The Emotion of WhatsApp: A Story of Virtual Ethnography through Transnational Family

Hermán Luis Chávez

King’s College, London

The ping of new messages, the bubbling ring of a new video call, custom statuses: these are the hallmarks of WhatsApp that have been a constant in my life for as long as my family members in Bolivia have had smartphones. As a second-generation immigrant with few opportunities to return to my generational home, WhatsApp is the sole vehicle of communication that connects me with my family. Having previously used WhatsApp to primarily tell my doting tías about my day, ask my abuela about Carnaval, and repeat te quiero to everyone, it came as a surprise when the platform became a key part of my research project on the Bolivian composer, author, and pedagogue Atiliano Auza León: an application that initially connected me with my transnational family had transformed into a site of ethnography.

Throughout this story, I will mention the transnational family, emotion, and WhatsApp as cornerstones of my experience. Taking the definition of “transnational” as “processes of interchange that could not be contained by…black-box understanding of nation-states” as a point of departure (James and Sharma 2006, ix; quoted in Skrbiš 2008, 234), I understand the transnational family as a group of people bonded via family relations engaging with processes of mediation across constructed national boundaries.[1] My transnational family was forged by my parents’ migration to the United States from Bolivia near the turn of the century. My own set of relations to abuelas, tías, and primos therefore necessarily occurs transnationally. Rather than expressing love, care, chisme, or discontent face-to-face, we share our emotions primarily through video call on WhatsApp, a social setting that mediates and simulates the family bonds we cannot otherwise regularly access. In this story, one in which my family could not hug or see me, they alternatively provided for me by clearing the path for my research on and with Atiliano Auza León.

While analyses of Auza León can be found in other publications (Chavez 2022; Páz Garzón 2018; Stevenson 1992), this story will not explore the composer and his works. Rather, I focus on the research process to demonstrate how transnational familial connections afforded the possibility for a significant ethnographic encounter against the backdrop of barriers to access, including the COVID-19 pandemic. I illustrate how my effort to engage with primary sources for my thesis research while navigating difficult research settings led to support from my family in Bolivia, a care-based form of access revealing new research avenues. By telling the story of how my ethnographic engagement with Atiliano Auza León was made possible through my transnational family’s care vis-á-vis WhatsApp, I hope to encourage fellow student ethnomusicologists—and, particularly, those who are first- or second-generation immigrants studying their communities of origin—to consider the possibilities of what an ethnographic process open to fluidity, emotion, and the transnational family might yield for our formative research.

In May of 2021, a mere two months after vaccinations against COVID-19 first became available in Bolivia, I received funding from the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music to acquire scores and books written by Auza León for my undergraduate thesis research. However, these texts were not available to purchase or acquire from any source in the US. Auza León’s publisher did not have a website, phone number, or address that I could remotely access, so I made a plan to travel to Tarija and La Paz to locate his works. This trip was, however, halted by limited funding and concerns regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. These developments merited emotional expression after years of building excitement for my research. Looking at the little rectangle of my face reflected at me beside the larger rectangles of my tía, abuela, and mamá, I saw the dramatic irony of my smile fall as I went from repressed excitement to genuine disappointment, relating the happiness of my funding approval to the wistfulness of being kept from Bolivia by the factors at hand. Maternal consolations that everything would work out were punctuated by problem-solving questions: well, where can we find his books? Who do we know that knows him? Eventually, my tía and tío promised to help me locate Auza León’s texts in Bolivia so that we could use my funding to ship them to the US, out of love for me and my interests.

After a few weeks, my tía called me excitedly with an unexpected development: she had found Atiliano Auza León himself! From the US, I had not been able to verify where he was living, not to mention whether or not he was still alive—my tía’s networks in Tarija proved surprisingly fruitful. When all I knew to seek were texts, my family had found the very center of my research. In making her connection, my tía had shared with Auza León that the origin of my request was my thesis on his work. Hearing this, Auza León had agreed to speak with me over the phone when my tía visited him at his home in Tarija. I used my research funds to pay for my tía to acquire his texts directly from him and ship them to the US, and as compensation for his time. I began to prepare for my interview with León, which I would conduct via WhatsApp the next week.

What I want to underscore here are the aleatoric developments deriving from familial care that led to my ethnographic encounter. My own Whatsapp encounters are typified by spontaneity, in which calls between my family members and I occur at random owing to the difficulties of navigating three time zones and the schedules of three generations. Not only does the use of social media platforms already suggest an element of temporal displacement, but this sense of communication occurring over rupture is accented, in this case, by displacements of geography and relation that have already occurred, in which the aleatory of calls—which, if missed, are often returned quite quickly—is almost an act of transnational bridging: a form of relation whose primacy is defined by both its site and by the actors of the transnational family. This foundation enhances the fact that this interview with Auza León was not in the original plan of my thesis, nor a part of my funding—it was a result of a progression of connections facilitated by family, an unexpected but welcome surprise originating from the emotions I shared in the face of barriers to access. Here I came to understand a paradigm of the research process: flexibility can be more useful than narrowly accomplishing exactly what is written in a proposal. Rather, the twists and turns of discovering materials or receiving forms of support lead to new sources, arguments, and connections that facilitate unexpected learning, allowing research to maintain a degree of organic development in becoming what it is meant to be.

In my particular case, the process highlights the difficulties in accessing materials and individuals located in other countries, especially those in the global South, that my transnational family helped me to overcome. In my work, I navigate a dialectic of privilege and access: on one hand, I have virtual access to my family in Bolivia and close emotional relationships with some family members, which is a privilege that not all who are directly affected by immigration have; on the other hand, my family’s country is difficult to study and maintain a relationship with due to elements of access predicated on physical presence. In researching Bolivia, I cannot easily turn to the Open Music Archive for recordings, or search IMSLP for scores, or visit named university archives for correspondence. Holdings beyond Bolivia are sparse, from only a handful of Auza León’s texts in a handful of libraries in the US to a grand total of five sets of sound recordings of Bolivian music at the American Folklife Center (Rotolo 2012). Many important archives in Bolivia either have not or cannot engage in digitization: for example, as reported by Bolivian cultural heritage organization Red Bolivia Mundo, the Moxos Musical Archive of Jesuit music “has no website. It is found in San Ignacio de Mojos, in Beni, in the estates of the church.” While the Bolivian National Archive and Library lists its holdings online, the documents are only viewable upon physical visit. Auza León does not own a cell phone nor does he have an email account, meaning that without physical presence, it would not have been possible for me to communicate with him. Despite my access to funds from my institution, as an undergraduate student I was not eligible for the necessary amount of research funds that could have allowed travel to Bolivia to occur, especially during the constraints presented by the pandemic. It was this particular circumstance—my location in the US with an inability to access many resources in Bolivia as an undergraduate student during a global pandemic—mediated by my family’s support that allowed an interview with Auza León to come to fruition. With no other resources, the possibility of the interview itself occurred exclusively because of my transnational family.

The origins of my encounter reveal the importance of kinship and cultural connection in the research process, with transnational familial ties as a cornerstone of such relationality. My parents’ immigration to the US meant a marked cultural and geographic separation from our family in Bolivia. My relationship with my abuelas, tías, and primos is thus defined by the cultural and geographic difference between us. One of the displacements that resides within this difference is that of emotion, in which expressing a sense of longing to be with a far-away family, culture, and geography constitutes the majority of my communication with my Bolivian family. When I shared my experience in trying to conduct research on Auza León, my tía—who is also my godmother—expressed a sense of commitment to supporting me beyond our symbolic familial kinship: the degree of separation created by immigration means that we must often find ways to express emotion and care through alternatives to seeing each other, including acts of service.

Anthropologist Zlatko Skrbiš’ connections between emotion, migration, and belonging in transnational families are especially useful for understanding the elements of care present in the experience at hand. According to Skrbiš, emotions are foundational to the transnational family experience in that individuals are linked to families via emotional ties, and that migration inevitably dissociates people from these emotional networks (2008, 236). Further, Skrbiš argues that emotional labor, co-presence, longing, and emotionalizing the national family are all elements of transnational families. I experienced each of these facets in the process of engaging with my family to ultimately arrive at Auza León: my tía and I verbalized how we missed one another (longing) after not having visited in many years (co-presence), and when I shared the emotions attached to my research, my tía went to great lengths to secure resources for me (emotional labor) while mentioning that my work would do well to represent the country in the US (emotionalizing the national family). While it is possible that I would have received similar support if conducting this work in Bolivia, it is necessary to note that the emotional connection that led to receiving this assistance is predicated on the established transnational positionality between myself and my family residing in Bolivia. Other scholars of transnational kinship (Andrikopoulos 2022; Largo 2017; Rodriguez Garcia 2014) draw explicit connection between methods of communication and the emotion experienced by families undergoing that communication. Similar currents of transnational connection can be found in my interview with Auza León, though the results of my ethnography are not the focus of this story.

The technological aspect of the encounter emphasizes how support from the transnational family was both necessary for the interview to occur and for the format of its elaboration. I made a WhatsApp video call to my tía, who spoke to me briefly before placing the phone camera facing Auza León. My cell phone did not have the capability to record audio while on a WhatsApp call, so I recorded the audio via an external microphone. As a result, the audio quality of the recording is clearer for my voice than for the composer’s. The discrepancy in audio quality led to a difficulty in transcribing some of Auza León’s words and phrases afterwards, as they are not easily heard in the recording. Had I been able to conduct the interview on another video platform, I might have been able to record the interview with mechanics that capture the direct audio from each user's microphone, avoiding the quality issue encountered in recording the WhatsApp audio reproduction. However, in the context of the transnational familial support that afforded this interview, there was not another platform that we could have used. My family’s familiarity with WhatsApp is what made the connection with Auza León possible. For example, in the interview itself, when Auza León sought to show me a concert poster in his living room, he had to ask my tía for help with the phone, and she was able to navigate the camera function due to her familiarity with the platform. Utilizing another platform would have obscured the function of WhatsApp as a site of familial and familiar contact—the use of WhatsApp elides the emotion of the transnational family with the ethnographic encounter of the interview.

I encourage fellow student ethnomusicologists to embrace an ethnographic process that might be messy, emotional, and circuitous. While original ideas or pursuits of funding may be well-intentioned, the experience of those studying a geographic location not easily accessible often means that they may have to engage with the notion that research may occur through academically unconventional currents to arrive at resources or connections not originally expected. At the stage of scholarly development in which undergraduate or graduate students are actively exploring how to engage in long-term projects with ethnographic components, embracing aleatoric and emotional possibilities throughout the research project can be a part of learning how to roll with the punches, as it were, discovering both process and content for our progress. Those of us who are simultaneously student ethnomusicologists and within a transnational family have much to navigate in this regard. Family and home—even those who have no formal relation to our academic studies of music and sound—are potential anchors to our work and research. And any ethnomusicologist, regardless of subject matter, may have to contend with previously unknown difficulties while engaging in fieldwork. We must endeavor to consider the power and impact that our communities, forged by emotion and connection, might have on our work.

Notes:

References

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Rotolo, Pampa. 2012. “Bolivia Collections in the Archive of Folk Culture.” The American Folklife Center. Accessed November 6, 2022. https://www.loc.gov/folklife/guides/ Bolivia.html.

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Stevenson, Robert. 1992. “Review of Historia de la música boliviana, Second Edition, by Atiliano Auza León,” Inter-American Music Review 13 (1): 112.