Love and Rescue

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For a Politics of Love and Rescue

Author(s): Virginia R. DomnguezSource: Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Aug., 2000), pp. 361-393Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/656607

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For a Politics of Love and RescueVirginia R. DominguezUniversity of Iowa

An unlikely event provoked these reflections on love and our awkwardnessabout love in scholarly writing. In the summer of 1997, a groupof gutsy, inter-esting PuertoRican women,most of themanthropologists n early stagesof theircareers,invited me to be the keynotespeakerat a conference they were organiz-ing for the fall of the following year.The conference,entitled "HavingOurSay(a como de lugar): Women and the Legacy of The People of Puerto Rico into the21st Century,"was being organized by this groupof women scholarsto feature,recognize, andgalvanize scholarlywork on PuertoRico and Puerto Ricansdoneby women over the past half century.I was touched and flatteredby the invita-tion but also surprised.I am not PuertoRican,andonly a relatively smallpartofmy scholarshipover the years has addressedPuerto Rico andPuerto Ricans di-rectly.I knew thatorganizersArleneTorres,MarvettePerez,ArleneDavila, IsarGodreau,and Yvonne Lassalle knew thatI was Cuban(by both birth and ances-try),and we all sharedthe same assessment thatrelations between PuertoRicansandCubanson the island of Puerto Rico over thepast two orthree decades haveoften been tense. So, I asked myself, why were they inviting me? Then I askedmyself, much more interestingly, what it was that made their gesture unusualand their entire project worth contemplatingmuch more closely-their effort,the choices they were making,and theway theprojectplayed intocontemporaryU.S. "identitypolitics."

It was easy to see a political motivation-a feminist interventionin thepractice,production,and consumptionof scholarship.But this was an affirm-ative intervention at least as much as a criticalone, and neither"affirmativeac-tion" as it is commonly construed nor a critical culturalstudies approach,withits emphasison critique, capturedwhat I came to see as quite central to this en-terprise:a deliberategenerosity on the organizers'partin opting for whatI calla politics of love.All conferences requirea lot of effort, but the scholars who first came to-getherto imagine, design, andput on this one knowingly took on an additionallevel of work. If the conference was notjust going to be about PuertoRicanstud-ies or even about the legacy of ThePeople ofPuertoRico project(Stewardet al.1956), how was it to define itself? And what role should the organizers'collec-tive diagnosis of the relative neglect of women scholars in PuertoRicanstudiesCulturalAnthropology15(3):361-393. Copyright? 2000, AmericanAnthropologicalAssociation.

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362 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

play in shapingthe overall natureof the event? Muchof the work theorganizersundertookwas emotional and political as well as institutional, analytic, andpractical.A great deal of it was about exclusions and inclusions-ones theywanted to makeandones to whichtheywereresponding,ones basedonthequal-ity of a potential participant's scholarly contribution and ones that includedother factors as well.Men were not invited to appearon theprogram noteven Sidney Mintz andEricWolf, both coauthors of ThePeople of Puerto Rico projectand at the timebothalive), but Puerto Ricanness was acriterionforneither nclusion nor exclu-sion. There was to be a specialawardsceremonyhonoringfive women scholars.Three were Puerto Rican (Elena Padilla, Virginia Sanchez Korrol, and AnaCelia Zentella);two were not (Helen Safa and RuthLewis). This vision also re-sultedin eventual conferencedemographicsof a similar sort. PuertoRicans out-numbered non-Puerto Ricans among regular conference participants, butnon-Puerto Ricans, including non-"Latinos" ike Bonnie Urciuoli, were in-vited, present,and deeply appreciated.Very few men attendedany session atwhich I was present, but some were presentat the conference, and they wereclearlywelcome. And, of course,I was thekeynotespeaker-someone who hadtrainedtwo of the women in the organizing groupand whose workI knew wasindeed cited and used by several of the organizersbut,nonetheless, not a PuertoRican scholar or even a scholar of Puerto Rico. The organizers'decisions weredeliberate.Identity politics did notexplainthem. There was courage,andvision,andgenerosityin theirdeliberate nclusions,and there were exclusions basedfarless on animositytowardanyonethan on apolitics of correction-an affirmativeaction based, I am arguing,on love andcaringfor particular ndividuals who intheir assessment had not been sufficiently recognized in public for theirprofes-sional accomplishments.As I contemplatedthe organizers'decisions andrealized I applaudedsomeand was troubledby others, I reached the conclusion that I needed to contem-plate this event as a "rescueproject" ust as much as a scholarly conference. Ialso realized that the relationshipof such a project, quarescue project,to "sal-vage" projects that Jim Clifford (1988) and I have in the past separatelycri-tiquedwarranteda second look. Key to thatexploration,I decided, was assess-ing what love does, or should, have to do with it.Thinking through "Rescue Projects"

Ever since Clifford (1988) pointed out serious drawbacks to "salvage"projects-and how centralthey have been to the 19th-and20th-centuryhistoryof U.S. andEuropeananthropology-the phrase"salvageparadigm"haslargelyserved as a put-down.I recall no unabasheddefendersof "salvage projects,"atleast on the pages of the major U.S. cultural anthropologyjournals, such asAmerican Ethnologist and Cultural Anthropology. Yet a parallel public dis-course-motivated by a politics of correction-has been widely endorsed,or atleast made roomfor, withoutanyoneto my knowledge commenting publicly onthe apparentnconsistency.


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FOR A POLITICS OF LOVE AND RESCUE 363

I amreferringhere to one consequenceof the pushto "diversify" he acad-emy, to create room for otheror different"voices" in the writtenscholarlyrec-ord (as well as on our course syllabi and our conference panels), and to "openup"ourscholarlyand educational nstitutions. That is theenabling,andpossiblyeven valuing, of projectswhose function is much like thatof "HavingOurSay,"in other words, the enabling of "rescue projects"undertakenby minoritizedscholars motivatedby apolitics of correction.The impetusto engage in this kindof politics of correctionis understandable,but too much of the changeit bringsabout is cosmetic, as I arguein "A Tastefor 'the Other' " (1994), andtoo muchreproducesthe institutionalizedsystem of difference and value that it purportsto challenge.Are we not unwittingly endorsinga bifurcatedethics, politics, andepiste-mology thatdenigratesrescueprojects (referred o as salvage projects) engagedin by people seen as "outsiders"but promotes rescue projects (rarelydubbedsalvage projects) engaged in by people seen as underprivileged"insiders"?Dowe really want to perpetuatethe apparentde facto assumptionthat"outsiders"areincapableof escaping that"salvage paradigm"and "insiders"are somehowautomaticallyfree from "sin"?There areproblemsof oversimplification,moralstakes,and missed oppor-tunities here. Preparingfor the Illinois conference, I remembered-and re-read-a review essay I wrote in 1986 entitled "Intendedand Unintended Mes-sages: The Scholarly Defense of One's People," which quite by accidenthappensto be largely aboutscholarshipon Puerto Rico and PuertoRicans.Thebooks I reviewed-Cuban Americans: Masters of Survival (Llanes 1982), FromColonia to Community (Sanchez Korrol 1983), and Puerto Rican Politics in Ur-banAmerica (Jenningsand Rivera 1984)-had inspiredme, already n 1986, tocontemplatesome of the pluses andminuses of scholarshipby "insiders"on the"peoples,"societies, countries, andcommunities they took as their own. Moreand more scholars, following Edward Said's lead in Orientalism(1978), weredocumentingthe politics of representation,which I thoughtwas much needed,butI sensed that unfoundedassumptionswere creepingin: (a) that the terms in-sider and outsider had referentialtransparencyand (b) thategregious racist orcolonizing practicesof representationwould be automaticallycorrectedby hav-ing "insiders" ake over the taskof representing hemselves and their"commu-nities."Among the specific drawbacks namedregardingscholarshipby "insid-ers" are (1) the ease with which we can take some things for granted(whenthings arejust too familiar to us) and (2) the fact thatwe face serious editorialdilemmas when we arepersonallyinvestedin countering negativedepictions(ofthe "peoples"or "societies" we consider ourown) andnotall the "data"we havecollected help our cases.But note thatthese specific points really refer to level of familiarity,depthof affection, and feelings of commitment and not to a scholar's social identitywithin any one system of racial, ethnic, or nationalclassification. All scholarswho write aboutpeople they really care aboutface serious editorialdilemmas,notjust those born,raised,and active in local, regional,ornationalcommunities


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of which theyhave long been members.Let us not make themistake of assumingthatonly longtime "insiders"areever drivenby love-or even thatthey areal-ways drivenby love.Differential contemporaryU.S. institutional and scholarly reactions to"rescue projects"based largely on the "majority"or "minority"status of thescholardoing theprojectseem atodds with muchof whatwe teachour studentsabout what makes good scholarship.And clearly, thoughI believe quiteunwit-tingly, they perpetuatea landscapeof restrictions that paradoxicallyhampers"minoritized"scholarsjust as much as non-"minoritized" cholars. Said's cri-tique of Orientalismcreated a spacefor "minoritized"andcolonized scholars tostep into andplay arole,butin thepasttwo decadesthe conundrum t helpedcre-ate has become clearer.If we agreethat intellectuals in geopolitically powerfullocations in the world have had-but should notautomaticallyhave-the powerto represent others, are we making a statement about who should have the(moral) authorityto do so instead?Have we not largely voted with our feet byendorsingcertainprojectsif undertakenby people we treat as "insiders"and re-jecting them(orbeingmuchmorewilling to critiquethem)if undertakenby peo-ple we treat as "outsiders"?I thinkwe have, and I am concernedby the practicalandintellectualconse-quences of such a development.While opening the academyto people who inthe past have been largely excluded is essential, conceding the rightto partici-pate in the productionof knowledge aboutparticularplaces, peoples, pasts, andsocieties of the worldto peoplejust from thoseplaces in principle imits all of usto the productionof knowledge aboutonly very narrowlydefined communitiesof which we might unquestionablybe a part.But we all know that theprinciplemay be one thing while the actualon-the-groundapplicationof the principleisoften somethingelse. If we look carefully,what we see is a differential de factodevelopment in the post-Saidera of this idea aboutthe (moral)authority o rep-resent. Some people have gained apparentauthority over the production ofknowledge about some partof the world with which they are seen as especiallyaffiliated, but this has not entailed the apparentright to produce knowledgeabout other parts of the world. Non-"minoritized"U.S. anthropologistsstillstudy most other people in the world, but few "minoritized"U.S. anthropolo-gists study-and are seen as authoritieson-people andplaces separate romthesociety with which they areancestrallyconnected. Chinese scholars,for exam-ple, are de facto allowed to functionas leading scholarsin Chinastudies,Indianscholars as the contemporaryauthorities n SouthAsian studies, and PuertoRi-can scholarsas the naturallymostknowledgeablescholarsin PuertoRicanstud-ies. But where are the Chineseexpertson the Italian Renaissance(in the UnitedStates),orthe Indianexpertson theAmericanRevolution(in theUnitedStates),or the PuertoRicanexpertson GATT(in the UnitedStates)?Whyshouldn'ttheyexist as well?An unintended (but equally discriminatoryand intellectually unproduc-tive) essentialism remains.Will anyonewith Chinese ancestrydo if the "rescueproject" s of a Chinese Americancommunity?Will anyone with PuertoRican


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ancestry do if the "rescueproject"is of a Puerto Rican neighborhoodin NewYork? It is important o ask ourselves whose experiences of China, India, andPuerto Rico are being treated as proper objects of study now that intellectu-als-typically fromthe middle andupperclasses of these societies-have cometo be treated n the U.S. academyas havingthegreaterdegreeof moralauthorityto representwhat we presumeto be "theirown people." Privilegingthe "insider"does not, and never will, privilege everyone on the "inside"equally. The pre-vailing inequalities "inside"do notdisappeareven if a neocolonial society's in-tellectualcommunityis interested n its own society's systems of difference andhierarchy, including, but not restrictedto, gender inequality.As an alternative, I want us to consider validating "rescue projects" asworthwhile projects but doing so based on a different criterion of value-namely, genuine love, respect, and affection, not categorical "identity."Thekind of love, respect, and affection I have in mind is the kind of love we feel forfamily members,tough love at times but never disengagementor hagiography.Love, yes, love-the thing most of us are not open aboutin ourscholarly writ-ing, the kind most of us have been professionally socialized into excising fromour scholarly writing.Thereareexceptions, of course. Among those thatcometo mind areessays like Ruth Behar's on the death of her grandfather 1991) orRenato Rosaldo's on the loss of his wife Shelly (1989) andbooks like BarbaraMyerhoff's NumberOurDays (1978) on (Jewish)life (amongold Jews) orJulieTaylor's Paper Tangos(1998) on wrenchinglove and violence in Argentina,herown included. But they remain too exceptional.Many anthropologicalworks, past and present, self-consciously experi-mental or self-avowedly traditional,communicatesomething other than love,despite serious efforts made by many anthropologistssince the late 1980s toconsider the epistemology andethics of our researchpracticesandwritten textsopenly and to critiquevariousforms of racist, sexist, or othercolonizing essen-tialisms. Perhapsmanyof us simply do not feel any genuine affection for thosewe studyorwith whomwe engage intellectually, or we deliberatelychoose criti-cal projects.Perhapswe feel love but fear that it would be awkwardto show it,or perhapswe believe thatmakingit visible would undermine he weight of ourscholarship.But applying a "love-based"criterion of value can clarify why certain re-search projectsare, and should be, identified with "thesalvage paradigm"andsubjectto sharpcritique,whereas othersare,and shouldbe, treatedmore benef-icently. Some projectsare drivenby uttercuriosity, not unlike the early-19th-century expeditions thatset out to collect curios. Many of these validate theirwork by proclaimingthat it is for the good of "humanity"-and the conceptionis of a very generalized and diffuse but unified thing called "humanity."Forsome, it is the very loss of "diversity"or the loss of some evidence of priordi-versity thatbecomes a rallyingcry. Real love andrespectfor realpeople are notthe powers thatdrive thatengine.Applying a "love-based" criterion of value can also clarify what remainsatavistic in muchof the culturaland social anthropologicalworkthatmanyof us


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still do, if unwittingly.I have for some time beenwaryof projectsthat see them-selves as "giving voice" or come across as feeling sorryfor whole communitiesof people they study. Something other thanlove comes throughin the writing.Oftenit is condescension thatmayhave rootsin guilt-ridden orms of liberalismstill with us in the year2000. Sometimes theproblem s thata text comes acrossas romanticizing. Loving does not mean (a) presentingonly positive charac-teristics of people in ourwriting;(b) eliding conflict, violence, ordebate;or (c)feeling so guilty about our own geopolitically defined position that we treatthose we consult with kid gloves, bothin "thefield"(i.e., when we arespendingtime with them)and in ourpublished writings.Approaching the Written Record

I was thinkingabout these issues as I prepared or the keynote addressbyrereadingpastandpresentbooks on Puerto Rico publishedin the United States.I reread the "classics,"including ThePeople of Puerto Rico-a multiauthoredbook whose most famous contributorswere men (JulianSteward and his stu-dentsEricWolf andSidneyMintz, the lattermy earliest and mostenduringmen-tor).Elena Padilla is the sole woman author n the collection.For years I have appreciatedthe ways ThePeople of Puerto Rico projectbroke new groundin the late 1940s andearly 1950s in the practiceof U.S. an-thropology, but I have also been privately critical of the scientistic and oftenmechanisticanalyticframe Steward mposed on theresultingbook publishedin1956. I made a point of readingAntonio Lauria-Perricelli's1989 unpublisheddissertationon ThePeople of Puerto Rico projectwith greatinterest,noting mytwinges of disloyalty as I contemplated ssues of politics andrepresentation hatenabled Mintz's and Wolf's work on PuertoRico in the late 1940s and 1950s.Not only have I never felt the slightest bit of condescension directed at me onSid's part n nearly30 yearsof knowing him,butI always happilysenthim (andEric) some of my best undergraduate ndgraduatestudents. This last commentis made morepoignantwhen I realize thatmost of thepeople I have sent to themhave been bright,ambitious,energetic people classified as somethingotherthanwhite in U.S. publicandlegal discourse-not all of theminterested n theCarib-bean. Sid Mintz andEricWolf clearly inspired my trust.I thought long and hard about what made these two feel so safe, so genu-inely acceptable,andI could not ignore the need to incorporate hose thoughtsinto the actual keynote I delivered that October at the University of Illinois. Ifound myself asking-openly and no doubt surprisingly and unortho-doxly-What if we highlightlove at the heartof our "rescueprojects"andinsiston a politics that takes love into account? And I added, more provocatively,What if we switchfrompromoting,oratleastsupporting,"thescholarlydefenseof one's people"to promoting,or at least supporting,"thescholarlydefense ofpeople you love"?I spoke aboutSid's relationshipwith Taso-Don TasoZayas, his longtimefriend,"subject,"and(in his own words) "teacher"n "Cafamelar,"who died inthe springof 1996. Taso's death affected Sid deeply, much like his life had,and


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I spoke abouthow he found a way to incorporate t into his most recentwritingin much the way he had found a way to incorporate t into Worker n the Cane(1960). I thoughtback to Sid's eloquentdefense of the value of fieldworkin hisdistinguishedlecture at the 1996 AmericanAnthropologicalAssociation meet-ings-delivered some monthsafter Taso's death-and the role that Tasoandhisrelationshipwith Taso had played in thatkeynote address. I remembersittingthere in the huge auditoriumat the SanFrancisco Hilton in November 1996 lis-teningcarefullythatevening as Sid spoke, tryingvaliantlyto pay attention o histheoreticalpoint and the unfolding of his argumentbutgrippedby the fear thathe would not make it throughthe parton Taso-which I somehow knew wascomingeven thoughI had not read thepaper n advance. Somehow he succeededin getting throughthetoughest partswithoutbreakingdown. Ironically,I didn't.It is not thatI knew andloved Tasomyself. I hadonly methimonce-in thespringof 1973-when, afterdeliveringmy veryfirst academic conferencepaperat a conferenceat the UniversidadInteramericanan PuertoRico, I accompaniedSid on a ride down to Ponce to visit with Taso. I rememberthe day well. I felt,and still feel, privileged by Sid's invitation, Taso's hospitality, and the gentleseriousness with which they were taking that (then-)21-year-old woman. Butwhat I remembermostpalpablyis theease of the warmthandrespectthat flowedbetween them, despite-perhaps in partbecause of-the differences in the so-cioeconomic and geopolitical positions they occupied over the course of theirlong adultlives.Sid Mintz is Jewish and American,born and raised in New Jersey in theearly 1920s and schooled in Brooklyn in the late 1930s, when the size of thePuerto Rican populationin New York was still quite small. There is no PuertoRicanness in his past to explain or justify his decades-long interest in PuertoRico. A strong working-class consciousness did, and does, draw him to learnabout working-class life elsewhere, including that in Puerto Rico. He chose aparticularsector of working-class life in Puerto Rico when he first undertookdissertation work in 1948-49 and met Taso as a result. Fornearly50 years, theydeveloped, shaped,and nurtureda friendshipthat was clearly special to both ofthem.

Love, and a periodically sharedworking-classpolitics, bound them to eachother and shaped Sid's thinking, teaching, and writing about PuertoRico, notnational,societal, "racial,"or"ethnic" dentity.I amsure thattheirmutualmale-ness enabled the friendshipto flourish, but I have never gotten the impressionthat there was much macho bonding between them. Both knew andunderstoodthepositionalinequalitiesbetweenthemandthereligious differences thatgot inthe way of their friendship. I know they would both say that at times it was arockyroad betweenthem,but how manyof us have, maintain,sustain,andcher-ish 50-year-old friendships-with anyone?Sid shows deep vulnerabilityin Worker n the Cane (1960)-long beforeRobertBly andthe men's movement. At the time Sid workedon Worker n theCane with Taso, he was still in his late thirties,a young scholarin ananthropol-ogy department hatreportedlyneverknew what to do with thatbook andliving


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in the Eisenhower/Kennedyera thathad reprivileged men over women in theworkplaceand reinforceda U.S. sense of empowerment.Impressively,he wentagainstthe currentand took big risksin doing so. Reviews attacked he bookbe-cause he and Taso were friends (see Mintz 1989). Dauntless, he ends his bookwith a clearmessage of love-of scholarshipdrivenby love, friendship,and re-spect and of politics havingto take love into account."Taso's story,"he writes,

hasno moral.Perhapst is enough hathis life shouldseemso muchbettero himnow.Orperhapshe readerwillseethe wasteIthink see: the wasteofa mind hatstandsabovethe othersas the violet spraysof the lor de cafa towerabovethecane.Butthestoryshould vokenopity,forthat s a sentimentwhichdegradeshemeaning f Taso'slife to himselfand o thosewhoknowand ovehim.[1960:277]It hastaken me threedecadesand theperspectiveof my middleyearsto rec-

ognize something Sid Mintz clearlyalreadyknew by the time I firstmet him inthe fall of 1969: how to incorporateandacknowledgelove in one's intellectuallife, indeed in one's writing, and how to incorporateand acknowledge love inone's politics. Worker n the Cane is a political tract as much as it is an anthro-pological analysis and a testimonialof love. It is indeedtrue that Sid's geopoliti-cal position as an American male intellectualin the post-World WarII era en-abled this projectto be conceptualized,designed, conducted, andpublishedinthe United States. But it is the real bond of love, affection, andrespectthat heand Taso developed and nurturedover many years that made it possible forWorker in the Cane to be special-that is, that made Worker in the Cane an ef-fective, almostgut-wrenchingexampleof politicized anthropologicalwritingofa (poorer,underempowered,active, interesting)person's life.

Picturing LoveMost of us are unlike Sid. We don't let feelings of love andgenuine affec-tion show so openly in our scholarly writing. Perhaps,as I said at the outset,some of us are not motivatedby love andgenuineaffectionbut,rather,by some-

thing else arguablyworthwhile.Perhapssome of us are motivatedby love andgenuine affection but fear it would be awkwardor even professionally danger-ous to show it so openly. Whatever the case, even when we reflect on ourposi-tions as researchersandcontemplatethe epistemological and ethical dilemmasof ourwork,we tend to mute therealexpressionof love when we do feel it.But I write muterather han shutout. I do thinkwe can, and sometimesdo,find ways to communicate these feelings-and not just in our "Acknowledg-ments."The selection of photographs s especially revealing. I haverecentlybe-come especially interestedin photographs n books not intended as art books. Ihave become quite partial to them because I think they have somethingto tellus-about the scholar whose book they arein, abouta panoply of feelings thatmay be the thick context within which the author'sanalytic slant makessense,abouthow feelings thatmaycontradicta textualmessage still get communicatedto readers,and aboutthe contradictionsthatscholarscan live with. Most social


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scientists and historiansconsciously treatphotographsas "mere" llustrationsorvisual materialevidence-presumably transparent bjects they (we?) rarelyin-corporatein actual analyses. Yet it is the photos' selection and inclusion in abook or article that I am interested in-as dataabout the scholar and his or herpanoply of feelings about the people studied.Considermanyof the texts relevantto the Illinois conference andcentraltoits "rescueproject."Worker n the Cane (Mintz 1960) includes 17 photographsin its 288 pages. The book's front matter includes a "Listof Illustrations" hatitemizes each photograph. The People of Puerto Rico (Steward et al. 1956) in-cludes 55 numberedphotographs n its 540 pages of text. Curiously,no "List ofIllustrations"appearsat thebeginningto alert thereader o their inclusion in thebook, but52 of the55 appearas numbered igures,withcaptionsunderneathandcredits to the photographerswho took them. Virginia Sanchez Korrol's FromColonia to Community 1983) includes ten photos, all groupedtogether in themiddle of the book and identified as "Plates." This book's front matter listsplates, tables,maps,andfigures separately.Elena Padilla's Up rom PuertoRico(1958) includes 27 photos appearing,as in Sanchez Korrol'sbook, groupedto-getheron eight pages in the middle of the book. Helen Safa's most recentbook,The Myth of the Male Breadwinner (1995), on women and industrialization inthe Caribbean, ncludes 12 photographsas well as numerousstatisticaltables.Manybooks, of course,get publishedwithoutphotographs,and the reasonsmay well include financial cost to the press, lack of interest on the partof theauthor(s),a desire on thepartof anauthor o protectthe privacyof the people heor she cares about,or the lack of appropriateor technically publishable photo-graphs. Lawrence Chenault's The Puerto Rican Migrant in New York City(1938) was published withoutphotographs.Was thatgood or bad?Would youhave been surprised f I hadsaidthe opposite?The sameis true of Mills, Senior,and Goldsen's The Puerto Rican Journey (1950), Eduardo Seda Bonilla's SocialChange and Personality in a Puerto Rican Agrarian Reform Community (1973),Glazer and Moynihan's Beyond the Melting Pot (1963), and OscarHandlin'sTheNewcomers (1959). But it is also true of Bonnie Urciuoli's much more re-cent book Exposing Prejudice (1996) and Ana Celia Zentella's Growing Up Bi-lingual (1997)-in contrast to Arlene Davila's SponsoredIdentities(1997) andFrancesAparicio's Listening to Salsa (1998), both of which do include photo-graphs. Absences may mean too many different things to be the basis of any-thing more thanspeculation.But when photographsare included I suggest we look at themclosely. Thepresumed objectivism (or drynessor distance) of many a writtentext can dissi-pate next to the accompanyingphotographic"text."ThePeople of Puerto Ricois agood example.Itturnsout, forinstance,thatJackDelano-who took the ma-jority of the photographs hatappear n Worker n the Cane(Mintz 1960)-alsotook almost half of the photographs n ThePeople of PuertoRico (Stewardet al.1956), more than twice as many as anyone else. Most of us would argue thatthere is a significant difference in the analytic paradigmand textual styles of


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these two books, yet the differencegets murkier he closer we look atthephoto-graphsincluded and the photographerbehind them.Ten of the photos in Worker n the Cane are credited to Delano. The othersinclude a close-up of "thefirstpage of Taso' s handwritten tatement" forwhichno credit is given) and five photos thatappear"Courtesyof the GovernmentofPuerto Rico" andcredit either Charles RotkinorEdwinRosskam.Thereis sucha markeddifference in the two sets of photographsthat they clearly play verydifferent roles in the book. But more to thepointis thattheyevoke verydifferentfeelings and, I am arguing, reflect them. Sid Mintz knew both Rotkin andRosskam (Mintz, personalcommunication,November 6, 1999) but thanks nei-ther in his acknowledgments. Yet on page viii of his acknowledgments hewrites, "Jackand IreneDelano wereconstantgood friends in PuertoRico. Theirunderstandingof thatcountryis immense, and they put what they knew at mydisposal. Most of the picturesin this volume aretheir work"(1960:viii).Which pictures?Those of Taso by himself (see Figure 1), of Taso with hiswife Eli and their children (see Figure 2), of two workers' houses in or nearCafiamelar,and of men visibly at work. Poignantare the close-ups of "Taso'shands"and "palero digging hoyados" [ditcherdigging holes to plantseed cane](see Figure3). Staringat them I came to doubtthatSid would have trustedany-one else to takepicturesof Taso, Eli, theirchildren,or theirenvironment. JackDelano's photos seem to communicatesomething of theirwarmth, ndividual-ity, thoughtfulness, respectfulness, and dignity, as well as the materialcondi-tions of theireveryday lives, and to parallelSid's text. Rosskam's and Rotkin'sfigures were taken from a set of availablephotographsat a government reposi-tory. They serve a different purpose. One, for example, is of "sugarcane inbloom" somewhere in PuertoRico; another is of a sugarmill; a thirddepicts"foremenduringthe harvest."They aretypically distant shots of ruralscapes orprocesses takenwith a widerangle lens. They providea largercontext for Tasoand his conversationswith Sid, but Sid would not have included themif he hadnot had Delano's photos, too. He trustedDelano both as a photographerand as apersontrulyinterested n all humanbeings regardlessof the materialconditionsof their everyday lives (personalcommunication,November 6, 1999). Rotkinand Rosskamwere indeedvery good photographersand had careersmanyapho-tographerwould envy (see Geibert1997; RotkinandRichardson1947; Wrightwith Rosskam 1941). From the photos andacknowledgmentsin Worker n theCane alone I had sensed that these were not sufficient qualifications in SidMintz's thinkingand that JackDelano had been very carefullychosen to photo-graphTaso and his immediate environment.All of this was later confirmedbyconversationswith Sid via e-mail and in person in 1999, butmy point is thatIhadguessed as much from the photographs ncludedin Worker n the Cane andthe photographershe does and does not thank. Taso mattered a lot to Sid, andonly someone who could appreciateTaso as aninteresting, dignified, smart,andvaluable humanbeing would be allowed to get close enough to him to photo-graphhim (Mintz 1990).


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Figure 1The original caption in Worker n the Cane reads, "1. Don Taso." Photograph by JackDelano. Reproduced with the kind permissionof the Estate of Jack Delano.

The People of Puerto Rico is, in some ways, the more interesting case totake up here. Julian Steward's analytic paradigm provides so much of thelanguage of the text that one must force oneself in the 1990s to go on reading.Unlike Worker n the Cane, the text reveals little visible love or even friendshiphere,unless one looks carefullyand notes the messages that individualcontribu-tors tried to send and imagines the sociopolitical and intellectual contexts inwhich they sent them. The text is analytic, objectivist, empiricist,andcreativelyintegrativebutalways functionallyandsystematicallydriven.Thenone looks atthe photographs.Twenty-fourof the 52 numberedphotos were takenby JackDelano, tenbyEric Wolf himself, two by RobertManners,eight by Edwin Rosskam, six byCharles Rotkin, and two by others. Wolf and Manners wrote sections of thebook. Rosskam and Rotkin contributedphotos muchlike those credited to themin Worker n the Cane. Before I looked for the credits, I combed throughthe


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Figure 2The original caption in Worker n the Cane reads, "3. Taso and Eli with five of their tenliving children." Photograph by Jack Delano. Reproduced with the kind permission ofthe Estate of Jack Delano.book expecting to note distancing techniques and ethnographic conde-scension-more a comment about how 1990s anthropology regards 1940s-50santhropologythana specific comment about the intellectual,political, and inter-personal relations of Wolf, Mintz, Manners,or Padilla with the people whoselives they studied.But I did notfind what I hadexpected-or at least nowhereasoften as I hadexpected it. On manyof the pages of ThePeople of PuertoRico, Ifound the ethos of Jack Delano instead and his relationshipto The People ofPuerto Rico crew and, more importantly, o PuertoRico. His photographswar-rantlong moments of appreciation,of looking. Many show scenes in which ma-terial deprivation is obvious, but none makes fun of-or seems to objec-tify-those whose images he caughtwith his camera(see, for example, Figures4, 5, and6).


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Figure 3The original caption in Worker in the Cane reads, "12. Close-up ofpalero digginghoyados." Photograph by Jack Delano. Reproduced with the kind permissionof the Es-tate of Jack Delano.

Like Sid, Delano was originally an "outsider." The child of Ukrainian dmi-gres who went to the United States, he attended the famous Pennsylvania Acad-emy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Inspired by the work of Walker Evans,Dorothea Lange, and Ben Shahn, whom he describes as his heroes (1990:21), hejoined the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration in the springof 1940 as a photographer. A serendipitous assignment in San Juan in the "win-ter" of 1941-42 changed his life-quite literally-and he and his wife Irene ef-fectively moved to Puerto Rico right after the war. Puerto Rico became home,not because he was born there but because he came to love being there (Delano1997).Teodoro Vidal, an antistatehood proponent whose personal collection ofPuerto Rican material culture was exhibited at the Smithsonian in 1998, was adear friend. Marvette Perez, a curator at the National Museum of American

., :.'I :} 'I? ' ' ", ,' ,I i - s, s, r . ? I ,


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Figure 4The original caption in ThePeople of Puerto Rico reads, "Fig. 10. Curandera(medicinewoman) and wife of sugar worker in T'ipin. Photo hy Delano." Reproduced with thekind permission of the Estate of Jack Delano.

History and one of the key organizers of the Illinois conference, told me that sheused to hear his name spoken when she was a child in Puerto Rico and that shehad always assumed he was Puerto Rican because of the way people talkedabout him and pronounced his name: Dela(h)no, not Dela(y)no. Jack Delano hadobviously crossed some genuine lines. Casting his lot with Puerto Rico, he wasas personally involved with Puerto Rico as he was politically involved. And hispolitics had become inseparable from his love, respect, affection, and concernfor Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. The 'love affair" went both ways. Long,mournful, appreciative, and loving articles appeared in Puerto Rican newspa-pers and magazines, in Spanish and English, when he died in 1997. In this daywhen so much attention is paid to drawing lines between "insiders" and "outsid-ers," the tone, length, and sheer number of these eulogies (Alegre Barrios 1997;Aponte Ramos 1997; Arrieta 1997; GonzAlez 1997; Hernandez 1997; Luciano


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F()R A POLITICS OF L(VE AND RESCUE 375

Figure 5The original caption in The People ofJPuerto Rico reads, "Fig. 11. Nocora girl doingneedlework at home. Photo by Delano." Reproduced with the kind permission of theEstate of Jack Delano.

Reyes 1997; Routte-Gc mez 1997; Vcra Irizarry 1997) say something specialabout Delano and his relationship with Puerto Rico.None of this is incidental to the fact that it is primarily his photographs thatappear in The People of'Puerto Rico. Mintz d(oesnot recall who selected the pho-tographs for The People (f /lPuerto Rico, and the University of Illinois Press doesnot have that information in its records. Yet I am convinced that Delano's par-ticular mix of love and politics was central to many of the contributors to ThePeople of Puerto Rico who made him the clear photographer of choice for thatbook. Of course, it is hard to say for sure that all contributors saw what was spe-cial about Delano, and there are indeed signs that so(nmeaw this more than oth-ers. Raymond Scheelecs essay, "''The Prominent Famlilies of Puerto Rico"(1956), for example, includes no photographs at all, and only three of the ninephotographs that accomlpany Bob Manners's essay, "Tabara: Subcultures of a


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Figure 6The original caption in The People of Puerto Rico reads, "Fig. 39. Sugar workers' homesalong the roadside in Barrio Poyal in Caniamelar.Photo by Delano." Reproduced withthe kind permission of the Estate of Jack Delano.

'Traditional' Coffee Municipality" (1956), are Delano's. In contrast, all but oneof the photos that accompany Mintz's essay on Cafamelar (1956) are attributedto Delano, as are four of the six illustrating Elena Padilla's chapter, "Nocora:The Subculture of Workers on a Govcrnment-Owned Sugar Plantation" (1956).But altogether it is obvious that Jack Delano was the professional photographerof choice, even when others, like Rotkin and Rosskamn,were available. At somelevel, he helped many of the contributors break through the adopted objectivistwriting style-even if only in a muted and unarticulated way--by evoking a vi-carious photographic link between their analyses and their genuine feelings ofaffection.

I do not want to suggest that there is somie transparency of thought and feel-ing to photographs. There is not. Roland Barthes was not just being long-windedwhen he wrote a whole book, albeit a short one, Camera Lucida (1986), explor-ing what it meant that he was especially attracted to a particular photograph ofhis mother. Nor is Howard Becker (lense when he suggests in a recent issue ofVisual Anthropology Review that we still do not really know how people "find


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meaning in photographs" (1998-99:3). Any careful reading of Reading Na-tional Geographic (1993) indeed reveals how much harder (and less successfulan exercise) it was for authors Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins to determinewhat consumers of National Geographic actually do with the magazine's manyphotographs than it was for them to document what the photographers do in thefield, how the selection of photographs occurs in the magazine's editorial of-fices, who writes the captions, how editorial policy is set, and where there isroom for debate in the production process. If photographs were transparent,none of this would be such a struggle.But what interests me is that scholars choose certain photographs and notothers to accompany or illustrate books, and these choices are not haphazard, Iam arguing, even if they are not fully conscious. Most scholars are probably "or-dinary" readers of photographs, to borrow Becker's terminology. "A sophisti-cated reader of photographs," he writes, "is a reader who does, consciously andcarefully, what any ordinary reader of photographs does unreflectively and care-lessly" (1998-99:6). Instead of taking time to go over

every partof the picture, registering explicitly what's there, what point of view itrepresents (where the photographer put the camera in order to get that particularview, among the many that might have been chosen), the time of day, the thingsthat were left out but perhaps hinted at by the framing of the image, and so on,[most of us] just take a quick look, add it all up, andsay, "Oh,yeah, that's strikingor sad or it 'really captures' the essence of thatthing." But [we] don't know whatwent into the adding up or capturingorjust how those operations were conducted.[Becker 1998-99:6]As "ordinary" readers of photographs, most of us raised in the 20th centuryrelate differently to photographs than we do to written texts or works of audio orvisual representation that are not based on technologies of recording (see Berger

1972). Most historians, sociologists, and anthropologists devote far less time toanalyzing photographs qua photographs than we devote to analyzing writtentexts, oral testimony, or statistical results qua evidence. Wonderful recent ex-ceptions notwithstanding (Pinney 1997; Price 1998), when most of us includephotographs in our books we typically do so for very different reasons than thereasons we have for offering our "data," elaborating an interpretation, extendinga written analysis, or proffering a theoretical point. We typically include them to"illustrate," to make it easier for viewers to picture someone in situ or to nudgereaders to be more open to reading, "listening," or caring about someone. VictorBurgin calls this the sociologist's "common-sense intuition of photography as a'window on the world' " (1982:2), while sociologist Irving Horowitz pinpointsthis as especially true of U.S. sociology in the 1950s-a time when "photogra-phy of a random sort was permitted to 'illustrate' basic points or relieve the stu-dent from an apparent tedium" (1976:1 1).But what is elided in those otherwise incisive comments is that the photosthat are chosen for inclusion are rarely just chosen out of a hat, even if they aremeant largely to illustrate, to be a "window on the world." Even if an author does


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not actively choose the photographsfor his or her book (and this is frequentlythe case with large-volume introductorytextbooks), that author does usuallyhave veto power, and when an authordoes choose, which I believe to be the farmore common case, that choice means thatcertainphotographs get included,while others areexcluded, for reasonsthat warrant xamination. If we look at re-lated books together and compare the photographseach one includes, it be-comes easier to see that alternativesalways exist and thatsome are not chosen.This is where, I amarguing, feelings of love andgenuine affection oftendoenter the body of an anthropologicalwork, albeit usually unremarkedon andoften not even consciously. An authormay not succeed in getting all readerstosee, to feel, to enter into his orherinterpretation f thebook's intendedmessage.But themurkinessof theplace of photographyn most social science books doesallow authorsto choose and not explain the reasonsfor choosing. Herein, then,lies a space seen, felt, and thoughtto be less regulated by the conventions ofscholarly writing-hence, a space in which to say something nonverballythatmay communicatemessages the authordoes also care about.It is in this seem-ingly passive (even occluded) way thatmanyanthropologicalworks thatadhereto learnednotions of objectivity andformalityhave in the past, I believe, com-municatedan author's love andgenuine affection for the people who servedaskey interlocutors or thestudy.There was a wonderful moment at the Illinois conference that made thisvery "real." nanticipationof the awardsceremonythatwas scheduled to followmy keynote address on October 1, 1998, I had made a point of checking outbooks writtenby the honorees. I was especially interestedin the photographstheyhadchosen to include in their books and thephotos' relationship o thestyleandanalyticparadigmof the writtentexts.I looked throughHelen Safa's most recent book, The Myth of the MaleBreadwinner(1995), and noticed that the vast majorityof the photos she in-cludes are of women at work or women engaged in political action-womenwith smiles andfrowns, machines,and workmatesstaringout at us as we look atthem. Nothing about this surprisedme. I smiled when I noted that two of thephotographsthataccompany chaptersdealing directly with Puerto Rico are at-tributedto Jack Delano. These arecarefullychosen photographsby a devoted,indeedpassionate,friend and advocate of women at work.I notedthat Elena Padilla's book Up rom Puerto Rico mostly includes oneperson's photographs,Michael Ciavilino's, whom she thanks in her acknowl-edgments as the one "who took most of the pictures in the book" (1958:xiii).Most of his photographsare of people in the streets,on sidewalks, and in alleysor otherpublic spaces, such as fire escapes orrooftops (see Figures7 and8). Inalmost all of them, people are hanging out, visiting, chatting-not working.Most of his photoshave at least fouror five people in them.No one in his photosshows even a hint of a smile. The overallfeeling is severe, thoughneitherviolentnor sad. Some scenes suggest play and active conversation. The physical envi-ronment s not appealing,butI, at least, do not see it as unbearable.The viewersees few insides. One shot is of a childbeingbaptized.Perhaps he most attractive


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Figure 7This photograph is credited to Michael Ciavolino and appears on the seventh plate inthe photo gallery included in Elena Padilla's UpfromPuerto Rico. Copyrightunknown.shot is of a couple sitting on a bench with a babystrollerandpresumablya baby(notvisible in thepicture).It is unfortunate hatPadilladid not attend heIllinoisconference andthatI have not succeeded in makingcontact with hersince, for Iwould love to know what made herchoose those photographs.These are shotsthat,takentogether,inspiresome sadness(in me) but also a sense of anactive so-cial life and even an excitementabout life in the big city. These mightnot be theshots she would include in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s in New York, were shepublishingthe book today.I noted the contrast with the book From Colonia to Community 1983), byVirginia Sanchez Korrol,whose photographsarevery different.Hers are threeformal portraitstaken from "the author'sprivatecollection"; four donatedbyMrs. ClaraRodriguez of Cabo Rojo, PuertoRico, and dating to the 1930s and1940s;and threemadeavailableby Mrs.HelenGuzmanSteffens of Centerreach,New York.These tenphotographssuggestmiddle-classness or even upper-mid-dle-classness. Everyone in these photos is well dressed, wearing nice dressesorsuits anddressy shoes. Many of the women wear stylish hats. Almost all-except in one photo of two young children-definitely look white, European.Sanchez Korrol's book describes an earlierperiod of Puerto Ricanmigra-tion to the U.S. mainlandand the class backgroundof the migrantsat the time.Anyonejust glancing at the book would come to thephotos firstand,given U.S.mainlandimages of Puerto Ricans in New York, would be likely to find these


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380 CULTURALNTHROPOLOGY

Figure8Thisphotographs credited o MichaelCiavolino ndappearson the seventhplate nthephotogalleryncludednElenaPadilla'sUpfromPuertoRico.Copyright nknown.picturesstunning.The text itself does not arguethateveryone was well-off, butthe photographic nsertions-clearly very deliberate-appear drivenby a com-mitment,a strongcommitment,to defend people the author oves fromthe ava-lanche of negative images and expectations, the faceless and always negativeobjectificationof her"people" hatclearlydominated heintellectual, ournalistic,andpublic policy scene by the 1970s. I was so sure of this thatI decided to sayso publicly at the conference,in the presenceof the author.I was thrilled,stunned,worried,and moved whenI learned fromthe authorherself when she stoodupto make a commenton my keynote addressthat one ofthose photographs-one I had turned into a slide and shown at the key-note-was a photographof her mother(see Figure 9). There is no such annota-tion in herbook. I hadno idea. At the time of its publication(1983), there was noroom for such an"admission"n a scholarlytext.At leastVirginiaSanchezKor-rol did not think so. So she included those photographsand not others,but sheprotectedherself (and possibly her family) by not namingthem as such. I wasstunned because I had guessed love in some abstract,collective sense, and Ifound an even closer link than I had imagined-unidentified but very visiblythere. October1, 1998, was the firsttime, it turnsout, thatVirginiahad everseena photographof hermother n public-a photographI, notshe, had turned nto a


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slide to illustrate the feel of her book, which I had gathered from her photo-graphs.

These examples make me think of a certain kind of documentaryphotogra-phy, thoughmostly by way of contrast.I have in mind a kind of intentionaluseof photographsto evoke particular eelings of sadness orjoy, disgust or empa-thy, andI have in mind the work of someone as legendaryin the U.S. world ofdocumentaryphotographyas Lewis Hine. In a 1977 introduction to Men atWork:Photographic Studies of ModernMen and Machines, JonathanDohertywritesabout how Lewis Hine (1874-1940), "whobegantakingpicturesin 1903and never stopped photographinguntil his death in 1940, proceeded to docu-mentthepartsof Americansociety that he felt needed to be shown to thepublic"(1977). ThoughHine is best known for the photographsof Ellis Island,photo-graphsof tenements, and photographstaken in conjunction with the National

Figure9The original caption in Sanchez Korrol's From Coloniato Communityreads, "Plate 6.Formal portraitof Elisa Santiago Baeza in New York City, circa 1930. Author's privatecollection." Copyright ? 1983 by Greenwood Press. Reproduced with permission fromGreenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT.


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Child Labor Committee and the Red Cross that he took prior to and duringWorldWar I (see Brooklyn Museum 1977), I amespecially interestedin Hine'sown wordsabout his workand the ease with which Dohertyacceptsthem."Inanoften quoted statement,"Doherty tells us, Hine "said, 'There are two things Iwanted to do. I wanted to show the things that had to be corrected.I wanted toshow the things that had to be appreciated'" (1977).Of the tenement,child labor, and Ellis Islandphotos, Doherty writes that"manyof these photographswere used to activate the emotionthatonly photo-graphscould bring to the reformmovements then taking place. In effect, Hinewas a detective searchingfor wrongdoingwith his cameraand, when he foundit, using his picturesto help indict the criminals"(1977, emphasis added).Butthe war,his return o the United Statesin 1919, orperhaps hereflectionsthat ac-companylife in one' s forties led Hine to realize "thatso farhe had been criticiz-ing with his photographs,and ... that it wasjust as important o give praise tothingsthatwere worthyof it"(Doherty 1977). In 1938, Hinerecalled,"InParis,after the Armistice, I thoughtI had done my share of negative documentation.Iwantedto do something positive. So I said to myself, 'Why not do the workeratwork?The man on thejob.' At thattime,he was as underprivilegedas the kid onthe mill" (quoted in McCausland 1938:503). "From then on," Doherty writesnonchalantly,"most of Hine's workwas with thepositive aspectsof life"(1977).Importantly,his photographswere not suddenlyasocial, apolitical, or de-contextualized.They were now just photographsof things for which he had anacknowledged and unabashedrespect-in Doherty's words, "deeprespect forthe good things in life that he photographed" 1977); in Alan Trachtenberg'swords, an "affirmativephotography" 1977:133). Men at Work Hine 1932) isone result-a celebratorybook of photographsof men doing manual labor, astunningset of black-and-whitephotographsof men at the docks, men in glassfactories, men in powerhouses,men in machineshops, menin mills, andmen inrailroadyards.The maleness (manliness?)of the photographs s evident-evenoverwhelming-but so is Hine's admiration for physical labor done by theworkingclasses (see Figures 10 and 11). None of this was hidden.No apologywas forthcomingordeemednecessary.The book was well received whenit firstcame out and "was chosen by the Child Study Association as the outstandingchildren's book of the year" n 1932 (BrooklynMuseum 1977:22). "Hine,"Do-herty writes, "looked at workingmenwith his camera and found a strengthinthem and a pridein their work that was common to all, [and]Hine showed ...that it is themen who arecontrollingthe machinesto createabetter ife forthem-selves" and not the machinescontrollingthe men (1977). Trachtenbergquotesfrom a letter Lewis Hine wrote to Florence Kellogg on February17, 1933: "Ihave a conviction that the design registeredon the humanface throughyears oflife andwork, is more vital for purposesof permanentrecord . .. thanthe geo-metric patternof lights and shadows that passes in the taking, and serves (sooften) as merephotographic azz" (1977:136).Of Hine's workoverall, Walter Rosenblumwrites that "histouchstonewasalways real people in a real world of which he andthey were a part" 1977:14).


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Of his particular ocial vision, Trachtenbergwrites that"Hine'speople are aliveandtough. His children have savvy-savoir-faire, a worldly air.They have notsuccumbed.Their spirit is at odds with theirsurroundings"-unlike, as he putsit, "the subjects in Jacob Riis' pictures"(1977:131). Even criticism leveled atHine by George Crugerfor the "affirmativephotography"of the latterperiodofhis life-for example, that it shows "anexaggerateddesire to glorify the work-ing class" (Cruger 1975:33)-points in a similardirection. Everyone acknowl-edges thatappreciation, positive feelings, and admiration are hallmarksof Le-wis Hine's work, his later work even more openly thanhis earlierwork. Somemay now find it exaggerated, but the question is rarely, if ever, about whetherthose feelings should be there at all.

Learning from MamamaI think about the contrasting ack of opennessaboutfeelings of love and af-fection in most scholarly books-history books, anthropological analyses,

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~il

Figure 10The original caption in Menat Workreads,"Thehoister... watches with specialcare ashe guides a great load of steel beams."Photograph by Lewis W. Hine.


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384 CULTURALNTHROPOLOGY

Figure11Theoriginal aptionnMenat Workeads,"Another onnecter oesaloft."PhotographbyLewisW. Hine.philosophical essays-and I cannothelpbutponderthe intellectual andpoliticalcosts of going against the grain.On the surface,the costs seem greaterfor non-minoritized scholars thanfor minoritized scholars in the U.S. academy.Schol-arly awkwardnesswith, or even closeting of, feelings of real affection-which Ihope aretheremuchmoreoften thanwe reveal-seems self-protective.Ina fieldoften perceived by other social scientists to be too subjective to be consideredreliable, revealing feelings of love would seem to be the kiss of death.My pointis specific. The baringof feelings andreflections about the way ourquestions,doubts,and actionsin "thefield" affect the results we obtain is not theissue here.Ourcolleagues mightconsider such revelations more or less scientific, depend-ing on their interest in methodology andquestions of evidence. It is love that isin question. We have largely bought into the notion that it produces untrust-worthy work presumablybecause it blinds us. To cross that line is to be per-ceived as producingunscholarlywork.


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Consider, then, the apparent eeway given to minoritizedscholars in theU.S. academyat thepresenttime. "Rescue"and"recovery"projectsundertakenby minoritized scholars in the United States in the currentclimate seem to besupported by universities andfunding agencies, andbooks thatbringforth thehardshipsand struggles authoredfrom "within"areoften given special weightand accorded warmreceptions.Where love and affection are visible, we ofteneven applaud.But are we applaudinga work we see as scholarly?Perhapswhatlooks like leeway is more like bait:it looks like something good butends up be-ing a trapthat is very, very hardto escape.The problem is that, if only "insiders"(here meaning underprivilegedorexplicitly minoritized scholars who write aboutplaces or groupsof which theyare a part)are allowed to express feelings of love openly, our selective act of"generosity"fosters two problematicnotions: (1) thatone group of scholars is"understandably"ull of feelings, desires, and political anger and must be al-lowed to show it; and(2) that the other(largerand still moreinstitutionallypow-erful)groupof scholars is not andshould not be. If "objectivity,""distance,"and"dryness"are, then, the hallmarkof the scholarlywork of those in positions ofpower, how is this "other"kind of scholarshipreally perceived, and is there away out of this conundrum?I am suggesting a way out in this essay, thoughnot without some trepida-tion. Anonymousreviewersof an earlierdraftof thisarticle seemed worriedthatmy position would leave no room for critical projects worthfighting for. I dis-agree because, as I have articulatedearlier,criticalprojectsareoften motivatedby love for victims of reprehensibleactions, andmy pointis that such a connec-tion should be incorporated nto the work rather han occluded. It is also possi-ble, though, I concede, difficult, to do ethnographicwork on a community ofpeople some of whose values are utterlyat odds with the researcher's and yetcareenough aboutcoming to understand hemto insist on notgoing public untilthe researcherreaches the point of really caring about at least some of them. Ithink JohnHartiganJr. s a terrificmodel to follow, and his veryrecentbook Ra-cial Situations: Class Predicamentsof Whiteness in Detroit (1999) is a coura-geous piece of anthropologicalwriting.But in suggesting that a politics of love-and not "identitypolitics"-should be the criterionused for distinguishing between good and bad "rescueprojects,"I am makinga case for valuing as good scholarshipa type of anthro-pological work that still standson thinice-my own ongoing workincluded.Inmoments of special reflection, I ask myself what this might mean and what itsintellectual andpolitical consequences are. I ask myself what it is thatI am at-tempting to "rescue"and what the "rescue"effort does, or can, yield. And lastbut not least, I contemplate-with hope but also sadness-how likely it is to beread or consumed, given the preexisting social, economic, political, anddisci-plinaryconditions of the currentU.S. academy.My currentprojectinvolves my mother's mother's life or at least one pal-pable way of relatingto it. She was notjust a relative.ClaraEstrellaBetancourty Beraciertode de la Carrera Fuentes("Mamama")wasmy favoritegrandparent


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and one of my absolutely favoriterelatives. She also lived a very long life, andher way of living it and rememberingit duringthe 44 years of it that I sharedwithherseem magneticto me. Her life spannednearlythewhole of the20th cen-tury(1899-1996), andshe was very, very lucid into hernineties(see Figure 12).I clearly admiredher. BornJanuary24, 1899, in Matanzas,Cuba,she grewup valuing the good, hard-foughtbattle for social improvementand politicalchange early on in her life. Spain's colonial and militaryregime hadjust leftCuba in the handsof the U.S. Armythe month she was born. PedroBetancourt,her favoriteuncle, hadbeen a leading figurein Cuba's 1890s independencewar,especially in the westernpartof the island, and, for the first decade of her life,remainedvery much in the publiceye servingfirst as civil governorof the Prov-ince of Matanzasandthenas one of its first four senators(Dihigo 1934). Whilestill in herteens, she and some friendsfounded a suffragists'club in Matanzas.Changeand social reformwere believable in heryouth,and even ateenaged girl,albeit of a privileged class, could see herself taking political action. Her givenname-Clara Estrellade la Paz (Bright Star of Peace)-was no accident, andneither was herpatriotism.She always revered Tio Pedro's dedication to Cubanindependenceandrelished and learned from his very visible political life.The fact is thatI have long been fascinatedby her deep-seated patriotism(Cubanpatriotism),the conditions in which it was nurturedand sustained overthe course of the 20th century, and the many consequences of that patriot-ism-the psychic and interpersonalones, the epistemological and ontologicalones, the visibly political ones and those that feed on theirinvisibility. To makemore sense of it, I have spent a great deal of time immersed in books, photo-graphs,documents,andnewspapersdatingback to the turnof the 20th century(e.g., Baldwin 1899;Bryan 1899;Halstead1898; see also Thompson1995). Al-though I sometimes fashion myself a historian,this immersionis special. I amnot just interested in the past. I am interested in a specific past. I have foundmyself passionately committed to virtually inhabiting my mother's mother'slife in order o make sense of otherthings-things like nationness andpatriotismamongpeople who arewell traveled,bonds of affection thatappear rrationalattimes andquite revolutionaryat othertimes, and the long-standingpenetrationof Cuba andthe United Statesin each other's lives. Not surprisingly,contempo-raryU.S. thinkerstryingto reevaluateand reclaimpatriotismas an impetusforsocial justice andsocioeconomic transformatione.g., Boime 1998; Nathanson1993; Nussbaumet al. 1996) areincreasingly appealingto me.But the fact, too, is that therearethingsthat were dear to Mamama hatI amnotpursuing,such as herdeepreligious life, long familiar but neverengagingtome. I push ahead,awarethat mine is a rescue attemptbased on love of certainthings in a certainpersonI long cherished-but ponderingmy motivations(per-sonal and intellectual), the balance of the personal and the intellectual in theeventual writtenwork,and the similarities anddifferences between this project,which I view as scholarly,and otherscholarly projects,my own as well asothers.I believeit canbeproductiveo thinkof theIllinois conferenceandmyprojecttogether as "rescueprojects"-driven by love and notby voyeurism-and I am


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Figure 12Clara Estrella Betancourt y Beracierto de de la Carrera y Fuentes ("Mamama").Pho-tograph taken by Jane Desmond in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in the spring of 1991when Mamama was 92 years old. Used by permission.convinced that it is importantto contemplate others like them. Both projectshave particularpassions, doubts, commitments, risks,anddesiredpayoffs. Bothprojectsrisk being consumed as self-affirming, or life-affirming, "rather han"as contributionsto scholarship.Both addressthe past, historicizing particularepistemologies and insisting on a critical historiography.Both feature womenand contemplate up front their gendered experiences and positions at manypoints in the 20th century.Both arealso fueled by analyses of particular lants,privileges,promotions,demotions,presences,and absences n thescholarlyrecord;its patternsof consumption;and its "reproductive" onsequences-criticism ofsome people, some processes, andsome structures nabledby respect, love, andaffection for others.I suspect, given a familiar climate on U.S. college campuses these days,that administratorsand colleagues at Illinois saw the conference as a way of


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"diversifying,""democratizing,"andcreatingroom for other"voices."I doubtthatanyonemouthed the wordssalvage project because it was seen as a confer-ence by Puerto Rican women for Puerto Rican women about Puerto Rico andpuertorriquenas (with possible benefits for other LatinostudentsandfacultyatIllinois). The unfortunatepart-to the extent thatI amrightaboutits consump-tion on the campusas a whole-is that such an assumptionstraitjacketswhatisof greatestvalue aboutthe conferenceArleneTorres and Marvette Perezpulledoff: that it was drivenby love atleast as muchas anger-love for women the or-ganizers appreciatedand admired,and anger that relatively few people jointhem in feeling this way. A good scholarlyendeavor notjust for Puerto Ricanswith Puerto Ricans came aboutbecause of a politics of love and would be seri-ously diminished by being relegated to the identity politics at work in highereducation.It is importantthat we all pay attention to the presence or absence of loveand affection in ourscholarship-at all stages of the productionof ourscholar-ship. If it is notthere,it is important o ask ourselves why and whatwe should doabout t. If it is there,we owe it to ourreaders o show it, to enable themto evalu-ate its role in the nature of our work. To maintain a bifurcated view of whoshould and who should not is to diminish us all and to make everyone's worksuspect.There are always many feelings-many of them quite complex-and it isimportantto acknowledge theircollective presence. But, as I contemplatethepotentialpanoply of feelings thatmight be presentin, or evoked by, my grand-mother's life, my life, Jack Delano's life, Michael Ciavilino's or VirginiaSanchez Korrol'sphotographs,my "rescueproject,"or the Illinois conference's"rescueproject,"I still want to make aplea formakingone of them moreimpor-tant, more visibly important,than we have been trained to do as intellectuals,andthat is love. It is because it may be the most closeted of ourfeelings at thesame time that t maybe the mostenablingone. It is abouttime thatwe recognizeit when it is there,value it rather handenigrate t, and flaunt it because we areproud(for good reasons, i.e., notblindly) of thepersonswe love andof thequal-ity of the workthat love (andthose people) enables us to produce.ImagineLewis Hine's emotionalopenness,his passionandcourageinmostscholarly books-history books, anthropological analyses, philosophical es-says. Whatif it were acceptableto say thatI really love these women (or thesemen,or these sugarcaneworkers,or these PuertoRicanpeople) and it is that oveI want to communicate to you, the readers,through my analyses, my statisticaltable, my detailedresearch,or the photographsI choose to have you see? Imag-ine it being okayto say "stopthesilence"(orerasureorneglectof people we careabout)or"stopthe condescension"(in theway someone we care about s treatedby people both outside and inside the academy)andhere's why: if you readmyscholarlywork,you will come to like thepeopleIcare about not becausethey'reperfectbut because they are a whole lot moreinteresting,curious,quirky,digni-fied, andeven more like you or your friendsthanyou realize. Imagineit beingnotjust something some feminist scholarsaredoing and"gettingaway with"in


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a scholarly world that still deems much of feminist scholarship both too politicaland too personal. Imagine the open admission of love and affection to be some-thing highly prized in the academy as a key ingredient in leading new work or asa necessity in nonfiction writing that is canonized from now on. Imagine havingthe power and the authority to show love openly and to take love productivelyinto account in our assessment of each other's work.

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Love and Rescue