An ethnography of joy: Entrepreneurship among Latinx communities in East Los Angeles

How do people living at the intersection of various forms of injury seek out collective experiences of joy? I explore this question through fieldwork with Latinx female and queer artists and entrepreneurs, some of them undocumented, who consciously seek out and enact joy in their communities in East Los Angeles. At the same time, these communities face gentrification, racism, and discrimination. I rest on joy as a conceptual framework that arises out of the analysis and theorizing of my interlocutors, who choose to push back against mainstream representations of their communities as exclusively defined by their suffering. This approach, or what I call “an ethnography of joy,” draws our attention to what joy does in a particular context, how it becomes politically meaningful, and how it intersects and interacts with other phenomena. For example, in this article, I explore the more capacious idea of joy through a particular angle that emerged in my ethnographic research: entrepreneurship, or small business ownership. A focus on entrepreneurship allows me to explore how my interlocutors summon the forces of neoliberalism to seek social mobility, belonging, and community activism.