I enjoyed this week’s reading by Jason de Leon particularly because of his multi-disciplinary approach to the study of migrant experiences. By visually enhancing his storytelling through imagery, photos, and artifacts, he does a very good job of anchoring his arguments in the migrant experience. The first image that comes to mind as I write this is the photo of the tennis shoes reinforced by bra straps. To consider these artifacts as “trash,” Leon explains, would be to diminish their value as representations of the resilience of migrants and their resistance against structural violence. The use of poignant imagery such as this one shows that visual representation can be a powerful tool of evocative storytelling and is something that I can readily utilize for my own projects when appropriate.
On the analytical side of things, I found it challenging to establish a firm stance on Leon’s justification for a few of his research methods. Although it was refreshing to have such a detailed description of his reasoning for determining his level of involvement and support of migrants, I realized that his research (just like anyone else’s) is solely predicated upon his own moral judgments which at times seemed conflicting. I did not see anything necessarily wrong with his approaches and certainly understand his refusal to participate in “entry without inspection,” however, when putting myself in his shoes, I felt thoroughly conflicted. He explains that his positionality and privilege complicate the act of participant observation since his subject matter includes phenomena that would be illegal for others but (potentially) not as detrimental for him, but it seems that this disconnect cannot be readily reconciled. His privilege exists regardless of his attempts to lessen its effects which for me would make this research a bit uncomfortable. This feeling, to me, is exacerbated by the fact that he will also profit in many ways from sharing the perilous stories of these migrants. That is not to say that he did anything wrong but just that the awareness of your positionality can offer some conceptual dilemmas. Scheper-Hughes wrote about the need for an anthropology rooted in activism as opposed to simply observation since even when the researcher leaves their field site, the violence, in this case, continues.