Cimarrón Pedagogies. Lidia Marte
and 2004), by taking a course in the geography department (where she was an instructor). Christie’s work echoes the ‘sensual ethnography’ first proposed by Stoller (1989).
As I continued expanding my searches, to best design my ethnographic projects, I found many other authors, unsuspected mentors, who helped me gather and develop my own toolkits and approaches to fieldwork. The food research of anthropologist Carole Counihan taught me how to foreground gendered labor with the richness of her ethnographic accounts, and her scholarly contributions have become for me a “founding mother” legacy that I teach students through my food courses. Her humbleness and accessibility in mentorship of new food scholars is also legendary; I have seen many young faces illuminated with gratitude at the sole mention of her name. Without Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (1997) pioneering work on food, body and gender many of us would have had to re-invent the wheel. The book Tangled Routes by Deborah Barndt (2002), about the tomato trail (from production to consumption) and the Mexican women workers lives ←26 | 27→invested in that chain), came late into my life, as a gift of my mentor Polly Strong upon passing my dissertation defense. This book has become very influential for refining my food mapping method and one chapter Whose Choice? has become a “staple reading” that I assign regularly in my food courses (according to their testimony, my students benefit greatly from her style of analysis).
Through the Center for African & African-American Studies, I found how crucial African Diaspora paradigms were for understanding the Caribbean and its diasporas in the US (I discuss this further in Chapter Four). The work of Kevin Yelvington is crucial to understand the global social formations and racialization from and of the Caribbean, yet it was one article in particular “The anthropology of Afro-Latin America and the Caribbean: diasporic dimensions” (2001), that helped me to understand intersections of race, gender, class and national formations in the region. Although a long and rich work to digest (and difficult essay for undergraduate students to decipher, as I have found out), it works well as a literature review about African diasporas in the Americas, an argument for the significance of the Caribbean for anthropology and a discussion about the wider US debates on Blackness. Mintz and Price’s The birth of African-American culture: An anthropological perspective (1976), helped me understand the multi-dimensional complexities of Caribbean cultural formations beyond a simplistic creolization or African survival debate, showing that the Caribbean was “… a unique region where people under the stress of slavery had to improvise, invent and literally create [new] forms of human [socio-cultural organization]…” (1976: 84).
The work of Aisha Khan was a breath of fresh air, her understanding of the significance of the Caribbean for anthropological studies and for understanding a globalized planet, is best expressed through her own words, “the world is catching up to the Caribbean” (2001: 1) and for her attention to food in the Caribbean (see 1994). The works of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Kevin Yelvington and Sidney Mintz became pieces of a puzzle that I needed to make sense of, to produce the kind of research I wanted to develop around food, place-memory and Dominican migration to New York City. These works influenced my research and my teaching ever since, as they helped me clarified my focus on the Caribbean, its significance to understand processes of globalization and the contribution of the region to an anthropology of the African Diaspora in the Americas. Trouillot’s book Silencing the Past (1995), specifically his theorizations of power and the “silences” of archives, gave me the first clues to historical imagination in the Caribbean and to ethno-history as sources I needed for my work (together with his writings on anthropology and the “savage slot” already discussed). These works have become regular staples also in my teaching, as I assign them at the least provocation. Even though I read other works of Trouillot (e.g., his work about the Haitian Diaspora in NYC), I was ←27 | 28→not impressed by its ethnographic approach or the writings of such accounts, as I found them surprisingly dull and devoid of the powerful wit and sharpness of his more critical ethno-historical writings.
Sidney Mintz’s remarkable work about sugar, plantation slavery and power (1986) as a global staple beyond the Caribbean, helped me recognize the necessity of an ethno-historical analysis to understand the “ethnographic present” of Caribbean diasporas in the United States. Mintz shows as a good teacher, rather than directly theorized; he sprinkled his analysis with tiny ethnographic gems from his fieldwork in the Caribbean. The work of Mintz has become central to my food research but also in my teaching of food and Caribbean related courses. In particular, I appreciate his analysis of plantation slavery through food production, as it foregrounds the implications of the centrality of time, labor and geopolitics for theorizing negotiations of power under the new Capitalist mode of production (which had its first experiments precisely in the Caribbean). His beautiful chapter “Tasting food, tasting freedom” (1996), moved me deeply, and it became a watershed to clarify my desire for a critical food studies approach, and for the kinds of methodological contributions that I wanted to make to this field. Rarely do we get to cry reading academic writings … I cried reading this chapter, stopping and re-reading, as if to make sure I was not hallucinating … someone had already saved me so much work by analyzing the tremendous significance of food globally and in Caribbean histories and experiences, the emergence of a creative and new regional cuisine, and its connection to slaves and their descendants’ struggle for survival, freedom and dignity. Mintz gave me also so many clues through this work, to understand the continuing racialization of this food-memory-history in the Caribbean present, the struggles and hopes of Dominican migrant women in NYC, and why they cherished their hard-earned foods, and for understanding even my own family food practices … what a gift!
I encountered Critical Ethnography late in my training. It was, in fact, through the publications and contributions of education and rhetoric scholars that I was first exposed to this version of ethnographic fieldwork (see Anderson 1989, Foley 2002). In 2006, the anthropologist Soyini Madison’s Critical Ethnography and Performance book was first published. By then, I have been gathering trends and fragments of a critical toolkit to guide me in the kind of engaged feminist and post-colonial work that I wanted to produce. My early bricolage of many disparate strands was promising, yet unwieldy. Finding that there was already a community of scholars, with new approaches to ethnography and to other qualitative methodologies, who also addressed many of my theoretical concerns, was a gift. This discovery helped me to focus my contributions on refining my interdisciplinary approaches, cooking up into that mixture the visual methodologies from my ←28 | 29→previous training, as well as mapping methods, relevant to develop critical food research (which lead me eventually to develop foodmaps method). It was from this experience that I began channeling those insights into my teaching practice, choosing an auto-ethnographic project-based and place-based approach. Initially, when exposed to classical ethnographic works in my graduate courses, in spite of appreciating their contributions, I mostly learned from them what I did not want to do and how I would not want to write about my research findings. These older ethnographic styles made me doubt if anthropology was for me, and if I wished to use a tool soiled with such colonial prejudices. Fortunately, I found other interdisciplinary works, which taught me to question the potential and limitations of ethnography as a methodology, and clarified how I could develop a form of engaged scholarship committed to ethical fieldwork and critical cultural analysis, and this eventually