Next Project

Building on prior ethnographic work in Oaxaca that centered on race, citizenship, and sexual and gender diversity, focusing on spaces of drinking and alcohol as key to understanding queerness, this new research turns to northwestern Mexico. Often framed through its arid geography, cattle culture, and export-oriented food industries, Sonora offers a rich site to examine how queerness is lived, understood, included, and sometimes silenced in relation to local culinary practices, domestic economies, and changing ecologies.

Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Ciudad Obregón and surrounding areas during the summer of 2025, this research involved accompanying family members navigating transborder life. Through shared meals at sushi restaurants, hotdog stands, comedores, and home kitchens, as well as visits with cattle ranchers, cheese-makers, and street vendors, the project observes how food acts as a medium through which queer individuals articulate care, visibility, memory, and citizenship. Food emerges not merely as sustenance but as a social form and a space of practice that shapes queer regional identities, marks economic mobility, indexes queer citizenship, and highlights environmental precarity.

Queer life in Sonora, however, remains fraught with silence and contradiction only acknowledged in jokes or sidelong glances but rarely spoken aloud. Unlike the more visible queer communities in Oaxaca, queerness in Sonora is often expressed through indirect social norms and familial negotiations. This raises critical questions about the geographies of queer visibility and the cultural scripts through which gender and sexuality are managed in rural and semi-urban northern Mexico.

At its core, this project asks: How is queerness lived and negotiated in a region where it is often silenced or erased from the social landscape? How does food, as a major site of economic and cultural life, become a key space for sexual and gender diversity? How do the material qualities of food such as its perishability, preparation, and sociality which intersect with climate, class, gender, and sexuality? And what can food teach us about the contested terrain of belonging and queer citizenship in Sonora?

• Queer Memory and Visiblity

• Pleasure and Queer Embodiments 

• Production of Queer Geographies and Queer Spaces 

• Environmental and Infrastructural Challenges

• Transborder and Migration 

• Applied Anthropology

• Regional and Cultural Identity

• Food as Identity and Resistance