Picture the stereotypical academic working on a book. Long hours of solitude, turning research into words on a page. Publish or perish.

But in “Portraits of Persistence: Inequality and Hope in Latin America,” Javier Auyero worked with 12 other authors to create an intimate look at major issues in that region as told through the everyday lives of people who live there.

“Intellectual work is oftentimes very individual. All the rewards are individual. You get the grants; you get this. And we wanted to push back against that,” Auyero says. “This is a collective process. I happen to be editor because we couldn’t put all the names on the cover.”

Auyero, the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Endowed Professor in Latin American Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin, grew up in Argentina. He earned his doctorate at the New School for Social Research in New York and came to UT with his wife, Gabriela Polit, a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. In 2012 he founded the Urban Ethnography Lab at UT.

Ethnographers collect data through participant observation — observing life as it happens — and in-depth interviews with their subjects to better understand a culture.

“It’s a type of research based on real time and space in which we try to figure out why do people do what they do in groups, organizations, institutions,” Auyero says. “It’s not surveyed research, not archival research. It is research where our whole being is embedded in the phenomena we want to study.”

Auyero has written several books, many focused on politics, social inequality and violence in Argentina. In 2015, he published “Invisible in Austin: Life and Labor in an American City,” a collaborative research project with graduate students at the Urban Ethnography Lab that looked at how service workers struggle in the booming city. That project, Auyero says, served as a model for “Portraits.”

“There are very powerful structural forces conditioning these people’s lives,” Auyero says of the 12 individuals and couples in “Portraits.” “Drug dealing or violence, migration, asylum seeking, environmental suffering — those were the big themes.”

The opening chapter tells the story of Soraya, a beautician who once dealt drugs. She revels in the power and independence she says the trade gave her, though her story also shows how patriarchy and machismo in Nicaragua play into the drug world and society at large. In other chapters, readers meet Aurelia, a mother and grandmother determined to keep her hard-earned home despite environmental contamination from a nearby petrochemical complex; and Nelson and Celia, whose economic stability is threatened again and again by health problems and political crises in Bolivia.

They are stories of “ordinary, seemingly unspectacular people, all grappling with the challenges of daily life in a region marked by some of the deepest inequalities in the world,” Auyero and co-author Alison Coffey write in the introduction.

And yet, amid that inequality, Latin America is also a contentious region with many powerful social movements led by students, feminists, Indigenous people and others, Auyero says. The authors resisted the tropes of making their subjects out to be either helpless victims or noble heroes resisting oppressive forces.

“The more we get into the stories, we find this issue of persistence. The idea of persisting either individually, or collectively, with others, trying to find some sort of meaning to their lives,” Auyero says.

The chapters are written as first-person narratives, a style that has become common in ethnographic writing in the past 30 years, Auyero says. But it also reflects a popular style of narrative journalism in Latin America.

“It’s not so much influenced by new types of ethnographic writing but much more by new types of investigative reporting, different ways of telling a story,” he says. “The intimate relationship between author and subjects is sort of foregrounded in the story, and it’s a more personal way of telling a story.”

That style also helps make the book accessible to a wide audience, and that ease of access, Auyero says, was a goal of the project.

“Social scientists are awful writers,” he says with a laugh. “And we’re trying to push that boundary. We have a captive public here, which is our undergrads. If our undergrads cannot read what we write, I don’t know who we are writing for.”

Plans for the book began in 2019. Many of the contributors were graduate students in the Urban Ethnography Lab, and other scholars joined in the project. All had conducted extensive ethnographic research in various parts of Latin America, spending months or even years on fieldwork.

Those close ties are important, Auyero says. “We gain trust, rapport. We know what we don’t know. We know the language in which they speak, not as in Spanish, but the terms they use. … We have a way of contrasting what they say they do with what they actually are doing.”

The researchers began discussing what issues they would write about, what possible sources they might use.

Then COVID-19 hit.

“We actually took advantage of the pandemic because most of the interviewing had been done in the context of dissertation research or fieldwork,” Auyero says. “We met (online) almost every other Sunday. … It actually kept a lot of us sane with some sort of sense of purpose.”

They worked together, workshopping each story, finding a collective voice. Graduate students had the same amount of input and credit as senior social scientists. The truly collective nature of the project, Auyero says, is what made it so special.

“It was the most fun, sort of intellectual fun, I’ve ever had,” he says. “And I hope the readers can actually see that.”

Earlier this year, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation named Auyero one of its 14 Distinguished Scholars for 2024. He’s using the grant to study collusion between police agents and drug dealers in Argentina. While sipping maté in his office in Patton Hall, Auyero gestures to towering piles of papers on a nearby table — reams of transcribed wiretapped conversations.

“Some people would argue that collusion actually channels the violence, represses the violence,” he says. “I’m trying to figure out the sort of microdynamics of these relationships, and wiretapping is an amazing source of information that a lot of people don’t study.”

“And,” he adds with a smile, “different from ethnographic work, it’s done from the comfort of my own office.”