Decolonizing Ethnography

In August 2011, Carolina 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. Based on this initial research they wrote the article “E-Terrify: Securitized Immigration and Biometric Surveillance in the Workplace,” published by Human Organization. 

Two years later, Lucia López Juárez and Mirian A. Mijangos García—two local immigrant workers from Latin America—joined Carolina and Daniel, and their ethnographic practice became 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 marginalized people to theorize their lives. Tacking between personal narratives, ethnographic field notes, an original bilingual play titled Undocumented/Unafraid, and examinations of anthropology as a discipline, the coauthors show how the participation of Mijangos García and López Juárez transformed the project's 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. You can listen to a 2019 interview about the book with Carolina for New Books Network and watch a lecture she created for the National Science Foundation Cultural Anthropology Methods Program in 2024.

Carolina recently submitted for review her article, “The ‘Magical’ Coalition: Immigrants’ Illegalization and Interethnic Solidarity in a New Jersey Town.” The essay—winner of the 2019 Andrés Torres Paper Series Award—explores the history of a coalition that emerged in the early 2000s between Black American and Latin American residents of pseudonymous Hometown, NJ, resulting in the creation of Casa Hometown, the immigrants’ rights center that served as the location for the research behind Decolonizing Ethnography.