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Bringing Anthropology Home: Latina/o
Students, by Victor Garcia Occasional Paper No. 57
About the Author: Dr. Victor Garcia Dr. Victor Garcia is a cultural anthropologist, whose specialty
is Latin American and Latino Studies, and the Assistant Director of Cultural
and Ethnic Studies at the Mid-Atlantic Addiction Training Institute (MAATI).
His research interests include economic anthropology, peasant studies,
the political economy of agriculture and farm work in the Unites States,
and lately, alcohol abuse among transnational migrants. Dr. Garcia's research
experience on Mexican farmworker populations and rural enclaves in California
and Pennsylvania has earned him recognition as a leading researcher on
these subjects. His findings have been published in book chapters and
research reports, put forth in working papers, and presented in numerous
papers given at national and international conferences. He teaches courses
on Latin America, the economics of peasant societies, and Latinos in the
United States. SUGGESTED CITATION Garcia, Victor, "Bringing Anthropology Home: Latina/o Students, Ethnographic Research, and U.S. Rural Communities," JSRI Occasional Paper #57, The Julian Samora Research Institute, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Mich., 2001.
Introduction Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez's paper, "An Anthro-pological Perspective: Borders, Transnationalism, Locality and Identity," presented some of the recent contributions that Chicanos have made to anthropology and the social sciences in general.2 A decade earlier, Renato Rosaldo (1985) did the same in an extensive review of the literature that examined the research directions and writings of Chicano anthropologists. Their quest to be heard and considered as major contributors, as Rosaldo (1985) documented, was long and difficult. Mainstream anthropology, mainly involved with developing and strengthening theories on culture and human behavior, was slow to recognize the research of Chicanos. Their concern was introducing and advancing theories and methodologies useful to the study of applied issues confronting many Latino communities across the country, such as health care, poverty, ethnic strife and racism, and work and exploitation. Chicanos have come a long way in anthropology, but whether or not they will continue to make new inroads into the discipline is highly questionable. A major problem on the horizon is the lack of social or intellectual renewal: that is, Chicanos are not entering the profession in the numbers that will allow them to make a difference. Very few of them earn doctorates in anthropology, and the number enrolling in undergraduate programs in this field is not any more encouraging. This shortfall is alarming and needs to be addressed creatively, especially if Chicanos are to have a voice in an academic discipline that traditionally has been resistant and slow to consider the research and writings of minority scholars. This paper will address the low and stagnant number of "new" Chicano and other U.S.-based Latino doctorates in anthropology and some of the reasons behind this poor showing. More important, an approach to the study of anthropology, one that makes the student an active participant in his training, will be presented as a possible solution to the low number of Latino anthropologists. This effective method of preparing prospective anthropologists is a key component of the Palerm School of anthropology in Mexico. This school, now in California, has produced many doctorates in Mexico and an increasing number of Latino and non-Latino Ph.D.'s in the U.S. Low Numbers of U.S. Latino Ph.D.'s in Anthropology Since 1974, the number of doctorates in anthropology has remained relatively constant; they average about 400 per year (American Anthropological Association, 1996).3 A new record was established in 1995, when the number of Ph.D.'s increased to 464 (American Anthropological Association, 1996). Overall, minority doctorates have increased from 13% in 1990 to 16% in 1995 (American Anthropological Association, 1996). However, the number of Latino Ph.D.'s in the discipline has remained on the low side. In 1990, Latinos, or "Hispanics," accounted for 5%; and more recently, as of 1995, only 3% (American Anthropological Association, 1996). That is, only 14 doctorates were awarded to Latinos in that year. In all, since 1990, the number of Latino Ph.D.'s has not exceeded 14 per year. Recently, there has been an increase in the number of undergraduate students in the United States seeking their major in anthropology. However, minority undergraduate students do not make a strong showing in the figures. In 1995, a little over 7,100 students declared anthropology as a major, of whom only 9.1% were classified as minority students (American Anthropological Association, 1996). This small percentage includes African Americans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, other Latinos, Asians and Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans. Impediments to Increasing the Number of Latino Anthropology Majors The low number of Latino doctorates in anthropology must be addressed at the undergraduate level. Waiting to recruit minority students at the graduate stage is too late because the pool of prospective candidates will be small. The ranks of undergraduate Latino students in anthropology must be increased if the number of Latino doctorates is to be augmented in the years to come. To date, however, anthropology programs have not had much success in attracting undergraduate and graduate Latino students. There are many impediments to this effort, some of which will be presented here. A major problem is the low number of Latinos entering undergraduate programs. In 1997, for example, only 11% of "Hispanic" young adults were completing a bachelors degree, a larger percentage, about 18%, were pursuing an associate of arts degree at community colleges (U.S. Census, 1997). By far, according to recent census figures, more Latinos drop out of high school than enter college. A little over 55% of the Hispanics in the nation had completed high school (U.S. Census, 1997). More has to be done to lower the attrition rate and augment the numbers of Latinos in college preparation courses. A larger pool of high school graduates who meet the admission requirements will undoubtedly add to the number of Latinos in universities. Affirmative action has proven useful in increasing the number of minority students in universities and diversifying the student body until the pool of "eligible" applicants grows. However, affirmative action is currently under attack and, in some institutions, being dismantled. If affirmative action is not replaced by another program, designed to improve the pool of prospective college-bound Latinos across the country, the number of Latinos on campuses will diminish significantly. Given the dearth of realistic alternatives to affirmative action, anthropologist Rosaldo makes the following observation: When critics bash affirmative action, one must ask, "Do you have a better idea for creating diversity in our nations' major institutions?" Constructive criticisms that offer positive alternatives ("Here's how to make this work better") are welcome and necessary in working for institutional change, but it will not do to throw away the available tools until better ones are in hand. Negative carping from the sidelines is easy, but it does not help. Or do such carping critics really mean to say that they oppose democratic inclusion and basic civil rights (1994, p. 408)? Another obstacle to recruiting Latinos into anthropology programs is that many of them know little about the discipline. Latinos, like the vast majority of other undergraduates, often do not have a clear understanding of anthropology. At best, they erroneously imagine it to be a discipline only concerned with bones and native people in far away exotic lands. If one picks up a class schedule or a syllabus of an introductory course in anthropology, one would quickly come to the same conclusion. Most course offerings and required readings mainly address populations in underdeveloped countries. Closely related to the previous one, another problem that keeps many Latino students away from seeking anthropology as a major is found in the curricula of the vast majority of the anthropology programs. Too often, the curricula do not include course offerings devoted to the diverse and growing U.S.-based Latino population. At best, problems found in this population, such as poverty and its many ills, are addressed in area, theory, and introductory courses. In these classes, Latino populations are basically used as case studies to illustrate specific problems, overlooking many other facets of the group's culture. Other U.S. minority populations are treated in a similar fashion. The only courses devoted entirely to a minority group are those on Native Americans, and many of these offerings do not include their contemporary plight. The curricula of undergraduate programs must change if Latinos and other minority students are to major in anthropology. Latino students must be shown that anthropology is not only concerned with cultures in Third World countries. As Rosaldo (1985) and Vélez-Ibáñez (1997) clearly point out, Latino anthropologists have demonstrated, through their work, that the discipline is also useful in addressing social, political, and economic issues in U.S. Latino communities. Latino students must be made aware that anthropology is relevant to their lives, communities, and career goals. Its approach to the study of culture is of great value in preparing them for academic and non-academic employment. More important, anthropology can be a means of addressing pressing issues back home. The dearth of anthropology courses on U.S. Latinos is directly related to the small number of Latino faculty or non-Latino faculty who specialize in U.S.-based Latino populations. Since 1990, the number of full-time Latino faculty in anthropology has been consistently low. They have remained at under 3% (American Anthropological Association, 1996). There is a strong correlation between the presence of tenured or tenure-line Latino faculty and the availability of courses on U.S. Latinos. The few departments with Latinos have incorporated into their curricula courses dealing with Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and other Latinos who have a long tradition in the United States. Mexican Anthropology and the Palerm School The intellectual renewal of Latino anthropologists has not received much attention in the literature. A number of Latino anthropologists have successfully mentored graduate students and produced new doctorates in the process; however, how they went about it has not been documented. This subject is treated as a given, as if there is only one way of producing Ph.D.'s, known to all. The pedagogy used in the graduate curricula of cultural anthropology and related subfields, it appears, is the one that has been employed for decades in U.S. universities. Besides receiving instruction in the required courses, graduate students review the literature and theories in their area of study under the tutelage of one or more faculty members in the department. In most cases, students select a research problem that their faculty mentors are currently working on. These same professors also help them formulate a plan of study and assist them in writing a funding proposal. During the entire process, students are seldom encouraged to go out into the field. Waiting until late in their degree program to embark on fieldwork can be risky for the students. They may discover too late in their studies that they were not cut out to endure the rigors of field research. If this should occur, the students will have lost time and resources that may be very difficult, if not impossible, to recuperate.
Ángel Palerm and Peasant Studies About 25 years ago, anthropology in Mexico began to take a radical turn in its intellectual development. It started to move away from structural functionalism, particularism, and indigenismo towards cultural ecology and peasant studies. Mexican anthropologist Ángel Palerm was a key player in this transformation (Alonso, n.d.; Hewitt de Alcantara, 1984). Like other cultural ecologists of his time who studied the peasantry in Mexico, such as Eric Wolf and Pedro Carasco, he examined how this rural population that comprised the majority of Mexico's citizenry was incorporated into the capitalist economy of the world. Of equal interest to him and Wolf, his life-long collaborator, was how peasant communities and households overcome social, political, and economic constraints placed on them by capitalism. Challenging the unilineal evolutionists of the time, many of them stanch orthodox Marxists, Palerm argued that the expansion of capitalism did not result in the disappearance of the peasantry (Palerm, 1980). That is, by working for wages or growing crops for the market, peasants did not abandon their traditional agrarian way of life altogether to become rural proletariats. He further argued that, historically, industry and non-traditional agriculture could not survive or expand without a peasantry (Palerm, 1980). Peasants provide raw materials, labor, and markets for manufactured goods, which have allowed capitalism to reproduce and expand into different regions of Mexico and the world. Mexican anthropology also became more applied, as Ángel Palerm and his cohorts began to address development issues in the country (Alonso, n.d.). Prior to the late 1960's, Mexican anthropologists were not applied in their research. Fieldwork was limited to archaeological excavations and Boasian-style ethnographies, sponsored by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Historia (National Institute of Anthropology and History), commonly known by its acronym, INAH (Hewitt de Alcantara, 1984: 95). The little "official" applied work that was carried out in the country did not touch on important structural issues in the Mexican countryside that had a negative social, economic, and political affect on the peasantry. The subject was considered too politically sensitive for the state and the agencies dealing with the peasantry (Hewitt de Alcantara, 1984: 95). In the process of changing anthropology in Mexico, Ángel Palerm and his colleagues also increased the number Mexican doctorates in the discipline. Until the 1970's, a Ph.D. degree was not a prerequisite for becoming a professional in Mexico. The licenciatura was the terminal degree in the social sciences, humanities, and other fields of knowledge.4 However, as a growing number of Latin Americans began to collaborate with colleagues in the United States and Europe, a doctorate quickly became a necessity. It became a credential symbolizing academic achievement, scholarship, recognition, status, and prestige. The Field School of Tepetlaoztoc To substantiate his theoretical arguments, which many times went against the current and were contested, Ángel Palerm and his students carried out fieldwork in peasant communities. Linking ethnographic research to theoretical debates was consistent with his approach to teaching anthropology at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. Palerm was an advocate of integrating theory and praxis at the start of a student's career. Toward this goal, he established a field school in Tepetlaoztoc near Texcoco where, to this day, many Mexican and foreign anthropologists learn the art of ethnographic research while examining real problems. Since the opening of the field school, cohorts of students from the Universidad Iberoamericana and other universities, some of them from as far away as the United States and Europe, would spend weeks out in the field, often learning to live away from the comforts of their home for the first time and living communally with their peers and professors. Workshops, field trips, fieldwork, briefings and debriefings, and lively discourse and debates filled their days. Friends and colleagues of Ángel Palerm, such as the renowned North American anthropologists Richard Adams, Sidney Mintz, and Wolf, would visit and contribute to the discussions of the day. From the very beginning, professors and students were a team addressing a larger research project in Tepetlaoztoc. Each student selected a specific subject to examine, such as land tenure, crop systems, kinship, or migration. In teams of two, students, alone or together with their professors, would go out to surrounding rural communities on a daily basis and collect data using traditional ethnographic methods. They would conduct informal interviews, construct genealogies, and practice participant-observation. These daily excursions and exercises introduced the students to the rigors of fieldwork, and gave them an opportunity to apply what they learned in their courses. In the evenings, together, as a group, the students and professors would discuss their findings and analyze data. Through his fieldwork and theory-centered approach to anthropology, Ángel Palerm created a school attuned to development issues in Mexico. Together with his students, he examined the survival of the peasantry in the face of expanding capitalism and the social inequality in the countryside caused by the green revolution, to name a few. However, while he insisted on a more nation-centered anthropology, he was active in opening Mexican anthropology to outside influences. Palerm sent students to the United States and Europe to study under various prominent anthropologists; and whenever possible, he would invite visiting scholars and students returning from abroad to give guest lectures in his seminars at the Universidad Iberoamericana. His collaborative work with many North American anthropologists, among them Wolf, Mintz, and Julian Steward, is evidence of this effort to expose his students and Mexican anthropology to theories popular outside of the country. This approach to anthropology became the model for training undergraduates and graduate students in other anthropology programs in Mexico. Ángel Palerm, while addressing development issues in his country, had a hand in increasing the number of Mexican Ph.D.'s in Anthropology. In all, it is estimated that he produced over 50 doctorates. Many of them, such as Arturo Warman, Teresa Rojas, Guillermo de la Peña, and Larissa Lomitz, are internationally known. He also contributed to the intellectual growth of a number of North American doctorates, such as Ann Millard, Scott Whiteford, and Vélez-Ibáñez, all of whom spent time at the field school in Tepetlaoztoc. Today, nearly 17 years after his death, Don Ángel, as he was fondly called by his students, friends, and colleagues, is recognized as a major figure in Mexican anthropology.5 He transformed the discipline in his country by his insistence on combining theory and praxis, and contributed significantly to the study of cultural ecology, development, peasant studies, and the history of anthropology in general. More importantly, however, he left behind at Universidad Iberoamericana and the Centro de Investigaciones Superiores del Instituto de Antropología e Historia (Center for Advanced Research in the Institute of Anthropology and History), known by its acronym, CIS-INAH, vortexes of graduate and postgraduate training, ethnographic research, and publishing activity. He also left numerous publications, in all 12 books and around 100 articles. Additionally, he left a number of manuscripts in note form that perhaps will never be published, while he left others near completion, and they will eventually appear in print. The Palerm School in the United States J.V. Palerm introduced his father's approach to preparing prospective anthropologists to the Department of Anthropology at UCSB. In a short period, as will be discussed, it proved fruitful in retaining Latino and non-Latino students in the university, generating doctorates, and studying farmworkers and their socioeconomic and political plight in California. Juan Vicente Palerm and the Center for Chicano Studies, UCSB Prior to his arrival at UCSB, J.V. Palerm was the chair of the Department of Anthropology at the Universidad Metropolitana in Mexico City. Following the lead of his father, he studied the relationship between the peasantry and capitalist agriculture. J.V. Palerm and his colleagues found that, besides being a major labor force for capitalist agriculture in Mexico, the peasantry was equally as important to agriculture in the United States. For decades, since the Mexican Revolution of 1910, young peasant men had been migrating to and working in agricultural industries in the U.S. southwest. California, it turned out, was the leading destination for three generations of migrants. Seeking to explore his new research interest, J.V. Palerm accepted an invitation to lecture at the Department of Anthropology at UCSB in 1981. About 18 months later, he was hired as an associate professor in the department and made director of the Center for Chicano Studies, the second organized research unit in the University of California system that was specifically established to address U.S. Latinos. From an early date, the course offerings of J.V. Palerm at UCSB attracted the attention of undergraduate and graduate students. The appeal of the classes was that their subject matter was based on real and on-going research in Mexico and that the reading material differed from what was required in other courses. For the first time, students in the department were reading works by Lenin, Luxenberg, Chayanov, and others who addressed the peasantry in the former United Socialist Soviet Republics. Those who could read in Spanish were assigned the studies by Ángel Palerm, Guillermo de la Peña, and Arturo Warman, among others. Prior to his arrival, course readings on the peasantry were limited to the writings of Oscar Lewis, Robert Redfield, Wolf, George Foster, and other North American anthropologists. Before long, J.V. Palerm was serving as a member of dissertation committees of senior graduate students. He attracted more junior graduate students, who would eventually be his first Ph.D. products in the United States. As soon as he became the director of the Center for Chicano Studies, J.V. Palerm began to examine the heavy use of Mexican labor in local, California agricultural production. With the help of the only two Chicano students, an undergraduate and a graduate student, in the Department of Anthropology he examined and generated data from official census and crop reports. Cities in surrounding counties, he found, were undergoing unprecedented demographic and ethnic changes, as agriculture became more labor-intensive. They were becoming "Mexican" in character as labor demands increased in surrounding agricultural enterprises. This discovery initiated an ambitious research project that began in 1981 with a couple of students and continues to this date with many others. At the time, there had been little ethnographic research carried out on Mexican farmworkers in the United States. By "ethnographic," this writer means living with or in close proximity to the population under study, and using traditional field methods, such as participant-observation and informal interviews. A cursory review of the dissertation indexes shows that the Mexican farmworker population in California and other states was not the subject matter of the dissertations being generated in anthropology. This lack of attention is surprising to the writer because, since 1970, Ph.D. candidates in U.S. departments of anthropology have not been carrying out research in the United States. Prior to 1970, 23% of the doctoral dissertations in sociocultural anthropology in the United States and Canada were granted to Ph.D. candidates who conducted fieldwork in North America or Europe (Chibnick, 1986:13). Ten years later, 42% of all the dissertation studies were carried out in these two areas (Chibnick and Moberg, 1983:33). The FIPSE Mentorship Program Initially, from 1984 to 1985, the research initiated by J.V. Palerm at the Center for Chicano Studies was formalized with money from the Funds for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, or FIPSE, Mentorship Program, administered by the UCSB Graduate Division. Funds were allocated to the project, titled "Mexican Immigration and Chicano/Mexican Population Growth in Rural California," to cover research expenses and to provide the student participants with modest stipends. The primary objective of the FIPSE Mentorship Program was to retain minority students, both graduates and undergraduates, in their prospective departments. The program was based on the mentor concept, where undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty, organized into three-tier research teams, would carry out a small-scale research project together. In the teams, faculty would mentor graduate students about research and their coursework, and graduate students would do the same for undergraduates. Faculty provided direction and instruction to graduate students, and graduate students tutored undergraduate students. A secondary goal of the FIPSE Mentorship Program was for the team members to gain hands-on experience in "real" research. The students would learn how to conceptualize a research problem together, carry out the investigation, and disseminate the findings. In the process, graduate and undergraduate students would gain practical research experience that would keep them interested in their university education. In addition to the research exposure, graduate students would learn how to teach and mentor by working closely with undergraduate students and faculty. Faculty would be exposed to working with undergraduate minority students and serve as their mentors. The FIPSE research project, "Mexican Immigration and Chicano/Mexican Population Growth in Rural California," addressed the changes in the demographic and socioeconomic composition of populations residing in farming communities in the Tri-County area (San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura Counties) and Kern County. For example, Guadalupe, one of the research sites situated in Santa Barbara County, went from 18% Mexican and Mexican American in 1960 to 83% in 1980. The research objective was to examine the linkage between the transformation of agriculture and the major changes that local communities were undergoing. J.V. Palerm had found that, from 1960 to 1980, the acreage and production of highly labor-intensive crops, such as lettuce, broccoli, and strawberries that were cultivated nearly year-round, increased in farm areas in and around the emerging Mexican enclaves. This increment, he further discovered, lead to an increase in the number of farm laborers who settled down in local communities, increasing the number of Mexican residents, and changing the ethnic and demographic composition of the neighborhoods. The FIPSE research team consisted of J.V. Palerm, two doctoral students in anthropology, and two undergraduate students. One of the graduate students was a Chicano and the other was a foreign student from Mexico, who was a colleague of J.V. Palerm at the Universidad Metropolitana, but on leave pursuing her Ph.D. at UCSB. One of the undergraduate students was a Chicano anthropology major and the other, a Chicana, was majoring in political science. The students received a monthly stipend, and funds for research expenditures. All four of the students were enrolled in independent studies courses, undergraduate students in Anthropology 197 and graduate students in Anthropology 596, and received academic credit for their participation in the program. The team - J.V. Palerm and students - met weekly in a seminar, which later would be offered as formal anthropology course, held at the Center for Chicano Studies. Interested students from J.V. Palerm's other seminars would also participate. Some of them, it turned out, joined the research project at a later date. The seminar was a forum for developing individual research projects, discussing literature reviews and research findings, planning research trips, and holding workshops on field methods. Ethics in anthropology and their importance out in the field were also included in the workshops. Actual field dilemmas, such as whether or not a researcher should take sides in local disputes or express opinions about grower-worker relations out in the field, were discussed. When applicable, J.V. Palerm and the graduate students with field experience would draw from their experiences to illustrate how real situations were handled. In regard to field methods, students learned how to conduct informal interviews, especially how to question informants without soliciting biased responses. Initially, this was accomplished through role playing, and later by interviewing in the field under the careful eye of J.V. Palerm. Students were also taught how to gain insight into local culture by participating in and observing local activities. Many of the community activities, and the appropriateness of engaging in them, were addressed in workshops. The students truly enjoyed the genealogy instruction of the workshops. It gave them an opportunity to learn about their own families and their peers. Genealogical symbols and their use to record consanguinal and affinal kinship relations across generations were taught. Effective informal interviewing techniques and the actual drawing of genealogical constructs were also part of this training. Besides receiving instruction in the subject matter, students participated in exercises designed to give them practice with drawing up a genealogy. They were paired up, and asked to construct and analyze the genealogy of their partner. They were also encouraged to practice on their own by constructing the genealogies of friends and roommates. Their genealogical assignments were assessed for accuracy, and recommendations were made for improvement. Besides gathering data, students learned how to record their ethnographic observations and interviews in objective form in journals. They were instructed on how to extract data from journal entries and categorize them according to the Murdock classification system. The students were able to put their methods training into practice during field excursions. Trips to surrounding farmworker communities, such as Guad- alupe or Filmore, were made at least once every other week during the academic quarter, and more often in the summer. At first, J.V. Palerm and the students traveled together to the communities within the vicinity of UCSB to make contacts and collect data. Later, students would venture forth in pairs, usually a graduate with an undergraduate student. Each one examined some aspect of the community, such as population growth, economic development, and immigration and migration patterns of the labor force.
Exposing undergraduate and graduate students to fieldwork early in their education was new to the cultural anthropology curriculum at UCSB. In fact, it was a new concept to anthropology curricula across the country. In general, to this writer's best knowledge, involving students in field research doesn't occur in the United States until the student is in graduate school, and only after he is advanced to candidacy. However, departments with Cultural Resource Management (CRM) programs do provide their archaeology students with early research opportunities. In these cases, faculty and students form teams and carry out excavations in sites within the vicinity of the university. With the FIPSE project in full swing, J.V. Palerm turned the Center for Chicano Studies into a nexus of research activity. Students shared offices at the center, where they worked, stored data, discussed research findings, and studied in the evenings or weekends. The walls, covered with genealogies of informants, maps, and charts, caught one's eye upon entering the offices. Additionally, weekly meetings, attended by J.V. Palerm and the students, were held in the conference room to share information and seek advice on how to proceed in the research. J.V. Palerm also met with students in his office and held his seminars in the conference room, which was covered with GIS maps of all four counties of the project. Within six months of the FIPSE project, J.V. Palerm had transformed the Center for Chicano Studies from a marginal Organized Research Unit in the University of California system into an important and visible research center. The FIPSE Mentorship Program concept was viewed by the Graduate Division at UCSB as an innovative teaching approach and an effective way of training and retaining minority students. For J.V. Palerm, however, it was not new. As discussed earlier, the concept is at the heart of the Palerm School of anthropology that J.V. Palerm adhered to in Mexico. The Project's Transformation The success of the FIPSE research project enabled J.V. Palerm to obtain funds from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) to continue the research. In 1986, a proposal for a two-year study, titled "The Growth and Expansion of Chicano/Mexican Enclaves in Rural California, 1960-1985," was funded. This study was commonly known as "The Transformation of Rural California Project," a title that was shorter than the original name of the project. Additional funds were obtained from the University of California. The money was used to hire some of the students participating in the study, those without other sources of income, as research assistants, and to cover research expenses. The objectives of the SSRC project were similar to those of the FIPSE Mentorship Project. The goals were: first, to generate new knowledge on minority farmworkers through the study of the recent formation and consolidation of Chicano/Mexican enclaves in rural California, and to assess the social, economic, and political impacts of the growing Mexican origin population on a number of small rural (non-metropolitan) communities located in California. Second, to use this research experience as an opportunity to train graduate and undergraduate minority students in the methods and techniques of ethnographic field and archival research, and in public policy issues specifically pertaining to national concerns. J.V. Palerm used the SSRC funds to expand the scope of the research
and to include more students. Prior to 1986, the study primarily addressed
the demographic history of the emergence and growth of the enclaves in
the Tri-County area (San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura Counties)
and Kern County, and the changing cropping systems as implemented by growers
and other agricultural entrepreneurs in these counties which had contributed
to the growth of the enclaves. A new line of inquiry, the political participation
of the community members in local affairs and government, was pursued
in the SSRC project. Additionally, prior to 1986, most of the archival
and ethnographic research centered on Guadalupe. Fillmore, Santa Paula,
and McFarland received greater attention, and a new community, Shandon
in San Luis Obispo County, was added to the number of research sites in
the SSRC project. The new students in the project were brought up to date on the study and trained in ethnographic field research in a permanent research seminar (the ex-FIPSE seminar), titled "The Transformation of Rural California" (Anthropology 197 and 596), established in January, 1986. Both new and ex-FIPSE students were given the option of enrolling in the seminar and obtaining academic credit for their work. The seminar met weekly and operated as a classroom, a workshop, and a forum for discussing the project. The ex-FIPSE students introduced their individual projects, and assisted J.V. Palerm in teaching the new students how to carry out literature searches and reviews. Ethnographic research methods and techniques, such as carrying out informal interviews and engaging in participation-observation activities, were also taught to the new comers. The training in ethnographic methods was also carried out in the field under the supervision of J.V. Palerm and some of the more advanced doctoral students. Day field trips were made to familiarize new students with the areas under study and to give them an opportunity to apply the field data gathering techniques and procedures picked up in the seminar. These excursions helped students learn how to make contact with prospective informants, develop rapport with them, and record in field journals the information they were gathering from informal interviews and participating in local activities. J.V. Palerm checked the journal entries for accuracy. To facilitate training under real conditions, a field station was established in nearby Guadalupe. It also doubled as the residence of two team members, both of them ex-FIPSE graduate students. One had been advanced to candidacy and was researching local agriculture and economic practices of resident farmworkers; and the other was examining past and current political participation of farmworkers in the community. Some of the field trips, discussed earlier, were made to the field station, where the two graduate students presented their work and assisted visiting undergraduate students to carry out specific field research tasks assigned to them. Some of the visitors would extend their stay over a weekend, giving them more time at the site to carry out their assignments. Two of the new graduate students were making overnight trips to other enclaves, namely to Shandon in San Luis Obispo County and McFarland in Kern County. Eventually, the two students were to reside and carry out ethnographic research in the two communities for their doctorates. These sites were located further away from the UCSB campus and, as a consequence, undergraduate students did not visit. The Rural Transformation Project team was organized along the same lines as the FIPSE team. Each student developed a research project of his own within the larger project, and reported his findings to the group on a regular basis. J.V. Palerm continued to supervise all of the students, regardless of their academic status, including the doctoral candidates out in the field. Additionally, the graduate students continued to assist him with the undergraduate students. They would supervise undergraduate students out in the field, and assist them to analyze data, write reports, and present their work. With the infusion of additional funds from diverse sources, the Rural Transformation Project continued under different project names beyond the proposed two years to the present. In 15 years or so, rich data sets on old and new Mexican and Mexican American enclaves in four Californian counties were compiled and disseminated in a number of unpublished and published reports. Everyone involved, J.V. Palerm as well as the students, benefited from their participation in the project. J.V. Palerm was able to obtain long-term extramural research moneys and turn the Center for Chicano Studies into a viable and productive research unit that provided students with valuable research training and experience. This course of action also contributed to the teaching, research, and community service mission of the University. With data gathered and compiled, J.V. Palerm was able to develop courses for the Department of Anthropology and write manuscripts for publication. All of these outcomes strengthened his academic record and professional standing. The graduate students who participated were able to carry out and, in some cases, finance their masters and doctoral research within a larger research effort. Some of them were awarded prestigious fellowships in order to carry out their research, such as the Woodrow Wilson Rural Policy Fellowship, Wenner Gren Dissertation Grant, and the Inter-American Foundation Fellowship. They also learned firsthand how to conceptualize a research problem, how to develop a theoretical framework, how to come up with a research proposal for funding purposes, and how to carry out ethnographic research. Supervising the work of the undergraduate student members provided the graduate students with valuable experience in teaching and carrying out research with them. They also benefited from the "team" approach, which taught them that anthropological research is not necessarily a solitary pursuit for knowledge. Graduate students wrote reports and presented research papers at state and national conferences, such as the Southwest Anthropological Association and the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies. Some of these works were published. Five of the graduate students who participated in the research projects have completed their dissertations, and two are tenured professors - one in Mexico and the other in the U.S. Three of the four have been awarded well-known post-doctorates, such as the Ford Foundation Post-Doctorate for Minorities, the UC-Mexus Post-doctorate, and the Rockefeller Foundation Post-Doctorate. The undergraduates also did well. They wrote and presented papers at state and national conferences, something that is unheard of in undergraduate programs in any discipline. All of them, except for one, graduated with their BA degrees. One of them went to graduate school and is a nutritionist for the State of California, addressing the needs of farmworkers, and two of them are teachers.
Anthropology, as a career and profession, is often seen as too remote an option for many Latino students. Many are first-generation, college-bound, and are from working-class backgrounds and, as such, have other priorities, namely to improve their socioeconomic plight. The relevance of anthropology to their career goals and the applicability of the discipline to solving problems back home are not made clear to them. Latino students need to be recruited into undergraduate anthropology programs, and early on, they should be exposed to fieldwork and problem solving. This hands-on approach early in their studies will keep them interested in the discipline and, it is hoped, motivate them to seek their doctorate. In Mexico, the Palerm School of anthropology has a long tradition of producing licenciados (holders of a licenciatura degree) and doctorates in the discipline. In the relatively short time that this school has been implemented in California, it has been successful as well. It has attracted undergraduate students to anthropology and allowed graduate students to earn doctorates. Both undergraduate and graduate students were taught the ethnographic method and how to apply it to the study of farmworker communities. Besides learning about these communities in special seminars on agriculture and farmwork in California, the students went out to the field and learned about these communities on their own. They applied their ethnographic training and, in the process, collected empirical data. Exposure revealed that anthropology could be used to address pressing problems in the Latino population, and made it relevant to the career goals of the students. As J.V. Palerm discovered, failing to attract Latino students is a great loss to Anthropology. Many of them are bilingual (English and Spanish speakers) and bicultural. Latino students also have an insider view of, or an emic perspective into, Latino culture that other students may not possess and will have difficulty in obtaining as outsiders. Insights of Latino students are helpful in gaining entry into the field, in studying a population, and in examining and interpreting data.
References Alonso, Jorge. n.d. Ángel Palerm Vich: Innovador de la Antropología Mexicana. Serie biografías, número 1, Colegio de Etnólogos y Antropólogos Sociales. American Anthropological Association. 1996. Survey of Departments and Survey of Anthropology Ph.D.'s. Washington, D.C.: American Anthro-pological Association. Chibank, Michael. 1987. Farm work and Fieldwork: American Agricultural in Anthropological Perspective. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Chibank, Michael and Mark Moberg. 1983. "The Changing Research Interests of North American Sociocultural Anthropologists" Journal of Anthropology, 3: 25-35. Glantz, Susana. 1987. La Heterodoxia Recuperada: en torno a Ángel Palerm. México, DF: Fondo de Cultura Economica. Hewitt de Alcantara, Cynthia. 1984. Anthropological Perspectives on Rural México. Boston: Routledge and Kegan. Palerm, Ángel. 1980. Antropología y Marxismo. México: CIS-INAH y Nueva Imagen. Renato, Rosaldo. 1994. Cultural Citizenship and Educational Democracy. Cultural Anthropology 9(3): 401-411.
Suárez, Modesto. 1990. Historia, Antropología y Política: Homenaje a Ángel Palerm, I y Anthro- pología y Política: Homenaje a Ángel Palerm, II. México, DF: Alianza Editorial Mexicana. U.S. Census. 1997. Population Statistics, Census Report, P20-S0S, Suitland, Maryland. Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. 1996. Border Visions: Mexican Cultures of the Southwest United States. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. _____. 1997 An Anthropological Perspective: Borders, Transnationalism, Locality, and Identity. JSRI Conference on "Transforming the Social Sciences Through Latino Studies," Julian Samora Research Institute, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Mich. Wolf, Eric. 1981 "Ángel Palerm Vich." American Anthropologist, 83: 612-613. Endnotes 1 This paper was written for and presented at the JSRI conference on
Transforming the Social Sciences through Latino Studies, Julian Samora
Research Institute, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan,
in April, 1997. 2 Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez's paper, "An Anthropological Perspective: Borders, Transnationalism, Locality and Identity" was presented at JSRI conference on Transforming the Social Sciences through Latino Studies, Julian Samora Research Institute, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Mich., in April, 1997.
4 The licenciatura is the basic undergraduate degree in Latin America and Spain. It requires a thesis, or "tesina," as it is often called in Spain. Frequently, educators in Latin America argue that the licenciatura is more than a bachelors and closer to a masters degree in the United States. It is believed that the licenciatura was originally a way of licensing people in a professional field, especially in theology, law, and medicine. Dr. Peter Broad, personal communication, Department of Anthropology, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, Pennsylvania. 5 Ángel Palerm's many accomplishments were summarized by his friend
and colleague, Eric Wolf, in an obituary published in the American Anthropologist,
83: 3, 1981. Jorge Alonso also wrote a brief piece on Ángel Palerm's
contribution to Mexican anthropology in the first of the Serie Biografías
of the Colegio de Etnólogos y Antropólogos Sociales. A more
detailed account of Ángel Palerm's contributions was written in
an homage by Susana Glantz, La Heterodoxia Recuperada: En Torno a Ángel
Palerm (México, DF: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1987). Ángel
Palerm's contribution to contemporary anthropological thought can be found
in a 2-volume collection of essays written by a number of anthropologists,
who were influenced by his works. The essays in the volumes were compiled
and edited by Modesto Suárez in Historia, Antropología y
Política: Homenaje a Ángel Palerm, I y Antropología
y Política: Homenaje a Ángel Palerm, II (México,
DF: Alianza Editorial Mexicana, 1990). |
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