| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Those of us who participated as fieldworkers in the Puerto Rico Project gathered regularly at the University of Puerto Rico (Río Piedras) during the eighteen months we were in the field to compare notes, discuss our work together, and advance our research cooperatively. During that time a distinct difference between our integration in the communities where we were working and in the university community where we gathered became apparent to some of us. It was a coefficient of the class and other differences that separated the university faculty from the working men and women among whom some of us lived in the field, and it was reflected in political differences, among others. A substantial fraction of the university faculty was strongly committed to political independence, whereas a large majority of rural dwellers supported the Popular Democratic Party, then in power. It was not surprising that these differences were linked to others, such that some of us felt we were more fully accepted by the laboring classes among whom we lived than by the intellectuals whom we knew at the university. I try here to show how our fieldwork made visible (and troublesome) these sharp political divisions.
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