Why did you choose to go to Bolivia in the first place?

I knew I wanted to do research in Latin America, but I wasn't sure exactly where. In the summer of 1993, I received a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) award from Cornell University to study Quechua language, first in Ithaca for three weeks and then for eight weeks in Cochabamba. When I got there, I realized that it would be a perfect place to do dissertation research on the problems of popular political action in an urbanizing context.

What was your favorite part of doing fieldwork?

My favorite part of doing fieldwork was establishing friendships with all the incredible people I got to know in Cochabamba. That is in a way one of the great things about anthropology as a discipline - getting to know people very different from one's self, and getting to be friends with them despite all the differences in your backgrounds and circumstances.

Is Villa Pagador a real place?

Yes. As I discuss in chapter 1 of the book, in many ways my access to the community of Villa Pagador was predicated on the notion that I was going to represent that community to the outside world, to be an instrument of publicity for people struggling to make a life for themselves on the margins of the nation-state. To mask the identity of the community, then, by using a pseudonym or otherwise making the place unidentifiable would have been a betrayal of that charge. I really do believe that anthropology has to try to be more than just an academic discipline, and that we as anthropologists do have the capacity to work on behalf of the people about whom we write. So, while I changed all individual names and identifying information to protect people against retaliation, I used the actual name of Villa Pagador in the final text.

Was it very dangerous doing research on lynching?

I never felt it was, though perhaps I was naïve. But really, as I point out in the book, the construction of marginal barrios as "dangerous places" is part and parcel of their marginalization and criminalization, a means by which the poor are made to appear threatening and antagonistic to the supposedly "good" people of the "mainstream." There certainly is a great deal of crime in Villa Pagador, and in Cochabamba in general, and one has to be careful not to walk down dark alleys alone at night, or to visit certain places where crimes frequently have occurred in the past. On the other hand, of course, one could say the same thing about just about anywhere on earth, including most cities in the United States. What's more, in Bolivia people for the most part do not own handguns, and most crime does not involve firearms. The United States is much more dangerous in that sense, too. As for lynching, I was never a target for that. It was very unlikely that I would be mistaken for a robber in a marginal barrio - the usual targets of lynching violence. So I never felt afraid of that either.

Were you worried about having your family with you in the field?

At times I was. Our oldest son, Benjamin, was born during the fieldwork period (though we returned to the U.S. for his birth, returning to Bolivia shortly thereafter), and having a newborn baby in Bolivia can be trying. The dust is very problematic for a young respiratory system, and polluted tap water is enough major health hazard. A few times we found vinchuca beetles in our rooms, the bug that carries the fatal chagas disease, and we all had to be tested to make sure we hadn't contracted it. So things like that are stressful. But having my family in the field had many more pluses than minuses. Having them there enabled me to spend much longer in the field than I otherwise would have, and helped me to understand much better what life is like for families in marginal barrios. Through Claire I learned a lot about women's lives and experiences that I otherwise would have had difficulty accessing. And through my family I became in many ways a much more real person in the eyes of my friends in Villa Pagador.