Leigh-Anna Hidalgo is Assistant Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. She received her PhD in Chicana/o and Central American Studies from University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose scholarship integrates ethnographic methods, digital humanities, and Latinx geographies in analyzing contemporary urban labor struggles and resistance.

Her forthcoming book, Abolitionist Marketplaces (under contract with Duke University Press), is based on a seven-year visual ethnography with the leaders of the Los Angeles Street Vending Campaign (LASVC). This book puts forward a new theoretical framework for analyzing how informal workers living under legal forms of violence center radical consciousness, self-care, and community-care to collectively organize and transform the urban spaces and city policies where they live and work.

In addition, Hidalgo has an ongoing digital humanities project with the LASVC that draws on a visual research method she developed called augmented fotonovelas (photo-based comics) that utilizes augmented reality (AR) to merge ethnographic data with photography, audio, and video imagery so that multiple publics can “see” and “hear” aggrieved communities. Articles from these projects have recently been published in the Journal of Latino Studies and Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture. 

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