Trigueño International Law

Abstract

Trigueña or trigueño, depending on whether the person is female or male, is someone identified with three (tri)cultures. Namely, someone of Indigenous, African and Spanish heritage. It has been used in the Latino/Caribbean culture as a term of endearment, a compliment but also as a descriptive word when neither morena or blanca seem to completely describe the subject.Urban DictionaryPutting oneself "out of place" or "in place" are common methodological strategies in socio-legal research, as in the social sciences more generally. As a socio-legal researcher, you are invited, early on, to leave the library and go to unfamiliar places in order to see the world from new vantage pointswith fresh eyes. Having performed this act of displacementhaving become "out of place"you are then asked to "emplace" yourself; to ground yourself in the norms and routines of your new place in order, for example, to find out how the law operates on "the streets" compared to in "the books." These acts of transmutation and reembodiment have characterized socio-legal writing and thinking for a long time. And regardless of how the assumption that "fieldwork" requires you to go to "exotic" places has been dismantled, such * I must thank Paulo Bacca, Carolina Bejarano, Lina Buchely, Rose Parfitt, and Silvana Tapia for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this text; Jenifer Evans for her editorial support; and Lynette J. Chua and Mark Fathi Massoud for inviting me to reflect on my sense of being out of place. All opinions and shortcomings are entirely mine.