Ethnographic drawings and migrant conversations: The sea, threads, and scraps that come together.

Abstract

How can one depict the murmur of the sea or the changing tides throughout the day? I encountered this question when Jota sent me recordings of ocean sounds in our WhatsApp chat. He told me he wanted me to imagine the coastal town he had recently moved to, one that reminded him of the beach in Venezuela where he was born and lived until his teenage years. In this article, I reflect on ethonographic encounters with migrants living in Ecuador whom I met during my fieldwork, some of which took place during the COVID-19 pandemic. The conversations we had via WhatsApp once the quarantine was in place, as well as the moments we shared in person before that, became a repository of voices, sounds, and images, which in turn led me to draw specific moments. I thus found myself faced with the challenge of drawing the bonds that connect a group of migrant women —like a vine or crocheted chains— or of finding strokes on paper for a daughter who cares for her mother from afar, in the form of scraps of fabric. The five drawings I discuss in this text have made space to evoke complex and sensitive experiences, while I wonder how they could be expressed in a graphic format (Dix and Kaur, 2019); to situate the relationship between ethnographic drawings and forms of memory that do not always translate into text (Bonanno, 2019); and, above all, to think of ethnography as “a kind of archival effort that connects and deploys affective, material, and temporal fields” (García, 2016).