What are the girls of La Rosadita working on? Brief reflection on a discovery in the field

Abstract

This paper presents a reflection situated, in the initiatory framework of an ethnographic work carried out in an Afro-Umbandista temple located in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, which works actively today. From this point of departure, we explore the possibilities and the multiple dimensions that take on the treatment of oral history and narrated life experience, as they unfold in a first and casual in-depth interview with an informant. Thus, it analyzes how the exploratory methodological practices of field work, allow the ethnographer to go further and obtain relevant and substantive information. n this sense, the article argues that these investigative strategies allow, not only -in this case- to expand the characteriza-tion of the socio-religious space and the subjects and subjects that inhabit it but, in particular, access to significant data that had not previously been taken into account in the design of the research: the way of earning a liv-ing for the group of transvestites and trans women who practice religion and who regularly attend this temple.