Growing up as the daughter of a funeral director in Fort Bend County, Texas, Marie Theresa Hernandez was a frequent visitor to the San Isidro Cemetery, a burial place for Latino workers at the Imperial Sugar Company, based in nearby Sugar Land. During these years she acquired from her father and mother a sense of what it was like to live as an ethnic minority in Jim Crow Texas. Therefore, returning to the cemetery as an ethnographer offered Hernandez a welcome opportunity to begin piecing together a narrative of the lives and struggles of the Mexican American community that formed her...

Growing up as the daughter of a funeral director in Fort Bend County, Texas, Marie Theresa Hernandez was a frequent visitor to the San Isidro Cemetery, a burial place for Latino workers at the Imperial Sugar Company, based in nearby Sugar Land. During these years she acquired from her father and mother a sense of what it was like to live as an ethnic minority in Jim Crow Texas. Therefore, returning to the cemetery as an ethnographer offered Hernandez a welcome opportunity to begin piecing together a narrative of the lives and struggles of the Mexican American community that formed her...