Project Solidarity

with Dr. Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz

The Mobilities and Methods Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) is pleased to share this interview with Dr. Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Loyola University in Chicago about her current research project with deportees’ rights organizations in Mexico City.

The following conversation explores of (im)mobility, ethnographic methods / methodologies, politics of research, and productive challenges of anthropological fieldwork.

Josephine Chaet (JC): Dr. Gomberg-Muñoz, thank you very much for taking the time to discuss your ethnographic work, including your current project focused on deportees’ rights organizations in Mexico City, in relation to complex questions of movement. We are so grateful that you are one of the first people that we are able to speak with in the context of the new Mobilities and Methods Lab at [the University of Illinois at Chicago]. To start off, could you speak a bit about the project thatyou are working on at the moment and how that project was conceived, especially in relation to your earlier work?

Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz (RG-M): I am not sure if you are familiar with the second project that I worked on, but it was about mixed-status families who were undertaking immigration processing in an attempt to adjust the status of the undocumented family member. For that project, I spent five years talking to people who had been undergoing these really painful experiences of family separation and uncertainty and indefinite liminality, in which they did not know whether their family would ever be allowed to be together. And it was just really painful, and I thought that I wanted my next research project to be a bit more affirming. I had been interested for a long time in working in emigrant communities in Mexico, they are often called pura mujer communities, basically it means ‘women only’, that have experienced the out-migration of large numbers of men, and then, in the absence of working-age men, women, in particular, as well as seniors in the community and, to a lesser extent, younger people, are tasked with managing the day-to-day life of the community. I thought that would be an interesting project to undertake and that, maybe, it would be empowering in a way that [my] second project had not been.

That turned out to be a little bit romanticized but, in any case, I met with some colleagues of mine, including a colleague from ITESO, which is the Jesuit University of Guadalajara, Mexico, in November of 2016. We were going to talk about what research with women’s groups and pura mujer communities in Mexico could look like, but we had scheduled a meeting for maybe two days after the election. And when we met, we just sat in my office, stunned, thinking about what Trump’s election might mean for the people we work with and the communities we are also a part of meaningfully. And my colleague from Guadalajara said, “you know, what we really need is help on deportation”, and my colleague and I were like, “okay, well, I guess that is what we are going to do then”. That summer, the summer of 2017, I went to Jalisco, which is where the city of Guadalajara is, and in coordination with my colleague from ITESO and several of her colleagues, I went with two of mystudents and then a group of social work students to a town called Zapotlanejo, Jalisco, and we spent the summer interviewing recent deportees and community organizers who work with deportees and their family members in Mexico. Based on that experience, the students and I put together a packet of ‘know-your-rights’ materials, specifically for people who are Mexicannationals who fear deportation or have a pending deportation case, that included some preparations that those people could makebefore they left the United States and which might help them transition to a life in Mexico. There are all kinds of bureaucratic regulations in Mexico and a lot of those bureaucratic requirements are satisfied only by paperwork generated in the United States; the more paperwork someone can get together before they leave the United States, then, the easier it is to apply forservices and resources in Mexico. That was the idea behind the ‘know-your-rights’ package, and we included a bunch of information about Mexican agencies that provide services to people who are deported, including some programs in Mexico that are specifically ear-marked for returning migrants, like small business loans, but that have various requirements to qualify. Partof the reason that we included that information was because our community partners in Mexico were saying that people needed to know how to demand these resources [when they arrived], and to exercise their rights as Mexican citizens and not justdisappear into the woodwork. So, we came back to the United States, we put together these materials, and we started disseminating them among our contacts, but when we did that, a community organizer on the South Side [of Chicago] reachedout to me to say that the agencies we included in the ‘know-your-rights’ materials are, in reality, virtually impossible for people to access.

This actually brings up some interesting methodological questions, because here I am, trying to take a bite out of this totally overwhelming project, in a geographical and cultural context that is not my native context, and of course the first that I do is massively mess up. I mean, not massively, but we were disseminating information that was, in some ways, just wrong, or, nottechnically wrong, but just not very helpful. So, I did what any ethnographer would do: I asked this other community organizer in Chicago if he could connect me with organizers in Mexico and he connected me with his sister in Mexico City.

In the fall of 2017 I met with his sister, and she introduced me to other community organizers in Mexico City, many of whom are deportees from the United States who have been organizing in Mexico City to help recent deportees do a host of things, everything from finding a place to sleep the first night that they arrive to long-term planning for family reunification and economic stability, and everything in between, such as public policy campaigns to pressure the Mexican government to provide services that are ear-marked for deportees. We decided, together, that we were going to do something. After I returned to Chicago and reached out to other community organizers, both in Chicago and Mexico City, we put together a proposal for a multi- sited, multi-methods project to understand not only immediate challenges facing deportees but also the ways in whichpoliticization of deportees is shaped by these twin experiences of having been undocumented in the United States and being alienated in the country of citizenship [following deportation]. On the most community-engaged tier, we are doing semi-structured interviews with deportees, and that work is really being carried out by my research partners in Mexico, these community organizers, many of whom, again, have themselves been deported and who are now seeking to assist recent deportees and help them rebuild their lives. That work is focused on two principal questions: one, what mechanisms of policing exist in the United States that are leading to deportation now, and, two, what resources do people need when they are in Mexico. The first question about policing in the United States is really about the deportation efforts here; we know that people are being deported from so-called sanctuary cities like Chicago, and so-called sanctuary counties like Cook, and so-called sanctuary states like Illinois, but how is that happening? What exactly are the mechanisms through which undocumented immigrants are being identified, arrested, detained, and deported today? That information is helpful to anti-deportation organizers who work on public policy campaigns to strengthen sanctuary policies, for example. Then the second question, about what deportees need, is also a policy question, what resources are lacking and what can the Mexican government do to help address that lack of services and resources?

I mean, the paperwork, the bureaucratic red tape, that people encounter when they arrive in Mexico is absolutely overwhelming, you need to have a proof of address for everything but people do not necessarily have that information when they arrive in Mexico after being gone for ten or twenty or thirty years, they do not necessarily have other family that can take them in, they do not have a voter identification card or a valid driver’s license. How would they have any of that? The Mexicangovernment has instituted so much bureaucratic red tape that it is incredibly difficult for people to access those kinds of statedocuments.

JC: We read Becoming Legal: Immigration Law and Mixed-status Families (2016) when I was a teaching assistant forAnthropology 101: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology in the spring of 2018, and this question of paperwork and of bureaucracy that you are speaking of here seems to dovetail with a lot of stories that were included in that book, by expanding the idea that it is on both sides [of the United States – Mexico border] that people encounter these bureaucratically incomprehensible systems.

RG-M: Exactly, and so what this project has found is that, unfortunately, that kind of bureaucratic nightmare impacts people after their deportation as well, in the countries of their citizenship. It is not just about being undocumented, it is also Mexicancitizens in Mexico who are being given the run around.

JC: Yes and, from an analytic standpoint, those questions of tracing paperwork and how that works with questions of politics and state surveillance is really compelling, and, methodologically, those strategies are rather innovative and can potentially illuminate a lot about the materiality of individual lives in very innovative ways.

RG-M:  It is really interesting and important, but we do not know a lot about this. There are a  lot of newer books about deportation that paint this really horrific picture of what life is like for deportees but that is where they end, with the notion that it really sucks. Where I think this project builds on these studies is that it shows why it sucks so bad, that there are all of these structural contexts around deportation in Mexico, just like there are in the United States, that really impact the ability to rebuildproductive lives. And the Mexican state is an actor in that, it is not just the United States, it is also about Mexico. It is not just about the United States implementing punitive policies but the fact that Mexico does that too, and people have to grapple with that in the nations of their citizenship. So, I think that, analytically, the stuff about paperwork is interesting but, also, I think thatquestions about citizenship are really interesting because we tend to think of citizenship as the solution. What people really needis citizenship. I tried to make this point in Becoming Legal as well, but when you dig down into the heart of citizenship, what you find is that citizenship does not necessarily mean a whole lot. I mean, ask Black Lives Matter protestors what theircitizenship is doing to protect them against police brutality and violence. People arrive in their countries of citizenship and they find that they are ignored by their state, that their needs are not addressed, that they are being treated with this kind of bureaucratic dehumanization in Mexico, too. I really think that we need to hold the Mexican state accountable for that, because otherwise it is all just one-sided, it is all about the United States. But it is not.

JC: It seems that what you are saying here very clearly connects back to the two research questions guide this project and, specifically, the implicit idea that they both start at a very grounded level of community activism but then scale up to have real policy implications, which I appreciate because that has not, perhaps, been the expectation of research.

RG-M: Right, I mean, actually I think that it is unconscionable to do this kind of work, with people who are having these kinds of experiences, and not address their real, material needs.

JC: Exactly. Related to the ways in which you approach your work, I wonder if you might speak a bit about how the multi-sited work that you are engaged in now informs your methods or the methodological framework in which you are working? That is,how do the research questions that you are asking drive or inform the methods that you employ in your work?

RG-M: That is a really good question, it is a really complicated question. I mentioned that my research partners in Mexico, the community organizers, are interviewing recent deportees, but the other component [of this project] is that I am interviewing [the organizers]. I have not really done it yet, because I do not even feel like I know enough to ask good questions. Even though this is the third year of the project. [laughs] Because the question that I am interested in, as a politicized anthropologist, isactually more about organizing, and this is part of a larger conversation, but I feel as though we have a political responsibility to not just end things as if there is no way forward, but, rather, to understand what people are doing so that we might support thoseefforts. That is my piece of the puzzle: [to understand] what the organizers are doing, how they are organizing, [and] howorganizing has changed their political dispositions in relation to the state. Those are the anthropological questions that drive my piece of the research puzzle.

To return to the question about how all of this, the multi-sited, multi-methods design of the project, has shaped the methods. This is the third year [of the project], and in 2018 I spent the summer in Mexico, 2019 I spent the summer in Mexico and havebeen going back and forth, and it is just not adequate. At all. I am still so out of my element when I am there, and the organizersare so busy doing important things that I feel very wary of asking too much of them or asking them to spend time with me or to even let me hang around. This is real stuff; these people are really suffering and then there I am. It is very awkward. So, I have not been doing a lot of that and I realized last year that that is actually okay. I am not the expert on what is happening in Mexico and I never will be. That is why I have to rely on my community partners in Mexico to be those experts and to understand that that is their role, that is not my role. That was really hard for me, to let go of the idea that I was going to be the expert on what was happening. But it is just not going to happen unless I move to Mexico and do this work full-time.

JC: For me, this is such an important concept in the context of research that relies on fieldwork, particularly because it is one that is often overlooked. It is especially nice to hear that, as someone working on their ‘third project’, you are still in the processof contending with these questions because, for young scholars going into the field for the first time, such questions are, often, not openly discussed. The feeling of ‘awkwardness’ that you mentioned especially resonates with my own research experiences,having just returned from the field in December [2019]. To confront these uncertainties in more engaged ways seems obvious but, as I said before, that does not always seem to be the standard in research.

RG-M: No, it is not, because we are trained [as anthropologists] to believe that we are the experts, that we are going to study something and really understand it. I just want to address this thing about me being an expert, I just think that it is important to acknowledge that I have been muddling my way through this. Having three projects under my belt does not mean that I have the answers, which is fascinating. I just keep messing up and readjusting, and I feel as though that is an ongoing part of what it means to be an anthropologist that we do not necessarily talk about enough, especially among students. Ethnography just seems like magic, as though you just go and do [research]. Part of doing it is making mistakes and then part of making mistakes is getting comfortable with that. For me, getting comfortable, it took me a really long time to understand what was really happening, why I felt so distant from this project, why I felt so frustrated with my own lack of knowledge, and then coming tounderstand that I just cannot be there and, actually, that that is okay and that is what it means to work as part of a team. Really rethinking my role and what I am contributing. So, if I am not the expert, what is the point of me in this project? I want to be theexpert, I want to be the person who is pushing forward policy documents, I want to be the person who is out on the street in aprotest, but, actually, that is not the best role for me now. I have had to get comfortable doing other things that are so much lessexciting.

JC: Can I ask, then, what is you find yourself doing now or how you have come to see your role in this current research project?

RG-M: My role, my first, and what I think of as my most important, role, is to figure out how to use my skills and resources to support the organizing work, because that is really the important work. I have been having this ongoing conversation with mycommunity partners where I am asking them what I can do for them, which is sort of a weird thing for all of us, because I think they are used to having things asked of them rather than things asked for them.

JC: In thinking of this more engaged research, I wonder if you could briefly speak about how, over the course of your time in academia, you have incorporated questions of mobility and the complex methods related to that work into both your writing andyour teaching?

RG-M:  This might not be the right response, I may not be answering your question, but I will tell you what my thinking about that is: the people who I work with are immobilized, both the undocumented people on this side [of the United States – Mexico border] because they cannot travel and the people in Mexico who, also, cannot travel. Rather than thinking about mobility, I amthinking about immobilization and how the mobility that matters in this project is my own, because I am one of the few people that can move back and forth. One of the things that we have learned, or that I have learned, since the start of the project, is thatthat immobility, that immobilization, really hinders organizing efforts, and this is why: communities of undocumented people here and of deportees there are, almost by definition, bi-national; the families are split, the communities are split. Almostliterally, it is the same family, the same community, but on either side of the border, and neither side can move. What that means, then, is that when people are deported, they have needs in the United States. Let us say someone is trying to get custody of their child; well, they have to file a petition in the county in which the child resides in the United States. So, they may be in Mexico City or in Guadalajara, but they need to find a pro-bono family law attorney in DuPage County. And vice-versa. In response, one of the things that we are working on for this project is a map, we call it a ‘solidarity map’, but it is an asset map locatingresources on both sides of the border; it is an electronic map so that, instead of relying only on Twitter or Facebook, people can look up on the map resources in different places.

When I am thinking of mobility, then, I am thinking about ways to help immobilized people access and expand flows of information and resources and services on either side of the border, so that is the way in which I am thinking analytically and methodologically about ‘movement’. the mapping project is one way in which my methods have really changed in order to try and address immobilization.

JC: This is especially interesting because ethnographic work is often presented in terms of migration and movement, but hearing you reframe this work to say that you are thinking about the mobility of resources, which are materialized in something like paperwork, and how that relates to immobile communities is a fascinating way to think about you might theorize broaderideas of mobility. I also wonder about how you bring these emerging ideas to your teaching in the classroom, if at all.

RG-M: I teach ethnographic methods, but I encourage my students to develop their own  projects, so, the analytical chunk of their projects, then, varies a lot. But, I do use the classroom as a space to talk about a lot of these issues that we have talked abouttoday, in terms of the desire to know everything, the need to really take seriously the expertise of the people who you are working with, taking seriously their goals, thinking about who we are working and why, why those people, making sure that we are not just chasing vulnerability and creating suffering porn, but that we are trying to use our training in a socially responsible way thatdoes not just benefit from our positions. So, all of those conversations about what is and is not working, how we might adapt, allof those conversations are a really important component of the course.

JC: Dr. Gomberg-Muñoz, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. The questions that you raise, about how to do mobile work with immobile communities, and how to analytically and methodologically approach that problematic, will certainly give the Mobilities and Methods Lab much to think about moving forward. Thank you again.

RG-M: Thank you.