Francesco Rolando
francesco.rolando@g.harvard.edu
This talk examines accompaniment as an engaged ethnographic orientation and ethical-methodological intervention in the context of intensifying immigration enforcement in the United States. Drawing on collaborative work with immigrant families and community organizers in Colorado, I explore what accompaniment makes visible about the moral, institutional, affective, and embodied dimensions of the contemporary deportation regime.
In Accompaniment with Im/migrant Communities: Engaged Ethnography (Yarris and Duncan 2024), we describe accompaniment as a practice of presence—a form of being-with and standing alongside that draws from Latin American traditions of acompañamiento, feminist ethics of care, and decolonial critiques of knowledge production. In my own work, accompaniment has shifted alongside rapidly changing political conditions and escalating attacks on im/migrant communities. It has involved engagement in moments of acute vulnerability and state violence: detention visits, bond hearings, ICE check-ins, late-night crisis calls, efforts to locate detainees transferred without notice, and support for families facing detention and deportation. It has also required the everyday labor of shared problem-solving within opaque systems, like calling detention centers and attorneys, adding funds to commissary accounts, reporting legal fraud, seeking bond sponsors, and sitting together to decipher legal and bureaucratic processes.
Accompaniment entails physical and emotional co-presence amid fear and uncertainty. It requires remaining alongside others through the prolonged and draining conditions that shape everyday psychological life under legal precarity and state violence. Through this work, immigration enforcement comes into view as an everyday structuring force that reorganizes kinship, redistributes responsibility within households, and shapes emotional life.
Grounded in stories from the past year, this presentation reflects on the ethnographic knowledge that emerge from sustained relational commitment within systems of state violence, and on what such engagement offers to medical and psychiatric anthropology’s understanding of suffering, care, and moral experience under conditions of precarity.