Reflections on culture, politics, and the spaces between.
Big data can tell you what millions of people do. Ethnography tells you why one person does it — and that difference matters enormously for understanding human behavior. Algorithms detect patterns; ethnographers uncover meanings. In an era obsessed with scale and quantification, the slow, relationship-based, deeply contextual work of ethnography is more valuable than ever. The communities I study don't show up in datasets. Their voices are absent from surveys. Their creative resistance doesn't register in social media analytics. Understanding their experiences requires being there — physically present, emotionally engaged, and intellectually humble enough to let their stories challenge your assumptions.
Most political discourse treats borders as lines to be defended or crossed. But for the communities that live in border regions, the border is something far more complex — a space of creative tension, cultural fusion, and daily negotiation. Artists and musicians in border cities don't just protest the border; they reimagine it. They create hybrid cultural forms — music that blends genres from both sides, visual art that transforms walls into canvases, performances that make invisible borders visible. This creative work doesn't just respond to politics; it generates new ways of thinking about belonging, identity, and community that challenge the nation-state framework itself.
Young people are often dismissed as politically apathetic when what they actually are is politically innovative. The youth movements I study in Mexico and the United States are deeply political — they just don't always look like traditional politics. They organize through music collectives rather than political parties. They claim public space through art rather than petitions. They build mutual aid networks rather than lobbying campaigns. These are democratic practices — participation, deliberation, collective decision-making, resource sharing — expressed in cultural rather than institutional forms. If we only look for politics in legislatures and voting booths, we miss the democratic experiments happening in basements, on street corners, and in online spaces where young people are inventing new forms of collective life.