Hermán Luis Chávez

Ertegun Scholar in the Humanities 
Balliol College, University of Oxford

1. 

Ya quiero adorar! 

My cousin repeated in the days before Christmastime, high-pitched in excitement, her hand tight on my arm, eyes and smile widening.

My grandmother’s sister, inheritor of several colonial-era dolls of the Divine Child in Tarija, Bolivia, is a patron of a yearly adoración, a slow march in which an altar displaying the dolls is paraded from the city cathedral to her house.[1] It is a family tradition with degrees of participation, not least of which is the role of the youngest generation, who dance in two fluid ovals that share a middle perimeter as dancers link arms when they meet. 

My mother told me and my brother that we’d be expected to dance. She told us that as young men who have come of age, we might also have to bear the altar. 

From the beginning, I perceived the experience as an opening for ethnographic work. I was not enculturated or socialized through an embeddedness in Catholic tradition, and therefore did not see my participation in the adoración as a cultural exercise of Christian faith, but rather as a part of my duty to my family in the ways gender, age, and responsibility are ascribed to my body. I had thought that my distance from religious belief would allow me to participate in the adoración such that I could pay sufficient attention to the processes and acts of the event to document them and write about them as participant-observer, with twin goals of contributing to knowledge on adoraciones in the region and to a written history of family tradition. Yet I failed to understand the extent to which my particular relationship to family—embedded in every aspect of this encounter—had already created an affective framework that would greatly impact not only my ability to conduct research, but how I approach my research as a young scholar at all.

My heart beat faster when my cousin grabbed my arm, the skin on my forearm hot, my sense of anticipation for participating in an event with such familial importance inflected by her excitement, by my own wistfulness at contending with the paradox that my cousin, younger than me by so many years, had adorado[2] for so many years before I had. That she was more a part of this family than I was.

My anxiety tight in my chest at the interlocking of religion and family, knowing that generations of localized Catholicism were behind and before me, and yet I, raised a continent away from family networks, could not recite or act from custom as those around me, did not experience belief and judgment of this world and the people in it as they did, and would not supplant an apparently American secular spiritualism tinged with the remnants of Catholic culture.

My dejection at an imposed manhood, eyes empty in mirrors reflecting twice-shaven stubble unhidden, makeup left behind in my British flat, ill-fitting t-shirts only worn for a family that would more than raise an eye at my lacy camis or floral bell shorts, long hair unkempt and chalked up to the artistic aesthetics of a musician, a back straightened and brows furrowed in unwanted masculinity. 

2. 

On the day of the adoración, I arrived late because I was accompanying my aunt, who was delayed due to other obligations. Though I was interested in the first half of the march and the service for the purposes of ethnography, it seemed to me more important to travel from her home to the cathedral with my aunt, whom I love and don’t see nearly as much as I want to, whom I knew I had to leave in a week’s time, and whom I did not know when I would embrace again. When we arrived at the cathedral, I didn’t immediately enter, having spotted my brother and several cousins lingering outside. I greeted a prima I hadn’t seen in years before making my way into the service. My grandmother was sitting toward the back of the pews, and my heart skipped a beat with happiness upon seeing her, an immediate smile on my face, a quicker step in my pace. I sat next to her, the priest’s voice a mere buzz in the background of my consciousness.[3] I held her soft, wrinkled hand and scanned the rest of the audience for other family members. My mother arrived even later than I, and I immediately went to be with her in a pew across the aisle upon her entrance, completely unaware of the content of this sermon, simply standing and sitting whenever I saw those around me doing so. I knew when to shake hands and wish peace upon the strangers around me, and to sit back with my arms crossed as the initiated received communion, and not much more. When I went up to receive la bendición, I almost thought the priest avoided me as he sprayed his holy water.[4]

I had already sacrificed what I had considered to be a proper beginning to an ethnography of the event. A balance of immersion and observation had seemed prescient for me as an ethnographer of the adoración; I considered both an awareness of my own embodied participation and of the elements of music, dance, and ritual throughout the extended duration of the event to be necessary.[5] Yet I was not present in either a bodily or conscious manner. I had not adorado from the house to the cathedral, and I had missed most of the service itself. Even when attending the latter portion of the service, I was not listening to the priest, my attention rather focused on my family members. Thus, I had missed what would have been both the religious framework for the adoración and important participatory elements of the event itself. I had chosen, in fact, to center relational acts with family members despite an earlier decision to enter the adoración as an ethnographer. I did so within an affective realm in which my desire to experience intimacy with family I was structurally distanced from superseded the work I considered to be necessary in conducting an ethnography.

3. 

As two of my cousins bore the altar to begin the march, they were followed close behind primarily by family elders, my sponsoring great aunt at the right-hand side. I watched with trepidation as the brass and percussion band began to play and youth began to move in dual circles. A few minutes afterwards, egged on by my aunt and mother, I joined the dance.

I skipped, I danced, I ran. I followed my cousins who led each circle, I kept my eye on my sibling-cousins in the ranks and aunts in the crowd. I sweated in the summer heat, enjoying the happiness of those around me to push through the adoración’s attendant cardio. I did, in fact, bear the altar, and I didn’t know what weight I felt more: that of the structure barely sustained by my weak arms, my shoulders not broad enough to rest the wooden planks of the altar on, or the weight of gendered family duty on my metaphorical shoulders. After expending the physical ability of my upper body, I rejoined the dance, and my little cousin ran to my side. We held hands—us, the youngest and the oldest of my maternal grandparents’ grandchildren, the smallest and the tallest, the most protected and the most independent—as we skipped, Karpil from an uncle hanging from our mouths,[6] eventually leading the pack, arriving first at my great aunt’s house, where the whole band would play one last piece before a smaller contingent stayed around to entertain those who were celebrating in situ. 

Not once did I feel that I could stop to record the band playing, or to note the music they played, or to count how many of us were running around, or how many onlookers had joined, or most anything else that I had conceived as ethnographically “useful” to the study of the adoración. I did consider doing so. Yet in my participation in the event, I yielded my attention to the experience of family tradition in community—an experience I had been deprived by immigration, an experience complicated by the resulting contrasting constellations of culture and gender, language and power, space and time.

My embodied acts did prime me to write about participatory knowledge of the event. I am able to describe at length the processional route, types of dance movements, interactions between dancers and observers, leadership dynamics among dancers that structured movement and form, relation between music and dance in pace, situated celebrations at the conclusion of the march, and sociocultural structures of family and the public as marchers, dancers, and observers.

And yet it would be necessarily incomplete. Not in the way that all research is partial, but regarding the conceived study of the adoración itself, as I would be unable to describe the initial march or church service from a participant-observer perspective. To write about them, I would have to engage in study including interviews with family members, an approach that would both create an inherent ethnographer/interlocutor power imbalance with my family and materialize our paradigmatic differences. For they know me as an American musician, a sensitive cellist who has run off to Europe for a graduate degree not in business or medicine or law, that odd far-off nephew or grandson or cousin to see every handful of years. Further, a “proper” ethnomusicological project would necessarily engage with the provenance of the dolls, requiring discussions of colonial inheritance many are wont to expose to critique, particularly to someone like me, a black sheep.

My familial position is already tenuous without inflecting it with the position of the ethnographer. But is it really that this familial position is already tenuous, or is it that I make it so following the affect of twin anxieties: my own, in my transnational breakages from family, and that of ethnography, which I understand as endlessly bound in relational problematics of knowledge power?

4.

What are my ethics here? Am I committed to my research, or to my family? Is there a way to commit to both? The ethical problem of family ethnography, for me, arises from the rhizome of my professional endeavors as an ethnomusicologist, my genderqueer experience, and the education, culture, and socialization I navigated nearly entirely apart from localized familial networks. The fissures that result from my particular relation as a genderqueer American researcher to a family I engage with in transnational acts cause me to question what is best for me and my family as I consider my research.

My original impulse was to say this is my family, so this is okay. I belong, so this is okay. But the experience of transnational familial breakages is torturous, suggesting that I am not really from or for my family. Attempts at research of this kind leave me heartbroken—my work and affect do not seem able to align in a way that is responsible either to myself or to my family.

Decolonial feminism grounds my initial response to these problematics, addressing the interweaving of home, community, and space for queer transnational subjects like myself who are wrought by the fractures of heterogeneity in worlds structured by logics of purity. The theoretical provisions of decolonial feminism can bear on the concern of transnational family ethnography—particularly in what we might call the Global South—following its commitments to a global struggle for liberation through contending with colonial and gendered relationality at varying degrees. Home is not just a static space to be left, and community is not just a group of people to be created. The mediations of experience between them are necessary for engaging with the transformative power of either; both subjects and those they engage with can be challenged for how they can work together in struggle against an internal and social fragmentation abetted by the inheritance of coloniality and capitalistic development. 

I turn to María Lugones and Chandra Talpade Mohanty in particular, whose respective 2003 books set a critical foundation for the development of decolonial feminism. Lugones critiques logics of purity that stratify subjects and maintain structures of domination, reconciling an abstracted distinction between communities of place (ie, home) and communities of choice by turning to a concrete spatialization of community resistance. In arguing for an interpersonal awareness of a “plurality that enables us to acknowledge, discern, investigate, interpret, remake the connections among crisscrossing oppositional subaltern worlds of sense, oppositional to the very logic of subjection” (2003: 197), she offers a resistant sociality based on sensuous multiplicity. Critical for ethnographic work, always both relational and linguistic, she harkens to power and knowledge in this relationality: “domination always ‘translates’ difference into otherness and otherness into sameness, exchangeability, passivity through the erection of impassable barriers of sense that require the translation into the master tongue… we should remember the translation rule and counter it with the impure epistemological shift” (Lugones 2003: 201-202). To engage with my family in such ethnography would involve doing so without seeking to translate their multiplicity for dominant academic legibility, to think otherwise about how dialogic communication undergirds research in a family where such pluralities and differences of being and thinking exist.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty considers the family as a site of affective negotiation, exploring the reflexiveness required for a liberatory engagement with the multiplicity of home. She writes that communities “are a constant recontextualization of the relationship between personal/group history and political priorities” (Mohanty 2003: 104). In an analysis of her experience as a feminist in the United States, Mohanty refigures home specifically within the political-familial relation “not as a comfortable, stable, inherited, and familiar space but instead as an imaginative, politically charged space in which the familiarity and sense of affection and commitment lay in shared collective analysis of social injustice, as well as a vision of radical transformation” (2003: 128). Here, familiarity extends out of “inheritance” into commitments beyond blood.[7] Alongside Lugones’  focus on the understanding and communication of plurality, Mohanty’s view of home as strategic space allows for a broader approach of transnational family ethnography in which the praxical element of solidarity is infused.

From Lugones and Mohanty arises a decolonial feminist conception of home as one that engages in transformative relations. For Lugones, the sociality of resistance necessitates home/community to develop resistant senses and techniques. They are learned together. Yet, the journeys between home and community are “extremely spatial, tortured, fragmenting” in the ways they materialize negotiation (2003: 193). Mohanty details at length how “the relationship between the loss of community and the loss of self is crucial. To the extent that identity is collapsed with home and community and based on homogeneity and comfort, on skin, blood, and heart, the giving up of home will necessarily mean the giving up of self and vice versa” (2003: 103). Together, they demonstrate how the safety of the home must be rejected in favor of a process of finding community in which the self is confronted. Communities, then, are not chosen, but rather worked out in a complicated relationship to self and home. This process theoretically opens the space for a coalition and solidarity in multiplicity. Though Lugones and Mohanty refer to “diverse communities” among stratifications of race, religion, gender, culture, nationality, and class in both local and global contexts, what might it mean to engage in decolonial feminist coalition and solidarity at the structural degree of the family? 

In my case, there are great differences due to transnational life that characterize our diversity of experience, particularly between generations: from my grandparents, who have lived their entire lives in Bolivia, primarily in departmental capitals, through a nationalist revolution, military dictatorships, and the rise of pluralism,[8] to my parents, who were born and raised in Bolivia and immigrated to the United States in their adulthood, mediating their immigrant experiences and the resonant geopolitical shifts of 9/11 throughout their adult development, to; myself and my brother, who were born and raised in the United States, in the age of technology with our passports and our citizenship, experiencing regular visits to and from Bolivia. Yet that diversity can be occluded by the blood linkages that would seek to group these distinct subject formations under family names. I can identify some of what for me are factors of shared oppression, global capitalism notwithstanding: a culture of binarism, reinforced by the state and religion, that particularly police bodies ascribed gender and prevent internal and external conceptions of gender expansiveness; and an unexamined relationship to power, particularly intergenerational trauma and colonial inheritance within varying local and global degrees of power, which structures approaches to transnational and familial life. 

My concern here is a process of negotiation which in decolonial feminism is intercommunal—in the case of transnational family ethnography, dialogically interpersonal relations must be understood in the multiplicity of subjective conceptualizations of liberation and resistance. Though I may see it vital to engage with colonial inheritance in my academic study of a family tradition as a praxical element of my decolonial scholarship, is this a “common interest” that my family shares? Can we agree on how the enduring oppressions of colonial inheritance, state power, and capitalist development hurts us all, and would they engage in a dialogic struggle for liberation not only within the family structure, but extending beyond it? Would they see themselves as oppressed; would they want liberation? Am I able to decenter my own academic interests and subject formation with the interest of understanding and supporting them where they are? Can we really travel to each other’s worlds, here as we are close by blood but far by experience? On a more embodied level, can I actually endure the sensorial intensity of engaging with my family to this degree? Or the various pitfalls of such relationality? And ultimately, how does this all affect my professional scholarly progression as a young ethnomusicologist keenly interested in the expressive cultures in which my family is implicated, participant, or even at the center?

5.

The theoretical import of decolonial feminism for transnational family ethnography is that it opens a relational door. Decolonial feminism offers this reparative movement. The move could be holding a tía’s hand and asking a difficult question; explaining my research in new ways; admitting my own faults. These movements require a vulnerability exposed to rejection in its affective constellation, one that says “I want to learn from you and with you; I want to do it for us and the world.”

For an ethnographic study of transnational family to be liberatory, my family and I must understand solidarity to be built from difference, blood relations notwithstanding. Ethnography would be not only the methodology through which family and culture are studied, but also that through which family relations are transformed. In the context of a transnational family shaped by colonization, the import of a decolonial feminist ethics to ethnography then might also allow for the colonialist frameworks underpinning family relations to be interrogated and challenged. 

Yet there is a particularity of exchange in this ethnographic work in which the personal stakes of the ethnographer-interlocutor relation are high; the affective and biopolitical rhizomes of family life materially implicate the familial researcher with a depth distinct from other ethnographic relations. A decolonial feminist transnational family ethnography is potentially praxical—allowing both the study of the family and the family of the study to be attended to—and yet that praxis depends substantially upon a mutuality that must be crafted from a shared commitment to the processes at hand.

The complex familial affect framing my ethnographic encounters require me to contend simultaneously with my methodology and my personal life. They are intimately intertwined. I have gestured to the affect of my transnational family in previous meditations on ethnography (Chávez 2022), but the framework I used did not account for familial embeddedness, nor for its implications for my scholarly development in the long term. The tenderness in that piece, of a family helping me when no one else could, exists alongside the tenderness of my ongoing research and familial relations, which are becoming increasingly interconnected. I write now with hope as much as I write with fear. The ethical question is now enough to make me consider very critically my research path as a student of ethnomusicology. I can feel that it is simply too painful for my difference to be materialized in my work. A decolonial feminist ethics of liberation—one which guides my approach to my scholarship—would prompt me to work with my family, if we can open ourselves to the transformative, on such enmeshed matters. Lugones writes that “the developing of companionship in a radical vein is a lifelong task” (2003: 195); what remains is whether my family and I can hold hands as we cross the doorway into it.

Notes:

References

Chávez, Hermán Luis. 2022. “The Emotion of WhatsApp: A Story of Virtual Ethnography Through Transnational Family.” Rising Voices in Ethnomusicology 18 (1).

Lugones, María. 2003. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Martí, Josep. 2024. “Ethnomusicology, Folklore, and Social Relevance.” Translated by Peter Collins. Ethnomusicology Translations 15.

McClamrock, Ron. 2020. “The Embodied Self: Merleau-Ponty on Consciousness and the Lived Body.” Institute for Arts and Ideas News 89.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1974. Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Routledge & K. Paul; Humanities Press.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.