Leigh-Anna Hidalgo

Leigh-Anna Hidalgo serves as Assistant Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University, where her interdisciplinary scholarship merges ethnographic methods, digital humanities, and Latinx geographies to analyze urban labor resistance and legal violence against informal workers.

Education:

• PhD in Chicana/o and Central American Studies, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA)

Research Focus: Her work centers on how street vendors and marginalized communities employ radical consciousness, self-care, and collective organizing to transform urban spaces. She pioneered augmented fotonovelas—a method using augmented reality to integrate ethnographic data with multimedia—to amplify community narratives through immersive storytelling. Current projects examine abolitionist frameworks in marketplace economies and policy transformation through grassroots activism.

Key Projects: Her forthcoming book Abolitionist Marketplaces (Duke University Press) emerges from a seven-year visual ethnography with the Los Angeles Street Vending Campaign (LASVC). This collaboration also drives her digital humanities initiative visualizing street vendor experiences through AR-enhanced photo-comics for public engagement.