Disquieting Complicities

In seeking to balance the demands of social science research with complex ethical and political commitments, ethnographers often find themselves caught in a series of double binds. This is particularly true when we are asked to testify in court on behalf of subjects criminalized by the state. I explore how these tensions play out in settings where right and wrong cannot be clearly distinguished in anthropological terms but are demanded in legal or political terms. I consider the narrative strategies that anthropologists employ in an effort to produce social-legal knowledge from our ethnographic research that would satisfy the demands of the court, while simultaneously deploying analytical strategies that can account for multiple realities and conflicting truths. I consider my own participation in these overlapping and often incommensurate projects through a particular ethnographic and legal case in which I was implicated as researcher and as a witness for the defense

From riots to rampart : a spatial cultural politics of Salvadoran migration to and from Los Angeles

textThis study of Salvadoran transnational migration is a multi-sited interAmerican ethnography. I explore the contentious spatial cultural politics surrounding the Latinization of Los Angeles and the Americanization of El Salvador attached to the global cultural flows of people, money, commodities and ideas between California and Central America. The study began and ended in Los Angeles. In between I traveled to and lived in El Salvador. Each chapter threads together multiple sites and connections between Los Angeles and El Salvador around the practices of representation, consumption, redevelopment, policing, and forced repatriation (deportation). I argue that more than just the literal movement of people back and forth. connections between El Salvador and Los Angeles are also material and discursive, imaginary and spatial, affective and mimetic. The ethnography spans these events in Los Angeles between 1992 and 2000: The Los Angeles (Rodney King) Riot and the most recent disruption in the Los Angeles Police Department—corruption charges against its Rampart (PicoUnion) division. While steeped in this political history, space—the production, representation, use of and arguments over—serves as the primary interpretive thread throughout the study. Most concretely speaking then, this dissertation is about Salvadoran migration to and from Los Angeles. Most abstractly speaking, it is about the social production of space and the spatialization of culture in late capitalism. The dissertation focuses on the globalization between the Americas as a process fraught with what I term a dialectic of mobility and immobility. As sucyh, it examines the tensions between global flows and the way those cultural movements are arrested and immobilized, and how transnational formations can be and are produced by nationalism (US and Salvadoran).Anthropolog

Gangster in guerilla face

Doble cara (double/two-faced) is a key trope in Salvadoran political folklore. It is a folk theory of mimesis, which attempts to 'master the absent presence of the other' through a discourse of conspiracy. The term has a history in the US-funded Salvadoran civil war. In this article, I consider how doble cara has come to be deployed around a new and pivotal social subject - Salvadoran immigrant gang youth deported from the USA - and how these deported youth emerge as a packed and displaced sign for the trauma of post-civil war violence, the failed promise of peace, and ongoing entanglements between the USA and El Salvador. The article is written in conversation with Begoña Aretxaga, who inspired many of the questions explored here. Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications