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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. 

In March of 2021, undocumented workers in New York state held public hunger strikes to call attention to the essential nature of their work during the pandemic and to demand that Governor Cuomo develop a fund to extend financial relief to “left behind workers,” undocumented workers otherwise ineligible for federal or state unemployment relief. These protests, organized by immigrant rights groups like Make the Road New York, were highly visible ways for undocumented workers to emphasize the embodied sacrifices they make through their labor in the U.S. economy, and they resulted in the New York legislature allocating $2.1 billion to an Excluded Worker Fund. As engaged anthropologists involved with Excluded Worker Funds in our respective states (Oregon and Colorado) since late spring of 2020, the protests in New York—and the national media attention they garnered—caught our attention, especially since the programs we have been working alongside for the past year-plus have received relatively little media or scholarly attention. Our goal in this SfAA News piece is to reflect on the policy potential of EWFs as a mode of social care and inclusion for undocumented community members and on the implications of our involvement with these funds as engaged, activist anthropologists. 

In this paper, we compare observations from engaged ethnography and participant observation with Latinx immigrants in Colorado and Oregon during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we focus on lived experiences of structural vulnerability, as well as the ways in which COVID-related disparities have become internalized as stigma and have amplified immigrants’ experiences of stress, anxiety, and “aislamiento,” or isolation. Indeed, Latinx immigrants in the US—especially those without legal status and those in mixed-status families—face a range of exclusions, discourses of blame and (un)deservingness, and forms of precarity that have contributed to disproportionate risk, suffering, and fear as the pandemic has unfolded. At the same time, by laying bare blatant injustices and racist exclusions, the pandemic has prompted some Latinx immigrants in our research and advocacy sites to enact new forms of resistance and contestation. We detail the range of ways which, in efforts to stay healthy and to challenge discriminatory portrayals of themselves as either disease carriers unlikely to heed public health warnings or as “public charges,” they insist upon their own rights, worth, belonging, and dignity. Finally, we conclude by discussing some of the ways in which these two U.S. states—and the health and social service organizations working with Latinx communities within them—have attempted to address coronavirus disparities among Latinx communities, showing how particular approaches can assuage short-term suffering and improve access to healthcare and other social supports, while others may create a new set of barriers to access for already marginalized communities. 

While Denver has long been a prime immigrant receiving community, the city’s immigrant population has increased nearly 50% since 2000. Along with this growth, the city has emerged as a leader in the national sanctuary movement and in implementing municipal policies to protect immigrants. But can Denver and its immigrant-serving public healthcare institutions offset the “chilling” effects of exclusionary federal policies on Latinx immigrant health citizenship? In this paper, I answer this question by detailing preliminary ethnographic findings from research conducted with immigrants, health care providers, immigration advocates, and public officials in the Mile High City. 

While Denver has long been a prime immigrant receiving community, the city’s immigrant population has increased nearly 50% since 2000. Along with this growth, the city has emerged as a leader in the national sanctuary movement and in implementing municipal policies to protect immigrants. But can Denver and its immigrant-serving public healthcare institutions offset the “chilling” effects of exclusionary federal policies on Latinx immigrant health citizenship? In this paper, I answer this question by detailing preliminary ethnographic findings from research conducted with immigrants, health care providers, immigration advocates, and public officials in the Mile High City.