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This roundtable brings together engaged anthropologists working with im/migrant communities to explore the transformational potential of accompaniment as anthropological practice. Informed by decolonial and feminist critiques of anthropology, accompaniment troubles the boundaries of scholar-activist and academic-community member to address the broader social purpose of our anthropological work. We understand accompaniment as an ethical commitment to solidarity, to using our positions of relative privilege to help ameliorate suffering. The roundtable will serve as a collective conversation about the multivalent meanings of accompaniment with im/migrant communities and as a forum to imagine possibilities for caring, relational, and decolonial forms of ethnographic engagement. 

In this presentation I will discuss various forms of “accompaniment” my Latinx immigrant friends, research participants, and fellow activists and advocates have engaged in during the pandemic. I will discuss accompaniment as an anthropological praxis of solidarity, focusing on how, together, we have attempted to advocate for immigrant-protective polices in the past 1.5 years, how we have navigated barriers to forms of social support and healthcare, and how our relationships have shifted in the process. 

In this piece, I explore both the intimacy and estrangement of ethnographic engagements, especially those that have unfolded during the pandemic, as ethnographic fieldwork and research have blurred even more than usual into accompaniment, friendship, advocacy, and mutual support. During this time, I have struggled with more traditional academic writing; for “D” and others, I have found myself unable to muster case studies or to extract quotations from interviews, conversations, and other exchanges to illustrate broader theoretical and empirical points. What emerges instead is a kind of letter to D, a fragmented reflection on her stories, struggles, and points of resistance, interwoven with my own experiences of the same periods of time and of the ways our relationship has evolved over the past few years. The piece considers how the pandemic has transformed ethnographic being-with, or convivencia: over the phone; via WhatsApp messages; through objects, foods, stories, and memories that we exchange in brief masked meetings . . . COVID precautions have flattened dimensionality in some senses but have also opened new space for forms of ethnographic accompaniment, intimacy, imagination, and advocacy. In this sense, the pandemic has illuminated the tendrilled connections between my interlocutors and me in unanticipated ways. Especially given that I now conduct research and advocacy in the region where I live, I explore and convey the seemingly intractable and violent nature of inequality that shapes our different life experiences and puts D, her family, and the other families with whom I work at elevated risk—for disease, for drowning, for violence, for economic calamity, for invisibility, for grief—all the time, pandemic or not.