Feeling our way through: On witnessing, writing, and improvisational care

Following a sequence of traumatic events involving a home raid, immigrant detention, and family separation, over fifteen years after the co‐authors first met our lives became entwined in ways we never could have predicted. In the decade since, we have been collaborating to narrate that experience and, in so doing, interweave Vargas's life story with an analysis of how U.S. immigration policy since 9/11 has indelibly shaped the lives of undocumented youth. But one thing about complex trauma is that it lingers. And, we've found, it has insistently confounded our best intentions: making demands upon and ultimately reshaping the possibilities for our collaborative scholarship. Grappling with the commitments and limitations of Stuesse's training in activist research, we reflect on our process, the values that guided us, and the affective, practical, and ethico‐political care practices that emerged. We theorize our writing journey as one of relational obligation, mutual accompaniment, and improvisational care, and we explore the roles of testimonio and witnessing as feminist praxes with the potential to create openings for new historicities—and thus new, intersubjective understandings of the self—to emerge.