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"At first I planned to study elderly
Chicanos, since I had previously done
fieldwork in Mexico. But in the early 1970s in
urban America, ethnic groups were not welcoming to
curious outsiders, and people I approached kept
asking me, 'Why work with us? Why don't you
study your own kind.' This was a new idea to me. I
had not been trained for such a project.
Anthropologists conventionally investigate remote,
preliterate societies....[Studying 'your own
kind inevitably] creates problems with
objectivity and identification, and I anticipated
that I, too, would have my share of them if I
studied the Center folk. But perhaps there would be
advantages. There was no way that I could have
anticipated the great impact of the study on my
life, nor its duration. I intended to spend a
year with them. In fact, I was with them
continuously for two years (1973-1974, 1975-1976)
and periodically for two more. In the beginning, I
spent a great deal of time agonizing about how to
label what I was doing- was it anthropology or a
personal quest? I never fully resolved the
question."
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