Ana-Maurine Lara’s ethnography on queer, black, and indigenous life in the Dominican Republic was different from the ethnographies we’ve read before in that Lara writes in a more poetic and literary style. Her use of footnotes also differs from other ethnographies in that she uses them in more expansive ways beyond citing her sources. She uses them to provide context to the places and concepts she discusses and to also provide the original Spanish transcripts of her interviews.
Lara’s methods are innovative in that her ethnography almost plays a supporting role to the work of her forebearers such as Audre Lorde. She weaves in her ethnographic evidence amidst a framework of theoretical concepts such as the body-land, zambo consciousness, and decolonization.
Lara’s ethnography is also an ofrenda, or offering, to queer black life and decolonization. She relates Black decolonization and queer freedom as two necessities that must be accomplished in tandem with each other. Lara argues that Black decolonization and queer freedom parallel each other because decolonization resists the settler-colonial state and queerness resists heteronormativity. Lara uses an intersectional analysis to assert that queer, black, and indigenous life are related in that they resist systems of power. A quote that stuck out to me is: “The arrivant state is starving the community into submission” (Lara, 78). I noted this quote because it summarizes Lara’s argument throughout the chapters that queer, Black, and indigenous peoples must stand in solidarity with each other to resist this submission.