Gendered Violence and Indigenous Mexican Asylum Seekers: Expert Witnessing as Ethnographic Engagement

The intertwined theoretical contributions of this article are: 1) how to interpret the lives of indigenous women asylum seekers in relation to structural vulnerability in western Oaxaca, Mexico, and in the asylum seeking process in the US, and 2) why expert witnessing should be considered as a form of ethnographic engagement. My discussion entails a detailed analysis of the cases of two female Triqui asylum seekers and their connections with local, regional, and larger state and economic structures and narratives of militarized gender violence. Finally, I discuss the ways that ethnographies as expert objects and expert witness reports harness both evidence and narrative through an interpretive framework.