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  • Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science by Carolina Alonso Bejarano et al.
  • Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz
Carolina Alonso Bejarano, Lucía López Juárez, Mirian A. Mijangos García, and Daniel M. Goldstein, Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 208 pp.

Decolonizing Ethnography is both an experiment and an invitation. It is an experiment in ethnographic research design, implementation, and writing that seeks to address and subvert long-standing power inequities in anthropological research relationships. It is also an invitation for readers to think with and critique the authors' "decolonizing" project, which is not presented as a balm for wider inequalities but points toward possibilities for more reciprocal research relationships and the rich understandings such relationships can yield. To carry out these tasks, the book merges decolonial feminist theory and activist anthropological approaches to explore and engage the work lives of undocumented people in New Jersey.

Decolonizing Ethnography could stand on its own as a contribution to the growing scholarship on undocumented labor and worker activism. Throughout the book, the authors' ethnographic research illustrates how undocumented workers in pseudonymous Hometown, New Jersey find empowerment in community organizing to respond to a host of gendered vulnerabilities and experiences of violence. In particular, workers featured in the text, including two of the book's co-authors, recount experiences of workplace injury, labor rights violations, partner violence, and prolonged family separation, all of which take place in a broader context of US immigration politics that render undocumented workers especially vulnerable to abuse. Yet the text's focus on worker activism pushes beyondy [End Page 1613] narratives of vulnerability to show how undocumented workers access and disseminate information, build social capital, and develop self-empowerment through community organizing.

As outlined in the book's Introduction, another purpose of Decolonizing Ethnography is to depart from the mainstream ethnographic canon and critique not only abusive and exploitative practices of employers and state agents but also the exploitative practices that lie at the heart of anthropological research itself. The first chapter presents an extended review of critical scholarship on academic coloniality and "decolonization." The authors effectively contrast the principles that have guided mainstream or "dominant" anthropology, such as valorization of research with marginalized "others," research for intellectual rather than social goals, and publishing in academic venues, with the principles that have guided activist, engaged, and applied approaches, such as research in service to community-determined goals, more democratized and collaborative research designs, and work that prioritizes social change in addition to, or in lieu of, theory building.

Decolonizing Ethnography does not just critique colonialist academic practices, it seeks to do something different. The second chapter describes the trajectories of the book's authors: an unlikely quartet comprising a junior scholar from an elite Colombian family, an undocumented woman worker/activist from Guatemala, an undocumented woman worker/activist from Mexico, and a senior white male US anthropologist. As their paths converged around a shared concern with understanding and addressing challenges facing undocumented workers in New Jersey, the four designed a project that centers the contributions of non-academics in both method and theory.

The project's methodology, the subject of Chapter 3, draws on applied and activist anthropological approaches that prioritize the objectives and contributions of community partners. The research, then, incorporated community members as producers of research and was designed to advance their goals. It did not start out this way. Originally conceived by Alonso Bejarano and Goldstein as a study of undocumented laborers, the project initially brought two undocumented women workers on board as research assistants. As the relationship among the four deepened, the non-academics became both producers of theory and co-authors of texts in their own right, not in service to academia per se but to advance the immigrant rights movement in their community. In particular, ethnographic [End Page 1614] methods helped them to identify myriad community concerns among undocumented workers in Hometown and also helped them forge relationships with workers and expand workers' rights education.

Chapter 4 describes how insights gained from their field experiences informed the book's analytical crux, which foregrounds the theoretical argument...

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