994) of the micro-politics of fieldwork for feminist anthropologists warned me of the dangers of assuming commonalities a priori, and the need to be critical of power differences, in spite of shared women’s experiences, in and outside of the “field.”

By a citation chance, I came across the work of Ruth Behar, a Jewish-Cuban-American anthropologist, through her book Translated Woman (1993) and her article about “anthropology that breaks your heart” (1996), based on her fieldwork with Esperanza (an ethnographic project focusing on only one person, but crowded with other humans surrounding her), taught me the benefits of an extreme form of focused “deep hanging-out,” and about the challenges of validity when our research sampling is very small (for further discussion of this see 1999). I also found in her work an echo of how emotionally challenging is to do work with marginalized individuals, to feel our impotence to help, and the delicate ethical negotiations of ←24 | 25→doing so even if we could. Other works, found through my graduate courses, have also been significant for designing my feminist critical ethnographic practice. The fierce poetics in the queer writings of Jafari Allen (2007), Audre Lorde (1984) and bell hooks (2000), taught me to dare to express my ethnographic voice, beyond a mere academic reflexivity, and to have the courage to also admit my limitations, contradictions and vulnerabilities, so the reader could best judge the accountability of my work.

Important also for my ethnographic understanding and practice were the work of Faye Harrison (see 1991, 1997), her radical approach to de-colonize anthropology and ethnographic practice and her focus on Afro-diasporas in the Caribbean. In fact, I assign now to my graduate students the article “ethnography as politics” (1991) as the best training ground before they go “into the field.” In the work of Haitian anthropologist Gina A. Ulysse (2007) I found a wonderful example of radical, post-colonial and critical feminist ethnography, that showed me the path to finish my dissertation. The book of Arlene Davila, Latinos Inc (2006), was crucial for me to understand the media production apparatus going beyond a semiotic analysis of representations, as well as to understand how and when Dominicans in NYC engaged with this pan-ethnicity label, and the role of media in identity politics. I later found other relevant works of hers, in particular related to Latinx ethnic enclaves or barrios (2003) and language and culture of Latinx in media (2000), as I had noticed that many ads and programs used food as metaphor. Davila helped me understand the complexity of ethnicity as cultural identity, specifically the emergence and transformations of the “Hispanic” and “Latino” labels, as problematic pan-ethnicity claims agglutinating a great diversity within immigrant populations and their descendants, as well as those “Hispanics” who resided, for example in New Mexico and other states which used to be part of México until the 19th century, when the US took over those territories (“we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us”).

Since audiovisual data was central to my project and to my approach to research, I searched related methods and found visual anthropology. The focus of this fringe sub-field was on ethnographic films (produced mostly by professional filmmakers in collaboration with ethnographers), it was a bit disappointing to me. However soon I found works by anthropologists that used audiovisual methods as central part of their ethnographic fieldwork (see Pink 2013, 2015). I found, as well, critiques of visual anthropology that open other doors unknown to me and that became, eventually, important in my teaching also. For example, the work of Faye Ginsburg I found by accident, and then kept looking for more. I had to show the film Atanarjuat (The Long Runner) for a course where I was the teaching assistant. I didn’t know anything about that film or indigenous media, and I watched in awe. ←25 | 26→I began looking for references, to help me understand what I had just watched, and found Ginsburg article (2003) and then her other writings on indigenous media and visual anthropology (see 1997 and 1998) . I have since found also her work with Rayna Rapp (an early feminist anthropologist that I had read before) on disability, and this work I assign now in some of my courses.

Other complementary sources were also needed, which I found through interdisciplinary works such as Donna Haraway (1988). For problematizing issues of “home” an article by Chandra Mohanty and Emily Martin (1986) and the work of Sarah Ahmed (1999) were significant for me, as they addressed clearly through their arguments concerns that I had in researching migrant senses of home. I rejoiced when I found memory studies scholars, such as Maurice Hallbachs (1992), Pierre Nora (1989) and Henri Lefebvre (1991), but it was the book Cultural Memory: Recall from the Present (see Bal et al. 1999), that gave me the critical understanding I needed on cultural memory and memory-work. I found the grounding I was looking for in place/space through two edited volumes, one by the anthropologist Setha Low (2003) and another by Gupta and Ferguson (1997). Yet it was through the more radical approaches of feminist political ecologists such as Dorine Massey, Nancy Fraser and Nancy Duncan (see Duncan 1996, for a discussion of the basics of this approach) that the relevance of these dimensions became clear to me and gave me the tools to analyze critically the place-data. I felt that I still needed more concrete methodological ways of researching place/space dimensions during fieldwork, which were not a focus in the anthropology courses I was taking. That is when I found the work of Maria Elisa Christie, a cultural geographer doing ecological mappings of house gardens in Mexico (see Christie 2003 and 2004), by taking a course in the geography department (where she was an instructor). Christie’s work echoes the ‘sensual ethnography’ first proposed by Stoller (1989).

As I continued expanding my searches, to best design my ethnographic projects, I found many other authors, unsuspected mentors, who helped me gather and develop my own toolkits and approaches to fieldwork. The food research of anthropologist Carole Counihan taught me how to foreground gendered labor with the richness of her ethnographic accounts, and her scholarly contributions have become for me a “founding mother” legacy that I teach students through my food courses. Her humbleness and accessibility in mentorship of new food scholars is also legendary; I have seen many young faces illuminated with gratitude at the sole mention of her name. Without Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (1997) pioneering work on food, body and gender many of us would have had to re-invent the wheel. The book Tangled Routes by Deborah Barndt (2002), about the tomato trail (from production to consumption) and the Mexican women workers lives ←26 | 27→invested in that chain), came late into my life, as a gift of my mentor Polly Strong upon passing my dissertation defense. This book has become very influential for refining my food mapping method and one chapter Whose Choice? has become a “staple reading” that I assign regularly in my food courses (according to their testimony, my students benefit greatly from her style of analysis).

Through the Center for African & African-American Studies, I found how crucial African Diaspora paradigms were for understanding the Caribbean and its diasporas in the US (I discuss this further in Chapter Four). The work of Kevin Yelvington is crucial to understand the global social formations and racialization from and of the Caribbean, yet it was one article in particular “The anthropology of Afro-Latin America and the Caribbean: diasporic dimensions” (2001), that helped me to understand intersections of race, gender, class and national formations in the region. Although a long and rich work to digest (and difficult essay for undergraduate students to decipher, as I have found out), it works well as a literature review about African diasporas in the Americas, an argument for the significance of the Caribbean for anthropology and a discussion about the wider US debates on Blackness. Mintz and Price’s The birth of African-American culture: An anthropological perspective (1976), helped me understand the multi-dimensional complexities of Caribbean cultural formations beyond a simplistic creolization or African survival debate, showing that the Caribbean was “… a unique region where people under the stress of slavery had to improvise, invent and literally create [new] forms of human [socio-cultural organization]…” (1976: 84).

The work of Aisha Khan was a breath of fresh air, her understanding of the significance of the Caribbean for anthropological studies and for understanding a globalized planet, is best expressed through her own words, “the world is catching up to the Caribbean” (2001: 1) and for her attention to food in the Caribbean (see 1994). The works of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Kevin Yelvington and Sidney Mintz became pieces of a puzzle that I needed to make sense of, to produce the kind of research I wanted to develop around food, place-memory and Dominican migration to New York City. These works influenced my research and my teaching ever since, as they helped me clarified my focus on the Caribbean, its significance to understand processes of globalization and the contribution of the region to an anthropology of the African Diaspora in the Americas. Trouillot’s book Silencing the Past (1995), specifically his theorizations of power and the “silences” of archives, gave me the first clues to historical imagination in the Caribbean and to ethno-history as sources I needed for my work (together with his writings on anthropology and the “savage slot” already discussed). These works have become regular staples also in my teaching, as I assign them at the least provocation. Even though I read other works of Trouillot (e.g., his work about the Haitian Diaspora in NYC), I was ←27 | 28→not impressed by its ethnographic approach or the writings of such accounts, as I found them surprisingly dull and devoid of the powerful wit and sharpness of his more critical ethno-historical writings.

Sidney Mintz’s remarkable work about sugar, plantation slavery and power (1986) as a global staple beyond the Caribbean, helped me recognize the necessity of an ethno-historical analysis to understand the “ethnographic present” of Caribbean diasporas in the United States. Mintz shows as a good teacher, rather than directly theorized; he sprinkled his analysis with tiny ethnographic gems from his fieldwork in the Caribbean. The work of Mintz has become central to my food research but also in my teaching of food and Caribbean related courses. In particular, I appreciate his analysis of plantation slavery through food production, as it foregrounds the implications of the centrality of time, labor and geopolitics for theorizing negotiations of power under the new Capitalist mode of production (which had its first experiments precisely in the Caribbean). His beautiful chapter “Tasting food, tasting freedom” (1996), moved me deeply, and it became a watershed to clarify my desire for a critical food studies approach, and for the kinds of methodological contributions that I wanted to make to this field. Rarely do we get to cry reading academic writings … I cried reading this chapter, stopping and re-reading, as if to make sure I was not hallucinating … someone had already saved me so much work by analyzing the tremendous significance of food globally and in Caribbean histories and experiences, the emergence of a creative and new regional cuisine, and its connection to slaves and their descendants’ struggle for survival, freedom and dignity. Mintz gave me also so many clues through this work, to understand the continuing racialization of this food-memory-history in the Caribbean present, the struggles and hopes of Dominican migrant women in NYC, and why they cherished their hard-earned foods, and for understanding even my own family food practices … what a gift!

I encountered Critical Ethnography late in my training. It was, in fact, through the publications and contributions of education and rhetoric scholars that I was first exposed to this version of ethnographic fieldwork (see Anderson 1989, Foley 2002). In 2006, the anthropologist Soyini Madison’s Critical Ethnography and Performance book was first published. By then, I have been gathering trends and fragments of a critical toolkit to guide me in the kind of engaged feminist and post-colonial work that I wanted to produce. My early bricolage of many disparate strands was promising, yet unwieldy. Finding that there was already a community of scholars, with new approaches to ethnography and to other qualitative methodologies, who also addressed many of my theoretical concerns, was a gift. This discovery helped me to focus my contributions on refining my interdisciplinary approaches, cooking up into that mixture the visual methodologies from my ←28 | 29→previous training, as well as mapping methods, relevant to develop critical food research (which lead me eventually to develop foodmaps method). It was from this experience that I began channeling those insights into my teaching practice, choosing an auto-ethnographic project-based and place-based approach. Initially, when exposed to classical ethnographic works in my graduate courses, in spite of appreciating their contributions, I mostly learned from them what I did not want to do and how I would not want to write about my research findings. These older ethnographic styles made me doubt if anthropology was for me, and if I wished to use a tool soiled with such colonial prejudices. Fortunately, I found other interdisciplinary works, which taught me to question the potential and limitations of ethnography as a methodology, and clarified how I could develop a form of engaged scholarship committed to ethical fieldwork and critical cultural analysis, and this eventually had an effect on my choosing a teaching style that foregrounds commitment to civil rights, respect for differences, and struggles for social justice locally and globally.

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