Decolonizing Ethnography

<div>In August 2011 ethnographers Carolina Alonso Bejarano and Daniel M. Goldstein began a research project on undocumented immigration in the United States by volunteering at a center for migrant workers in New Jersey. Two years later Lucia López Juárez and Mirian A. Mijangos García-two local immigrant workers from Latin America-joined Alonso Bejarano and Goldstein as research assistants and quickly became equal partners for whom ethnographic practice was inseparable from activism. In <i>Decolonizing Ethnography</i> the four coauthors offer a methodological and theoretical reassessment of social science research showing how it can function as a vehicle for activism and as a tool for marginalized people to theorize their lives. Tacking between personal narratives ethnographic field notes an original bilingual play about workers' rights and examinations of anthropology as a discipline the coauthors show how the participation of Mijangos García and López Juárez transformed the project's activist and academic dimensions. In so doing they offer a guide for those wishing to expand the potential of ethnography to serve as a means for social transformation and decolonization.</div>