Abstract
Adriana Páramo's (2012) creative ethnography Looking for Esperanza: The Story of a Mother, a Child Lost, and Why They Matter to Us provides important insights into the politics of race and gender in relation to mobility and migration. In telling the stories of undocumented Mexican women who perform backbreaking farmwork in Florida, Páramo aims to elicit empathy for their plight. And yet, she portrays them as helpless and dysfunctional, showing that ethnographic writing often remains enmeshed with colonial violence. Obscuring crucial differences between women, Páramo also analogises her own condition as a Colombian American immigrant to that of Esperanza Vasquez, an undocumented woman who in 2001 lost her youngest child to dehydration while crossing the Sonoran Desert from Mexico into the United States. As it reproduces some of the logics of white feminism, Looking for Esperanza echoes the politics of much scholarship on gender produced within mobility studies, which often also fails to account for racialised differences between women and to grapple with racism itself. Páramo's work, then, unwittingly reveals the need to deploy an intersectional lens that makes racism visible when engaging the politics of gender and mobilty, and beyond.