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 pseudonymous Hometown, 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’s more recent scholarship continues the project started with Decolonizing Ethnography by elucidating the relations between immigrants’ rights organizing and the production of immigrant “illegality” in the US within the larger context of the histories of state violence against African Americans and Native Americans. Traditional discourse on immigrants’ rights asks: “Which rights should immigrants have as non-citizens?” Conversely, her work explores how different colonial systems of dehumanization legitimize themselves through racialized and gendered distinctions between “citizens” and “non-citizens,” which are concomitantly mapped onto social space and sedimented through time. Carolina is currently working on two interrelated manuscripts addressing this exploration: “Native” Roots, Colonial Routes: Freehold Tenure and Anti-Immigration Ordinances in New Jersey, and “The Magical Coalition: Illegalization and Solidarity in a New Jersey Town,” winner of the Andrés Torres Paper Series Award. 

“The ‘Magical’ Coalition” maps the investigation into the colonial legacies of contemporary immigration policies explored in “Native” Roots, Colonial Routes onto twenty-first-century immigrants’ rights activism. It draws upon news articles, town hall records and interviews with town residents to discuss immigrant “illegality” and document the intersectional nature of the activism of African Americans in Hometown, NJ in the early 2000s. The article describes the creation of an interethnic alliance of Black and Latinx Hometown residents to legally protect day laborers’ rights to congregate in public spaces and to live without police harassment, which resulted in the creation of Casa Hometown, an center for Latin American immigrants and the field site of Decolonizing Ethnography. The essay reconsiders the discursive and material production of the illegalized immigrant in the US by narrating the efforts of the Hometown municipal government to stop immigration from Latin America through the enforcement of anti-loitering ordinances targeted at day laborers—a strategy that had already been mobilized during the Great Migration to criminalize Black Americans waiting for work on the streets of Hometown. In relaying the story of a campaign that brought together racialized US citizens and undocumented Latinx residents to fight against discriminatory local legislation, the article demonstrates the potential for a coalitional politics that can arise from and against the creation of the illegalized un-citizen in the United States.