Debra A. Castillo

Border Lives: Prostitute Women in Tijuana

This paper examines the concrete social situation of women working as prostitutes in Tijuana Mexico and understanding the articulations among the competing social and cultural formations. Data were gathered from ongoing published work primarily in education and public health policy with both male and female prostitutes and from the researchers two-phase qualitative project. The interviews were analyzed to show how the identity narratives of the prostitute women complicate typical social science discussions of prostitution and constitute an implicit if ambiguously cited counternarrative to them. However despite meticulous analysis of the interviews the researchers often found themselves confused by the ambiguous narratives about their lives that affects the social theoretical cultural and historical frames. The stories of these individuals remain considerably unruly and recalcitrant and resist categorization. Likewise the experiences when read in the context of cultural studies practices and social scientific theory force the need to rethink their social implication. Overall a fuller understanding of these processes still eludes the researchers; however some hints were given to raise the deeper questions that need to be asked.

Engagement and Pedagogy: Traveling with Students in Chiapas, Mexico

This meditation on the pedagogy of fieldwork-based courses is based on the author’s experience as an instructor for Cornell’s oldest fieldwork course, a collaborative class anchored in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, but open to a wide interdisciplinary audience. In recent years, it has been located in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, known for the Zapatista rebellion, the richness of the state’s natural resources, its indigenous poverty, and the increasingly fraught issue of Central American migration. The chapter addresses the purposes and practices of public scholarship in the humanities and the challenge of creating meaningful international models of engagement and fieldwork practice in local communities.

Introduction: Conjectures on Undisciplined Research

This introduction explores what happens to fieldwork when it shifts discipline, shifts form, shifts audience, shifts medium, shifts end point, and shifts traditions of interaction: in short, when information gleaned from the field is routed back into an undisciplining form of inquiry. It situates the project of fieldwork in the humanities in relation to the histories of cultural studies, anthropology, area studies, and postcolonial studies. In contrast with these areas of study, fieldwork in the humanities often involves disciplinary isolation and professional incomprehension. We argue for the value of combining textual study with lived experience in transforming our scholarly practices, opening the conversation without asking that these fieldwork-inspired practices become standardized, prescriptive, or paradigmatic.

Performing Gender in the Classroom and on the Stage

Some years ago, my students performed a play by Argentine Nora Glickman, Una tal Raquel, in a number of different locales: our home university in Ithaca, as well as in New York City, Belgium, and Mexico. We were very pleased by the enthusiastic reception in all these sites, and intrigued by the differences in the audiences’ responses.

Introduction: A New Kind of Public Intellectual?

Already in late 2011 things were heating up, a year away from the elections of 2012, one of those unusual years in the political cycle in which citizens of both the United States and Mexico were voting in presidential contests. Candidacies were bruited about, and the press lamented the anti-intellectualism pervading so-called political debates. On the ground, locally, things often looked somewhat different. In early November of 2011, the international hackivist group “Anonymous” backed off its promise to publish names and personal data of Mexican drug cartel members—an Internet action that would have been effectively a declaration of war, with real rather than video-game kills on both sides (revealing the locations of known cartel members would effectively target them for rival cartels; drug trafficking organizations had already murdered numerous Internet journalists and incautious users of social media). That same day, poet Javier Sicilia, the subject of the last chapter in this volume, was leaving cempazuchitl flowers at the Angel Monument in Mexico City for Day of the Dead, promising to lead a new caravan, this time from the US side of the border, to Washington DC, to protest the US counter narcotic strategy. The reelection of Obama has done little to stem the anti-intellectualist tide in US politics; that of Enrique Pena Nieto in Mexico seems a worrisome return to the PRI-dominated stagnation that marked most of the twentieth century.