Making Legible Vulnerable Lives: The Strange Reconciliations of Ambition and Love in Ethnographic Work with Undocumented Mexican Fathers in the New Latino South

This study of fathering across Méxican and U.S. borders reveals how politics, partiality, and positionality can be called forth in a postcritical ethnography. Sánchez’ work focused on fathers who labored in the U.S. to provide for their families in México. Sharing experiences from fathers in the U.S. and spouses in México, she represents an incisive critique of exploitive labor patterns and insufficient immigration policies. She also engages her positionality. A daughter of Mexican immigrants, her identity as mexicana gave her a way to relate to the fathers but also limited what she was expected to do and be. She wanted to establish herself as an ethnographer and layered into her work that ambition alongside her love for her mother, and her care for the families she met. In the end, Sánchez’ understood ethnographic analysis as a disruptive force amidst the relations she established and concluded a single account could never reflect the complexity of the families’ experiences or forms of love in her own.