I am sitting on my porch, talking on the phone to Anahí.[1] It’s Saturday, a perfect fall afternoon in Southern California, with the warmth of the sun cutting through the chill in the air. Because my kids and husband are home, this is the place where I can speak to her with some privacy. I imagine Anahí in the house that she has recently purchased with her brother just twenty miles from here. Maybe she is also sitting outside. It’s been a while since I’ve seen her. I hadn’t connected with her as frequently after she graduated from UC Riverside, where I am a professor, and though we stay in touch through social media, the pandemic has created further distance.

At UCR, I knew Anahí well. She was part of PODER,[2] the campus undocumented student advocacy group, while I was doing fieldwork on undocumented activism. We were at the same group meetings; I saw her at political actions; I witnessed her delivering her testimonio in several different settings; I interviewed her for my research project. In other words, she participated in my research.

But we had other moments, too. At an undocumented student summit, she affixed a temporary tattoo of a monarch butterfly—a symbol that migration is natural—to the underside of my wrist; she came to my house with other students for a tamalada social; she met my husband and children; she celebrated my birthday with me on campus, and posted a video of us on her Snapchat. I was always a professor, and she was always a student; I don’t think that we ever lost sight of that, but we enjoyed each other’s company. We’re both extroverts with a similar sense of humor, and we are both Latinas with family roots in Mexico. On a sociopolitical level, we are also both pushing against laws and policies that hurt the undocumented migrant community in the U.S.

I reached out to her that afternoon to help me reconstruct the student protest of an undocumented student summit in Oakland in 2015. It was the end of Janet Napolitano’s second year as President of the University of California system, and her office was hosting a UC National Summit on Undocumented Students. Student anger and distrust had been brewing over the previous two years, ever since the UC Regents announced that they would be appointing Napolitano, former head of the Department of Homeland Security, as President of the ten-campus system. Though Napolitano had made financial commitments and gestures that indicated the support of undocumented students, they did not trust her.

I trusted the students. On the first morning of the summit, when I walked into the hotel ballroom, Napolitano was at a podium, her opening comments interrupted by students with their fists in the air and their backs toward her. A student from each campus read a portion from a statement chastising her. Napolitano’s office had invited high profile figures from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the National Council of La Raza to the event but had not made much of an effort to ask the students what they wanted out of the summit. Many did not even know how they had come to be chosen to attend. Ultimately, they felt as if she was using them as props for her political image. After the last student spoke, concluding their speech, they yelled “Undocumented!” to which the rest of the students responded, “Unafraid!” Then a hundred students —almost all who were invited to attend the summit— walked out of the room.

On my porch, I ask Anahí what she remembers about the protest that morning. After one year at UCR, she had already been very involved with PODER. While planning the protest, students had decided that one person from each campus would stand and read a part of the speech. Anahí initially wanted to be the student from UCR to speak, but she hesitated. She tells me, “I wasn’t totally undocumented and unafraid yet.” She emphasizes that they were protesting the president of the UC system. She was not sure that she would be able to deliver her portion of the speech without faltering. She might cry. And she didn’t want to take away from the action that she and her peers had planned.

As I scribble notes, Anahí reminds me that her dad had been deported.

“While Napolitano was the head of Homeland Security?”

She thinks about it. She was in junior high. It was 2009. Yes.

In a moment, we are no longer in Oakland.

Her parents had just come home from work when ICE agents showed up at the house that Anahí’s family shared with her aunt and uncle. Her aunt had been petitioning to fix her status, which entailed regular meetings in immigration court. After years of appointments with no action, her aunt had stopped going; this prompted the court to issue a warrant for her arrest.  Anahí’s parents had been selling tamales all day, and they had just returned to Anahí and her two younger brothers. With the warrant, ICE agents asserted their right to enter the house. They handcuffed Anahí’s aunt. Then they turned to Anahí’s father and asked him—and she remembers this phrasing—Are you an illegal? She recalls that one of the agents spoke Spanish. They were talking directly to her parents, and they understood.

Are you an illegal?

Her dad nodded, and they handcuffed him.

Then they asked her mom. Are you an illegal?

Her mother said yes.

Anahí remembers looking at her father, who was handcuffed, and he was looking at her.  Her younger brothers were clinging to her mother. Then something unexpected happened. The Spanish-speaking ICE agent asked Anahí’s mother, “Do you have any U.S.-born children?”

Yes, she told him, motioning to the son whose arms were encircling her body.

Is there anyone who can take care of them?

No, Anahí’s mother said. He’s little. There’s no one who can take care of him.

Ok, the agent told her. Because you have a U.S.-born son, we’re not going to take you.

Still stunned, Anahí watched the agents walk her father and her aunt outside, into a white van. Watched it drive away.

I had called Anahí for a different story, one that highlighted undocumented students as bold, critical activists who were standing up to the most powerful person in the UC system. Telling that protest story was important for me to show how students were leveraging their education to fight for migrant rights. But I was not ready to hear Anahí talk about the day her dad was deported. I knew that she had experienced trauma because of ICE, and I know that she is not alone in this kind of experience with deportation. But the way she pivoted in the conversation from the protest to that day when she was in junior high caught me off guard. She wasn’t emotional while she was telling the story. She was matter of fact. She spoke deliberately, sometimes pausing for emphasis. Even so, I felt that story in my gut.

I have studied deportation, seen statistics, and read personal accounts. But there is something entirely different about hearing someone that you know—someone that you care about—talk to you about one of the most painful days in their life. Even though it is within a research context. Especially when it is within a research context.

Vulnerable Anthropological Relationships

At the beginning of The Vulnerable Observer, Ruth Behar ponders a question that a family member poses to her: “What is anthropology?” Beyond its simplest definition, the study of people and their customs, Behar presents us with another way of thinking about anthropology. Anthropology is a “fascinating, bizarre, disturbing, and necessary form of witnessing” (1996, 5). Witnessing aligns well with the idea that, as anthropologists, we engage in participant observation. However, Behar quickly complicates the idea of witnessing by focusing on the relationships between the anthropologist and members of the community where they study. She writes that anthropology is a “mode of knowing that depends on the particular relationship formed by a particular anthropologist with a particular set of people in a particular time and place,” and because of this, the discipline “has always been vexed about the question of vulnerability” (5). As someone who is situated at the intersection of anthropology and Ethnic Studies, I want to build on Behar’s argument by asserting that vulnerability also holds the possibility of destabilizing the power relationships between researchers and their interlocutors.

I came of age in an anthropology that was marked by the reflexive turn, with books like Writing Culture, edited by James Clifford and George Marcus, and Women Writing Culture, edited by Behar and Deborah Gordon. After a long history of anthropology being used to make colonial projects possible and/or justifiable, these scholars were asking critical questions about how they might decolonize the very discipline of their training. As a young anthropologist, I took my cues from the texts above as well as feminist and Chicano/a anthropologists like Pat Zavella, Renato Rosaldo, Carlos Velez Ibanez, and Leo Chavez. All of these scholars were using the tools of anthropology to examine not only cultural practices, but also the power dynamics—structural and individual—that shaped people’s lived experiences of culture.

Fundamental to understanding power dynamics was examining the power/privilege of the anthropologist herself. This generation of anthropologists also began to ask difficult questions about positionality. Pat Zavella’s critical article “Feminist Insider Dilemmas” (1993) and Ruth Behar’s pathbreaking book Translated Woman (1993) were key texts for me, demonstrating the connections and tensions between anthropologists and their interlocutors. This scholarship illustrated how the subjectivity of an anthropologist could shape cultural representation; they also showed how the subjects of ethnographic study could shape anthropologists themselves. This, of course, could only happen if they (the anthropologists) would allow themselves to be vulnerable.  While there is discomfort in vulnerability, it was important for anthropologists to understand that there is also discomfort in “being studied.” Leveling the emotional playing field through such vulnerability was one way for anthropologists to destabilize power in their research relationships. This can only happen when anthropologists forge connections with people in the field that extend beyond the borders of researcher/research subject.

Because I have a relationship with Anahí that is bigger than a research relationship, she entrusted to me the story of the day her father was deported. I know that she would not have told that story to just any researcher. She recounted it to her professor, her mentor, and her friend. The question that I continue to grapple with is: how do I receive her story? As a friend/mentor?  Or as a researcher? And do I reveal what Anahí’s story makes me feel?

Undocumented Emotion

Sitting on my porch that bright Saturday afternoon, listening to Anahí recount the details of her dad’s deportation, I felt like I might cry. I was taking notes but could feel my hand moving more slowly. My gaze settled on the enormous pecan tree across the street, noticed how its leaves were turning from bright green to yellow. My heart ached for the young teenage Anahí that faced the possibility of losing both her father and mother in that moment. That she had to watch her father handcuffed and taken away. It ached to know that she felt his absence for the days, weeks, and months afterward, and for the anxiety she had to live with, that ICE might come back for her mother.

I felt angry that ICE agents could walk into a home and tear a family apart in a matter of minutes. I wondered if the ICE agent who spared Anahí’s mother from deportation felt that he had been humane, leaving her to care for her U.S.-born children. I felt angry that the agent deemed citizen children to be more deserving of a parent in a home than migrant children.

And I felt guilt. I have a migrant family history. My maternal grandparents and eldest aunts arrived in the United States without papers in the 1940s. The farmer they worked for in South Texas eventually sponsored them for citizenship, but my grandmother remained undocumented because of a tuberculosis diagnosis. My mother told me stories about the fear she felt that “la migra” would come for her mother. Though my migrant family history makes me empathetic and affects my positionality as a researcher, I did not live that history. I do not have to live with the specter of deportation the way that Anahí does^⁠. As Anahí recounted the story about losing her father, I was very aware of my husband sitting on the couch in our living room, just a wall dividing us. My young daughters in their room, playing on their iPads, all of them waiting for me to finish my call so that we could go to the library that afternoon. My girls have their father, and they have their family intact. I felt that acutely on the porch that afternoon.

I continued to feel it after Anahí finished telling me what she remembered of the protest, and after we made plans to meet for dinner the next month. I felt it still when I came back inside the house, sat down next to my husband, leaned into the warmth of his body, and let myself cry.

Documenting Emotion in Ethnography

If this is the gift and price of being a vulnerable observer, what are the obligations in terms of representation? Immediately after my conversation with Anahí, I thought, I can’t tell the story of her dad’s deportation. It’s too painful and too intimate. Little by little, however, I began to understand why she told me the story. She was trying to explain to me why she did not volunteer to speak at the Oakland protest. She was not yet undocumented and unafraid. She might never be. Anahí wanted me to understand the fear. It follows that I would also feel a range of emotions in response to her teaching me about the affective toll of being undocumented. This is anthropology that might very well, as Behar writes, “break your heart.”

As a citizen and a professor researching in an undocumented community, there is no way to eliminate the structural privilege that I have. Given that fact, I look to the methodologies and theories of decolonial, feminist, and Latinx anthropologists to orient me toward an ethical position of research. These strands of anthropology can guide us toward ethnographic representations that are more ethical and accountable to the communities where we study. In the case of my work with undocumented students, I want my ethnographic writing to help people understand the very human impacts of draconian immigration policies and practices. I also hope that my ethnography—with its foundation of researcher vulnerability—underscores the humanity of the undocumented young people who fight for migrant rights, as well as my own.

Works Consulted and Cited

Behar, Ruth. The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.

Behar, Ruth. Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza’s Story. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.

Behar, Ruth and Deborah Gordon. Women Writing Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996.

Chavez, Leo Ralph. Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1992.

Clifford, James and George Marcus. Writing Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986.

Rosaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. New York: Routledge Press, 1993.

Velez-Ibáñez, Carlos. Border Visions: Mexican Cultures of the Southwest United States. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1996.

Zavella, Patricia. “Feminist Insider Dilemmas: Constructing Ethnic Identity with ‘Chicana’ Informants.” Frontiers  no. 3 13 (1993): 53–76.