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their double social dislocation with tools acquired in the youth camps and prisons of the
US—poetry as therapy. In the plazas of Los Angeles's glass towers to global capitalism,
Central American trade unionists gather—dressed in militant red and black T-shirts, their
faces covered with Los Angeles Police Department monster masks—chanting the chant
that got them booted out of Central America—"Qué queremos? Justicia. Cuándo
queremos? ¡Ahora!" Los Angeles and El Salvador emerge as a dense intertextual field, a
minefield of connection and contact.
Research for this project began and ended in the Pico Union district in inner city
Los Angeles, the symbolic—if not demographic—center of Salvadoran LA. This
ethnographic site—a six-mile area in inner city Los Angeles—called for a wide-angle
lens. The Pico Union district is a complex articulation of local and global forces and my
research there necessitated travel back and forth to El Salvador. Knocking on doors in
small towns and rural settlements in El Salvador proved crucial to opening up
ethnographic spaces and knowledge otherwise hidden to me in Los Angeles. Indeed, as I
will argue, in order to understand the cultural landscapes of California’s immigrant
barrios, one has to travel well beyond the boundaries of the barrio and indeed, of the
nation-state.
Anthropological fieldwork has traditionally been understood as a spatial practice
of "intensive dwelling” (Clifford 1997b:58). However, this bounded notion of the field is
now under considerable pressure, and there is a body of emerging work, to which mine
belongs, that challenges existing notions of the field and fieldwork (Appadurai 1991 and
1997; Clifford 1992, 1997a and 1997b; Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Marcus 1989, 1995
and 1998; Marcus and Fischer 1986). Drawing upon deCerteau's concept of “practiced
Convention