“How Will You Give Back?”: On Becoming a Compañera as a Feminist Methodology from the Cracks

Abstract

Issues of power, inequality, and representation in the production of knowledge have a long history in transnational feminist research. And yet the unequal relationship between ethnographers and participants continues to haunt feminist research. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with the cooperative Sulá Batsú in Costa Rica between 2015 and 2019, in this essay I argue that centering solidarity and working through discomfort creates relationships that can reinvent and endure the persistent imbalance of power between researcher and participant. I conceptualize a solidarity-based methodology that is uncomfortable, tossing between "us and them," the objective and the subjective, akin to Gloria Anzaldúa’s “nepantla,” a liminal space of both fragmentation and unification, of both anguish and healing: a methodology from the cracks. In this essay, I reflect upon my experiences as a Puerto Rican feminist researcher focusing on Sulá Batsú, specifically on my relationship with the coop’s general coordinator. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with the coop, including participant observation, in-depth interviews, and textual analysis of their research, briefs, blog posts, presentations, and promotional literature.