Movement You Might Not Expect: How Cindy García is Redefining Ethnography
Where has Cindy García’s research and transdisciplinary projects led her recently, as an artist and scholar? To a front lawn in Cuba, choreographing a dance with a group of women before performing in the street. “I'm an ethnographer, but it's a kind of ethnography where I'm actually part of the project, too,” García says.
Here’s a look into the human-centric work that named García the 2026 Melvin and Gertrude Waldfogel Scholar of the College.
Then & now
Continual learning through movement has been a constant in García’s career, which began at a bilingual elementary school in Colorado, where she taught for six years. Children with different dominant languages learned to communicate through the same Mexican social dances that García learned in her family’s kitchen and living room — or the occasional rented barn.
García studied merengue, salsa, cha cha chá, and bolero in Colorado, Cuba, and Costa Rica before moving to California to get a doctoral degree in Culture and Performance at UCLA. She wrote her first book, "Salsa Crossings: Dancing Latinidad in Los Angeles" (Duke University Press, 2013) as a faculty member in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota.
As part of her current research on arts-based, decolonial activism, García collaborates with artists, activists, and scholars in Cuba, Mexico, and the US. "We've created this transnational feminist community that started in Cuba,” she says.
García is interested in the practices of anti-racism, cultivated by her Chicano father and mother, who is from white, working-class South Carolina. Her background helped make race, class, and culture focal points in her research. She explores questions of how dominant cultures can work to be more inclusive and how movement and power are interwoven.
“I'm really interested in the movement practices of everyday life — the movement relationships that people have with each other,” García says.
The question driving her work today is how she can make the world a better place for her two adopted Black daughters. “And then, by extension,” García explains, “it's how can I do that in collaboration with Afro descendants and other women and gender expansive people of color in the Americas?”
A home in Cuba
When her daughters were five and nine years old, the three of them moved to Cuba for five months “to learn about practices of anti-racism among Afro-descendant feminists,” García shares.
Violence against Black and Latino/a people persists in the US, and García decided to view the issue from a different angle: “I wanted to learn from women who are doing this somewhere else, so maybe I can bring more tactics for anti-racism back.”
In García’s view, ethnography is much more about participation rather than objectification.
It's not that I am studying them; it's that we are creating relationships, to work together, to do a project together, and through that, I actually learn more about everyone's cultures and what limits our own — everyone's — imaginations, whether it's patriarchy or anything. What can we learn from each other?
Cindy García
She found notable things happening in various neighborhood projects and community development through Casa Tomada mirArte, an intersection of the local neighborhood, art, and LGBT+ community.
“They have lots of gatherings, parties. Different artists will come — visual artists, singing artists — and we spent a lot of time just… participating.”
In one special project, La Muñeca Negra, she met the director, Margarita Montalvo, who shared that she never had a Black doll to play with growing up. Now a sculptor, Montalvo teaches her community how to make Black dolls by hand using papier-mâché.
García took note of how these communities were being developed and the ways people were moving together.
“In many ways,” she says, “it’s mutual aid through arts collaborations.”
Connected through the arts
Contours ArteCalle is the anchor of García’s current work. Through this collaborative, performative, decolonial feminist digital publication, women who previously wouldn’t have considered themselves writers are seeing their work published through the University of Minnesota Libraries.
It’s a project that celebrates neighborhood art — with an edition featuring Black doll-making — through a medium that hands the pen to those ready to write their own story.
“And then they become authors, and we publish together,” García remarks.
“Friendship is really at the heart of this research and trying to understand these subjugated knowledges,” García shares. “People who are somewhat invisible in their own communities are also neighborhood leaders in creating these projects. That has had such an impact on me.”
In García’s view, ethnography is not a one-way street. Bumping heads is inevitable when working with a wide range of perspectives and experiences, but instead of seeing this as a negative thing, García and her collaborators view this process as an opportunity for growth; they don’t shy away from it, they embrace it. And sometimes, these different perspectives are seen in the work itself, dancing around one another, noticing new angles.
These are the moments
When asked where her work might take her next, García smiled. “The exciting thing is that we never know,” she says.
We talk about the importance of — it's a bit of a joke — but of reinventing the wheel with every [Contours] edition, and with being ready to shift. What is it that we desire to do, and how can we make it happen? If we desire to do a performance, we use the street in front of someone's house in Cuba, and we do a performance.
Cindy García
But the dance doesn’t end with the conclusion of an article or a flight back to the US. Daily WhatsApp messages keep each other in the loop; remembrances of moments like sitting in the back of a tiny orange bus in Cuba turn to fuel, because it was in that quiet moment when it suddenly became clear: all that you’ve dreamt of is falling into place.
A particularly world-rocking moment, however, was when García read her name as the 2026 Scholar of the College. Her reaction to reading the e-mail is nothing short of an encapsulation of the work she’s doing today.
“I had to read it twice,” García admits. “But then, when I realized it was real, the very first thing I did was WhatsApp my friends in Cuba. And I was like, ‘I got this award — but we got this award, because all of my work now, you are in. We are in this work together.’”
Collegiate affiliations
At the University of Minnesota, Cindy García is affiliated with: Anthropology; Art History; Chicano & Latino Studies; Gender & Sexuality Studies; Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies; Theatre Arts & Dance; and Race, Indigeneity, Disability.
This story was written by Deborah Sventek, an undergraduate student in CLA.
