[2] Behar was born in Havana, Cuba to a Jewish-Cuban family of Sephardic Turkish, and Ashkenazi Polish and Russian ancestry.

Just when she's finally beginning to gain confidence in her mastery of English –and enjoying her reign as her neighborhood's hopscotch queen – a horrific car accident leaves her in a body cast and confined to her bed for a long recovery.

"[6] Professor Jonda C. McNair also highlights the importance of Ruth Behar using her personal experience as a Cuban American of Sephardic Turkish, Ashkenazi Polish and Russian ancestry to write stories that are culturally authentic.

[7] Traveling Heavy (2013) is a memoir about her Cuban-American family, descended from both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews in Cuba, as well as the strangers who ease her journey in life.

Conducting one-on-one interviews, combined with black-and-white photography, she builds readers an image of the diasporic thread connecting Cuban Jews to one another.

In Cuba immigrants opened mom-and-pop shops, peddled, and gradually adopted Spanish while still speaking Yiddish, settling into Latino life in La Habana Vieja.

[3][11] As her family was among those who left Cuba, Behar intertwines her personal thoughts and feelings with her professional, analytical observations of the current society.

Suffering her grandfather's death while on a field trip to Spain to study funeral practices, she decided the ethnographer could never be fully detached, and needed to become a "vulnerable observer".

[13] Other anthropologists, including Claude Levi-Strauss, Georges Devereux, and Clifford Geertz, had also suggested that the researcher had to claim being part of the process more openly.

[14] Behar reflects on her own life and begins to think that her Latina-gringa conflicts result from a feeling of loss after having tried to model herself according to the American Dream, thus losing some sense of her Cuban Jewish family's past in that island nation.

[15] Translated Woman contributes to the feminist argument that studying women in anthropology has been undervalued due to traditional academic prejudices that view women-centered analysis as too personally biased.