Leigh-Anna Hidalgo is Assistant Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. She is an
interdisciplinary scholar whose scholarship integrates ethnographic methods, digital
humanities, and Latinx geographies in analyzing contemporary urban labor struggles and
resistance. Her forthcoming book, Abolitionist Marketplaces, (under contract with Duke
University Press) is based on a seven-year visual ethnography with the leaders of the Los
Angeles Street Vending Campaign (LASVC). This book uncovers a new theoretical framework for analyzing how informal workers living under legal forms of violence center radical
consciousness, self-care, and community-care to collectively organize and transform the urban spaces and city policies where they live and work. In addition, Hidalgo has an ongoing digital humanities project with the LASVC that draws on a visual research method she developed called augmented fotonovelas (photo-based comics). Her method utilizes augmented reality (AR) to merge ethnographic data with photography, audio, and video imagery so that multiple publics can ‘see’ and ‘hear’ aggrieved communities. Articles from these projects have recently been published in the Journal of Latino Studies and Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture. Hidalgo holds a PhD in Chicana/o and Central American Studies from University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). She has taught at UCLA and SUNY Binghamton University.