Feminist studies and the traditional way of cooking tortillas in Guerrero

We are used to thinking about methodological interruptions as those factors external to the researcher that disrupt an ethnographic moment, a decision, or our archival research, but there are also some interruptions that we ourselves, as researchers, materialize. What happens when we decide to study a field site where we already have a preexisting role as an activist and are familiar with our informants? After five years of doing community work with nahua and ñoo savii women (from two different ethnic groups) in Guerrero, building firewood cooking stoves with an non-for-profit organization, I decided to explore the same place ethnographically. I wanted to understand the entangled relationships between cooking practices, and the identities of women in that region. My previous experience with these women materialized in my body, and fulfilled a double function that, on the one hand, helped me to quickly create spaces of intervention and trust, but, on the other hand, it also interrupted the new kinds of interactions I was seeking. I had to learn how to embrace my interruption, shifting the conversation from firewood as fuel to firewood as "kojkol". I moved in ways that I hadn't moved before, and to places that I had not explored before, allowing my own body to guide my research.