“To bring the future in on our backs:” Tracing migrant ambiguity in my dad's evangelical archive

For the past three years, I have engaged in fieldwork (or homework) with my father, a formerly undocumented pastor ministering to Latin American migrants in the Nuevo South. What began as an attempt to study his church has become a project about our family's migration and its religious, political, and economic entanglements. In this article, I consider my father's evangelical archive—the sermons and theologies that define his ministry and connect our lives in the United States to the ones we intended to leave behind in Argentina. I seek to understand the “migrant ambiguity” that informs his religious practice. Through a commitment to ambiguity and what Édouard Glissant terms “opacity,” I invite anthropologists to attend to the incompleteness of migrant lives and migrant trauma, to those intimacies and longings that cannot be reduced. Here I study conversations with my dad in our home, often in the kitchen, as he washes dishes or as I help my mom chop vegetables. This intimate and at times arduous labor offers an opportunity to take intergenerational and domestic spaces seriously as sites of ethnographic study, and to linger in the competing impulses and commitments that shape relationships in the field, in this case, home.