 Let's talk about anthropology, literary journalism, and memoir. We tend to believe that the concept of literary journalism is something new, that is something kind of modern and really hip, and the reality is that it's been part of the American narrative for a long time. So if we go back to the 1800s, I'm just going to do this just so we know that we have a background and that it's not completely new. And we're going to go over it really quickly. I want to talk about that Kelly O'Hern because he was a really cool character for many reasons. First of all, he was Greek. He came to America in the 1800s, and he learned English here and became a very well-known writer of the time. He broke many rules when he came here. One of the rules that he broke was, before I said that, he was the editor-in-chief of a very well-known newspaper of the time. I can't remember the name, but it was a big newspaper in New Orleans. And then he broke the first rule and he married an African-American woman and miscegenation was considered illegal. So this interracial marriage marked the end of his career as editor-in-chief in the newspaper. So he was fired for marrying a black woman, and he was given just a little job in a lesser newspaper somewhere else, and his job was to write obituaries. Oh my God. Yeah, it was a serious demotion. But this is what's so interesting about these little terms that life takes. He was writing the obituaries when a man by the name of Jean Montaner died. And Jean Montaner was such a cool character in New Orleans that some people knew him as Jean Laficelle, or Jean Latanier, or Jean Racine, or Jean Grirry, or Jean Macaque, or Jean Bayou, or Boudou John, or Bayou John, or Dr. John. And he was the last Boudou high priest in New Orleans. And he was the last one, and probably the one that captured the most attention in New Orleans because he had a lot of power over the African-American population. He was feared, revered, there was a lot of mystery around him. When he died, public school was becoming more prevalent and public standard education and occultism didn't go hand in hand. So that was pretty much the end of occultism out of Africa as it was in the beginning of public school. So when the guy died, rather than writing just a single obituary, he just went all out. And what he did was he presented a beautiful portrayal of African population, occultism, witches and wizards straight out of Africa, all that they had brought from the African tradition and incorporated into their lives in the States. It was a long, long essay. You can find it, it's free online and it's called The Last of the Boudous. It's all you, for some strange reason. So he had already married a black woman. He had already been fired. He wrote this which was very well received. People read about it and felt like, this is not just such and such died and he survived by this and this. It was a long story of traditions in witchcraft and it was just a different way to look at the African population of the moment in the audience. And because he was married to a black woman and he was so immersed in the black world of the audience, he did a lot of exploration. He did anthropology without doing anthropology. He went around observing, documented, reporting and he wrote something called Levy Life, which was just another exploration of the American, the black American subculture in the Orleans. It was just out of the civil war and nobody had explored this process of acculturation. What was happening to the black population now after the civil war? They kind of captured how they were acculturated, how they were trading traditions of the black ones that they had brought from Africa for the mainstream ones so that it could be incorporated into the culture. And then he just got the hang of it and I said, I'm going to go a little bit farther and I'm going to get into linguistics. And what he did with the voices of Don is that he was probably the first one to make hints of the Creole language of the Holocaust in New Orleans. So nobody had done it and suddenly there is music in the way they did this, the way they sell their goods and it is also free of line. You can just type voices of Don and it will come up. So we're talking about mid to late 1800s and then of course we have Mark Twain who did the same thing without calling it anthropology, literary journalism and memoir. So Mark Twain did a trilogy that has largely considered travel writing but it's actually a combination of travel writing and memoir and anthropology. Life of the Mississippi, because without saying it, it captures the life of the people living up and down the Mississippi. Innocence abroad and rough in it, those two have been considered hardcore Mark Twain's travel writing. What reality is a combination of anthropology, memoir because he writes about what he sees, what he lives and at the same time it portrays the communities that he goes across and explores. And of course when Mark Twain went to Central and Southern part of Europe he wrote all his travels in a trumpet broad and the trumpet broad is pure anthropology. It's a very detailed account of European communities and cultures through all the cultures that he visits. So this concept has been around for a long time and then I want to talk about this guy Lincoln Stevens because what he did just kind of sealed the deal that we have literary journalism in America and this guy was the one that called it that way. So he is the editor of the New York commercial advertisers in the 1890s and there is a murderer in town so he called his favorite writer and he says this okay there is a report that a man has murdered his wife a rather bloody heart that crying. I do believe there is a story in it. That man loved that woman well enough once to marry her and now he has hated her enough to quote her out to pieces. If you can find out just what happened between the wedding and the murder you will have a novel for yourself and a piece of news for the newspaper. And what he did he just sanctioned this thing. It's just something happened, a crime has been committed but there is more than a crime there is a book there. You go write the book and give me the little Jews that I need for the newspaper and what he was doing in giving the writer that instruction is he was bridging journalism with memoir. And from then on people just got the hang of it like alright there is something happening and there is more than that. So it's not just a piece of news it's a whole story behind the headline. And then of course 50 years forward in time when we got to 1954 in Kansas there was a quadruple murder. I don't know if you remember because four members of the Clutter family were murdered and Truman Capote was really intrigued by what had happened. So he went to Kansas with her to be in the bottom then investigation of the murders eventually the guys were killed captured and executed and Truman Capote was there through the whole time doing journalism. So so far he's been a writer. Now he's incorporating journalism he went there to Kansas he interviewed the investigators the detectives the family and then he mixed that with the memoir genre and he produced in cold blood and what's so admirable about what he did is that we in that feeling empathy for the murders we we know the guys so intimately and there is a part of us that we cannot understand what they did so this being able to move from from the writer to the journalist and back into the writer wrap it all in a package give it to you and make you feel something that was quite unique and that's what Truman Capote did with cold blood. When cold blood in cold blood was published it became a hit. No one has done or has done anything like that before. People were just interested in in the gore and interested in all the empathy that was aggressing and people were just taken by the language and Capote just did pretty much anything you want it with the reader. It was or it has been the second largest the second largest the second largest sale what is the one I am trying to say the second highest sales after Helter Skelter so Helter Skelter was the true crime that so far it has been the largest what is it? and then cold blood and then we can move to something that we are very familiar with which is magical realism and magical realism you might be wondering what does that have to do with journalism and memoir it's magical realism so it can't be anyone's memoirs right but if you look at the real history of Martin and what he did he was a journalist that's what he did he worked for a newspaper and his job was to go out and look for stories right when he decided to start writing fiction I watched him giving an interview and he said that he was just out of laziness that he just couldn't be bothered to cross check and cross reference and fact check I know a crime was committed but it wouldn't be great if she was this she had magical powers but whatever so he pretty much made up stories based on true facts but he was a journalist and what he did was a beautiful beautiful mixture of journalism fiction and memoir and in the process of doing so he was also introduced in colonial culture to the world so the vibe probe of this mixture is anthropology the world newer Colombia was and the world knew a lot about what we eat the way we dance our modisms, our little Colombianisms because of the Garcia Marques had chops that required to pour everything in the pot and deliver a nice soup so everyone had a taste of Colombia so it's not a concept that is contemporary it's no new it's been at least in the American narrative from the 1800s and probably before but the 1800s these people here are the ones that we have on the record as the first ones to do it or to talk about now we're going to be talking about looking for esperanza and how we in the marion all these different elements of a happy relationship and in order for me to tell you about looking for esperanza I need to take you to Kuwait so let's say that looking for esperanza is the final destination but there is a journey so there is a journey that I want to do at the moment is I think she doesn't like my voice she's just tired so I just want you to do the journey with me I'm going to condense a lot of information and it will make sense the first five minutes you will go like what is there to do with looking for esperanza a lot it will make sense so bear with me let's stay focused because then you will understand why you have that book in your hands I lived in Kuwait in between wars I lived there after the first Gulf War before the second one that is 1996 to 2000 three things made me write about social justice and memoir and anthropology I was an anthropologist when I moved to Kuwait and I have been accepted into Kuwait as a PhD candidate in dance ethnography that's what I wanted to do I wanted to explore cultures through dance that's what I was doing with the Eskimos with the Yupik in Alaska and that's what I wanted to do there big mistake I wanted to do belly dance studies in Kuwait and Kuwait is done dance belly dance that was the first one to go I couldn't do that professionally I couldn't do it so I have a little stint as a DJ is that funny and one of the sheikhs knew that I was an anthropologist and apparently I was the only anthropologist in Kuwait so I heard that you're interested in music and in dance and blah blah blah would you like to have an hour on the radio? and I had a vasculation of world music so I prepared the shows it was a really nice experience it was an hour of pygmy chans and cha-cha-chas and memos and brazilian music and hakas and so on and so forth I would explain the ethnic groups the countries, the history it was a really really good experience until I found out that hour that I was on that hour that everyone in Kuwait switched the radio off it was a flop nobody was interested in international music they wanted green spears they wanted spice girls that was hot pygmy chans excuse me so that didn't work I am not British I am not American although I have an American passport and I couldn't quite fit in any group in Kuwait there are lots of British lots of Americans and I just couldn't find my place and it was very disconcerting just trying to find a community to belong to that's why I was so desperately looking for a job then eventually I got into touch with the curator of the museum and I said I have a plan about a collection of oral history lots of Bedouins have left the desert and lots of Bedouin traditions were and I volunteered to collect oral history and we exchanged emails and it was fantastic the guy was all for it so we made an appointment I showed up and then he realized that Dr. Paramo was a woman he was not too thrilled with Dr. Paramo he was really cool and when he found out that Dr. Paramo was a woman he wasn't too cool about it he said that the Bedouins are not going to talk to women and the guys will not talk to me and so on and so forth someone was opening a school for girls and offered me a job as a teacher I am not a teacher I don't have a license to teach it's alright, it's in Kuwait I don't want to speak Spanish I am going to be teaching Spanish you are a controlling engineer can you teach our sciences? I am teaching our sciences I know how to say we I don't know from which so I was teaching French it was easy I ended up teaching a lot of things to a group of very wealthy Kuwaiti girls and because I was a woman and I have a group of women young women in my class I had access to the women in their families and I started to mix work with work I was a teacher but I was an anthropologist too when we have the meetings with the parents the women would come all covered they would give me a piece of their lives and I started to learn a lot about what it meant to be a woman in Kuwait so far so good so it started to mix my personal life with anthropology I need to make a parenthesis here to add that when I moved to Kuwait my marriage was in shambles it was not working but we thought that it was Alaska that was killing the marriage it was not him, it was not me it was Alaska and Kuwait was going to restore everything that we had lost so we moved to Kuwait thinking that this new country was going to breathe life into our relationship and he did it what happened was that I fell in love with a woman and that I had an affair in a Muslim country that is about this tiny where everybody knows everyone where I was risking being sent to jail and lose my girl but I carried on with the affair when I started to teach the girls we just hit it off I was their favorite teacher and it was just a great relationship a great fantastic relationship I had a great rapport with the girls I was young, I was fit, I was ahead I was just the same color skin, I was the same height we were like sisters it was fantastic right? they didn't have the right to vote and because we were so close and we had this great relationship I pushed the issue it is important that you fight for the right to vote right? you will be able to do this and to do that and they were all fired up they really wanted to go out and do politics there was a lot of war and the Americans are so keen on pushing the notions of democracy and liberation there were lots of women in Kuwait who even talked about the women liberation movement and the right to vote so I invited one to the classroom we rehearsed the whole thing who was going to ask what and they were going to make me look amazing the woman came she was beautiful and she was just really empathetic and sympathetic and everything and she finished and I said okay, do we have any questions? okay, how about you? rehearsed last night nothing there was nothing, just blank space no emotion so I escorted the woman out I apologized, came back to the classroom and said what happened? we don't want the right to vote give me all the reasons because when a woman becomes a public figure that woman becomes the subject of scrutiny we don't want that we don't want to be scrutinized we don't want anyone looking at the shoes and wondering how much we pay for shoes we don't want to sit at a table with men looking at our bodies we don't want to leave our kids behind at home because we have a meeting with men ladies and women don't go out and share the table with other men they gave me all these reasons and because without the right to vote they had more than any American woman in their eyes we have fathers who give us everything that we want we have husbands who look after us we have parties in London just around the corner and we can go and buy anything we want what is it that we gain with the right to vote? we already have it all and I couldn't quite figure out the change of heart why? why two days ago we were so like let's change the world let's set Kuwait on fire and now I found out later that the day before one of the students had seen me with my lover and they knew he was my husband and that was it, that was the end of the honeymoon and as a woman as a teacher, as an anthropologist I also had to understand that all this great report that I had with them was not because I was a really cool teacher it was because I fulfilled a role in the lives they had an idea of an ideal teacher and I was that for the fulfilling that ideal they just drove me off the pedestal and they just forget it, we were no longer friends and it was a very difficult relationship from there on that's anthropology and that's memoir I cannot separate one from the other because my role as an anthropologist is to explain why people do what they do and when they did that to me I had to where my anthropologist had and try to understand why they had done it and I understood the reason let's move back to my academic life I was a PhD candidate in international relations and I had to choose my dissertation topic Kuwait is highly hierarchical there is the rich and there is the poor and there is nothing in between for me as an anthropologist it was very palpable the social injustice and inequality in Kuwait if you drive outside Kuwait you start seeing what you see when you go looking for immigrants like the ones that you read about in looking for Esperanza very neglected in class on the outskirts of the city no AC no fire extinguishers no police no hospital people living in squalor and in complete neglect in the richest country in the world those were Indian women working in Kuwait as maids so I decided to work with them as the topic of my dissertation I wanted to do an evaluation of the quality of life so there are certain parameters and certain models that you can use to evaluate people's quality of life nobody had done that before there so I had to design my own blah blah blah you cannot enter the work camps that's all the limits to everyone I had to find my way into the work camps to do my job as an anthropologist so there is a lot of charismatic women American charismatic women spreading the gospel in Kuwait doing proselytism which is illegal in Kuwait but doing it nonetheless one of them I didn't know was my friend and she was also a charismatic sister and she used to visit the work camps with all the charismatic I'm sorry no charisma we spent the costals so she said sure we go there because we are in the process of spreading the gospel and we go there and we bring toiletries and valuables and so on and so forth if you want to come along you're welcome I went with them and I just realized that their interests and minds were very different we had a moment probably the third or fourth visit you have to realize this is a group of women who are ill we are at almost 125 degrees people living on top of each other cockroaches, tested, accommodation no ACs no emergency exits these women had not been paid or they had been paid three times in a year they were not allowed to leave the country because once you enter Kuwait or any country you cannot leave the country for two years your passport is confiscated upon arrival some of them were converted without their knowledge as soon as they arrived your name is Sahih and now you are Fatima and she doesn't speak English she doesn't speak Arabic she speaks Malayalam and lots of things are done to her to her identity upon arrival the confiscation of the passport is illegal still does in Kuwait and where I live they are in the process of changing that they are ill they are hungry they haven't been paid they are mute, they are invisible and here we have a group of well fed Americans in the costos given bibles in English and more interestingly you have the Indian women dying together their hands on the shiny Bible because it's an American thing it was like a McDonald's it wasn't the content because they couldn't understand English it was shiny and the leather covered it was and it had this cross which is for them Jesus was just another god in the pantheon so you have English and Krishna and Shiva and then Jesus all of them just part of the same pantheon the day that we decided that I couldn't go back with the Pentecostal sisters they started to speak in tongues and I have never ever seen anything like that in my life I was frightened I thought I was going to get eaten I do not understand the concept I do not I am not familiar enough with the religion to understand what happens all I know is that they started to speak in tongues and should enough after they did some of the Indian women who had recently been converted started to speak in tongues too the anthropologists just take in I am taking not I am scared but I am reporting everything that I see then one woman apparently is not speaking tongues she is speaking something else so all the Pentecostal sisters come all that is not the Holy Spirit we need to do something that is something evil on her in her and they start patting her I am just terrified because she is almost like having a fit on the floor just shouting things and these women are patting her all over and then they found out why she was speaking the language of the devil she had an om you know the om she had an om which according to the sisters was deep proof that she was not a real Christian and that, thank you and that needed to be removed because she was thrown out of the window and everyone is excited they are sweating they are kind of dancing doing all this really intense stuff and then they just left and I just could not believe that I mean under placing hands there was a woman with a tumor in the stomach and she was in a lot of pain and everyone is placing hands I do not I am not going I am not going to enter into this or national world or not that works or like noise and a woman had a tumor in her stomach that she was in a lot of pain and that I think she needed a hospital that she needed a physician and but the sisters did what they had to do and they left and they left the women in such a sleep just it felt like abandonment you know that you came and you feel stuck and then you leave something just didn't gel and I never went back with them so from then on I started to go back on myself and I worked with them for two years or two years every weekend I went there and documented reported in their lives whether or not they had been paid whether or not this one was sick and so on and so forth and that was my dissertation because we were out of of a God work Amnesty International was in Kuwait and they heard about the research that I was doing so I was approached and said well we know that you're doing a little bit of social justice and some reported in the work camps would you like to share the results with us sure Amnesty International so I gave him my dissertation they looked at it and said listen this is a lot of science is a lot of hard data this doesn't tell us anything you need to you need to transform all this data into something that we can understand and that is where anthropology and all the literature and all the journalism that I have been doing have to be mixed with the work I had to sit down and rewrite all this hard data into something that was a soft narrative that was invited that was brought upon awareness and something that tapped on the reader's wealth of empathy which I couldn't do with social science so good so far so good in Kuwait we were assigned a huge huge gigantic and because I worked full time I couldn't look after the house myself so I hired an Indian woman to come to my academy with her in the house twice a week she didn't come one day a little big deal the second day that she was supposed to come she didn't come I got worried I called her and she sounded very agitated and said what is it Lucy why are you ill and all she said is I have chocolate water running down my legs chocolate because it had been raining a lot so I thought maybe her apartment was flooded and I asked I said the rain and no madam just chocolate water chocolate water so I can understand this thing there where you are and I'll go and see maybe I need a plummet or something like that when I got there she had chocolate water running down her legs the stench was unbelievable she was sweaty feverish she said why happened to you she collapsed took her to a hospital now another major parenthesis she is Indian and I look Indian in Kuwait which is not good news because Indians are fourth class citizens in Kuwait in the Arab world it pays to be white people know that you are foreigners and they give you respect straight away if you look Indian they treat you like such and it's not it's not a good combination but instead of being white I speak English and I don't speak English with an Indian accent so the moment I say my maid is sick everyone was like oh the maid is sick let's do something there's an American woman here in the house right lots of attention Lucy gets taken away and a few minutes later she is brought back by the arm just by the arm here we don't touch that woman why because she committed a crime she just had an abortion I didn't know that I didn't know that so I said Lucy why happened she was married she had a baby in India but could not afford another point so an Egyptian woman said I can help you with that took her to her kitchen and with a coat of hand she performed the abortion and punctured her uterus so by the time she noticed the chocolate water it had a physical septic septic alright so it was she had an infection in her blood they would not see her at the hospital I took her from hospital to hospital nobody would touch her at the third hospital the doctor told me she committed a crime and you are helping her therefore you are committing a crime both of you will go to jail well this is getting serious so I took Lucy our doctor my ex-husband used to work for British Petroleum so we had our own British doctor and I took Lucy there and I said do something and the doctor said I would not even look at her don't even think about it I can lose my license I go crazy I shout I remind the guide about the hypocritic he took you swore that you were going to save lives that you were not going to discriminate and he said you know what I'm going to give her antibiotics take her home let me make a few phone calls and I'll get back to you tomorrow if she makes it which I doubted so I take Lucy back home I give her all the antibiotics I know that fingers crossed the following day she's alive I go back to the doctor and he says I talked to an Egyptian doctor he has already dealt with those things in the past just tell him that you have a little issue and he'll help you I already talked to him this is what happened I go to the doctor I am with Lucy and he says doctors such and such already told me the issue don't worry you're in good hands you can get your mate here and come with me so I just follow him right and so I just take her without pressure wait what I'm not ill I thought the doctor said that you had an issue you know not me the mates oh let me say I can lose my license for you but I'm not going to lose my license over an Indian woman what do you do what you cannot possibly just look at what's happening from the outside you have to be involved you have to do something the oncologist the woman the mother the wife every bit of me had to do something for Lucy right unfortunately back then I was not an American citizen yet so I had a Colombian passport with my Colombian passport I could not travel to India without a visa that would take a week so I could not go with her to India so the British doctor just gave a cocktail antibiotics and I don't know what else is it just put her in a plane and let's hope that she makes it and that's exactly what I did I just put a little note in her as soon as Lucy arrives please let me know this is my telephone number and you know call collect blah blah blah that's what happened and she made it back then I still had this great relationship with my students so I brought up the subject and I knew I knew there was just dangerous territory that they were too young and that I was given them too much information and I was dying to know what they had to offer because they were friends right and what they had to offer was a condemnation no way she needed to die because she killed the baby and if she killed the baby why would she have the right to do that and those are the moments where you have to make memoir I'm living there this is the experience that I'm having but I'm also documenting this yet at the same time that I'm documenting I'm offering a next reign of the Kuwaiti culture not the Muslim culture not the Arab culture but the Kuwaiti culture all those things just kind of intercepted or intersected naturally in Kuwait we talked about honor killings with children of course they have to happen do you know what a bad apple does to the rest of the bunch and this is after we've been together for years after we have talked about the right to vote and after we have talked about how important it is to have a voice and after they have a message already engraved you know as part of their lives but what they have is the culture the culture is very heavy you can't shake it off everything that your culture feeds you I left Kuwait I moved to Florida with all this with the experience of having worked with an neglected group of women with the experience of writing all this hard scientific data into an easier to digest a narrative for Amnesty International and then the anti-slavery organization in London so I knew how to do it but there was no book inside what I had done I had done just as a part of the social justice agenda if you want to call it that way when I moved to out of Kuwait and I got to Florida I was a teacher at a university and on my way to the university I went by a work camp lots and lots of immigrants there even just life that didn't even look like an American life I would drive through all the the trailer parts and look at them and look at the children with protruding bellies and would see the hunger and the need and the disease and I said this is not to be American this is not the same country you just drive 10 minutes to the east or 20 minutes to the north and you have golf courses and sunky hotels and here it is I mean this is the American dream I'm reflecting on this when I read in the newspaper about a woman named Especanza and the newspaper said that she had lost a baby crossing the border and that she had tried to smuggle the babies because she was afraid that the coyotes would force her to leave the baby behind because it's very inconvenient it's a very dangerous one journey and the last thing the smugglers want is a dead baby so she knew that and she knew that she would be forced to leave the baby in an unmarked grave and she just could not bear the thought of leaving the baby behind so she just fracked it and pretended that he was asleep until the baby is not asleep what's going on here and she didn't know she had to leave the baby in an unmarked grave she has no idea what the baby is but the story also said that Especanza lived in Lakeland at the same time what I did I mean was that a ha moment like what? I mean this woman lost the baby and she lives right here in Lakeland this is a kind of middle class neighborhood everyone is pretty middle class in Lakeland and I don't know anything about this and I started looking for her and I went up and down the peninsula east to west and north to south going from migrant park to trailer park to trailer park looking for a woman named Especanza of course I couldn't find her because they changed their names they adopt different personalities they're chameleons they get sold fake IDs and they adopt that identity for six months for a year then they move, they marry it's impossible to trace and they move because they are seasonal so one month they are in Florida two months later they're in Georgia later they're in the Carolinas and six months later they are in New Hampshire, Vermont out there they're very difficult to track down and I started looking for her for many reasons I found that she was a woman like me an immigrant like me a mother like me someone with dreams like me I just feel like I knew this woman and I became obsessed with finding her I just wanted to find her and not because I was looking for this story I just wanted to hold her I wanted to book her in the eye and have a drink with her I don't know, I had no reason it was no rational I just wanted to find this woman and that's exactly what I did for 18 months after going up and down the peninsula looking for this woman I ended up finding her just around the corner from my house now there are things that are not in the book because they were not relevant when I was writing it and now that I look back it was relevant for instance Esperanza was an alcoholic and when I met her she told me that she had been sober for a long time and because she was sober I was very supportive and all that and she wasn't sober her kids told me and I could smell the breath sometimes and her behavior was a little bit erratic and there was something too with one of her girls there was a cholo which is Mexican born in the States and this cholo an older man was very fond of the three girls and I was not happy with the dynamics and I do believe the cholo was giving these girls a lot of presence in exchange for something and I think Esperanza was well aware of that and she was fine with it but it was not my place to either put it in the book because it was not relevant or to intervene because it's just a complicated matter I have no proof just a gut feeling that there was something not quite right there did I do literary journalism? all the time all the time every time you go out I mean you interview a journalist you might not be one by train by train but you are one when you ask questions you write down information you document, you observe you document, you report so what's the difference between the anthropologist and the journalist because the anthropologist does the same thing we go we immerse ourselves into a culture we document, we report so what's the difference what do you think the difference is between a social scientist and a journalist a journalist is looking at the story and an anthropologist is looking at the culture it's a scope, right? so the difference lies in the scope we are looking at changing views teaching people about a subculture while the journalist is more punctual more contemporary he is reporting for today's news but I see a problem with that because this is within the description of how people want to categorize it so it's like you have said that they go hand in hand you got to report and then you got to make sure that it is the accurate fact of a certain culture but I don't think it can be separated those two can't be separated because it's still about the group of people it's about how they act it's about what makes them who they are so I see that as a problematic that it's just categorization it's just thicker the way I would like to see it is that we both do the same thing I am not a journalist I am an anthropologist but I do the job of the journalist when I go out and interview how do you feel about this health services you have and so on I am doing the role of the journalist the difference is how I report my findings back and what the aim is as an anthropologist I am not looking at being published by today's news or to make it to the weekly news I am looking at changing the outlook completely or bringing awareness so looking for Esperanza is timeless in the sense that for as long as we have undocumented women working in this country the book is relevant that doesn't happen with news right should we take some questions now or comments anything when it came to writing the report for Amnesty International did you find that because you started off with hard science and data did you find that when you sort of turned it into a narrative it sort of lessened the impact rather than just having statistics or do you think it helped it by turning it into a narrative I think it helped because what you want to do with that is you want to compel people to change right you want people's empathy and you don't do that with numbers and you solve in the narrative when you take all these numbers and all these statistics and all the results and diagrams and you turn that into a narrative anyone can read that not everyone can understand the numbers of the statistics but everyone can relate to a group of women who are being exploited everyone understands the concept of modern slavery numbers are very difficult to digest so I think it helped you go about trying to find I mean did you have the newspaper article and did you just simply say I'm looking for this woman who lost her baby how did you get yourself into the the trailers or the camps how did you do that Saki as you said I just went I found one trailer park and I looked around they looked Mexican they could have been Salvadorian or Guatemalan but you know they looked all the same from the border there so that's exactly what I did the moment you park your car everyone looks at you and think that you are children and families and then you come here or that you're La Migra and so if they think you're La Migra nobody talks to you, everyone goes back to their park the doors are closed, the windows are closed and suddenly the park is empty right but I'm sorry, yeah exactly very good I made the mistake of driving a funky sporty car into a trailer park and nobody talked to me and then it dawned me like maybe I just need to drive a truck or something that is more approachable but that's exactly what I did so I would go to a trailer park and if anyone talked to me and I said hey listen, I'm looking for Esperanza Lasquez do you know her? does she wear your money is she messing with your man what I said you know is I buy books and I know she has an interesting story and they would say oh you're looking for a story and she would tell me her story and we would be in the trailer park and everyone just walked by hey what are you guys doing oh this woman writes a book and she wants stories come to my trailer after you finish I'll tell you mine and what happens is by the time I got to the following trailer park I already had five wonderful stories I didn't set out to write a book I just wanted to find it I didn't want to write a book I just wanted to I just wanted to see her I just wanted to find her there was nothing else there and the heart that I look for heard the more stories I have and then I would go home and just look at all the interviews and I said there are lots of commonalities there is a lot of history a lot of emotion a lot of blood and tears and grit and hope it was just very moving to see all this collection of humanity here and what it meant to be a mother a woman what it meant to be hungry and ignored and voiceless and it was just so much abandonment in their voices that I started to think I think I have something here I think I can do something with this and the thing that I thought I could do was to give them voice I cannot change their lives I cannot do integration reform I cannot change the way things are but I can give them voice and that's what I try to do in looking for an answer what do you think what was your responsibility to the women that you interviewed did you in terms of your follow up with them so for many of the women in the book it seemed like you developed a relationship with them where you would visit them many times did you keep in contact with them did you show them the product at the end what did you think if any of us were going to do something like this what do you think the responsibility the moral or ethical responsibility is to show them the product should be going with this is my end game and hopefully there will be a product at the end of this so anthropologists just like journalists they need people's consent to publish the story that is the the first horrible because they are hiding from the law so they don't want the names they don't want the pictures taken they don't want the addresses written down so they're very unrightfully so they're very suspicious about people making inquiries about their lives but once you get over that once they say I'll tell you my story but don't put my name down or do not identify me with the pictures or whatever once you have that and you develop a report and if that report happens to become friendship that's easy because then you just go with your heart you can put professional guidelines aside and just go and visit a friend the problem lies for me is when you are not friends and when they are the subject of your investigation so you have to be very careful about your boundaries and there are guidelines and anthropology just like in journalism that you're not supposed to pay your subject for information the information has to be given to you freely you're not supposed to reward but if you go and interview a woman that is hungry the least you can do is offer an enchilada in exchange for information and I broke the guideline and I would do it all over again when I went to the fields to work with them I didn't want to give money because I didn't have any because it's just not right it's not a big catch for information but what I thought I could do is in the process of working with them going to the fields with them I could learn I could experience in my own skin and body the pain that they had to endure when they worked and at the same time I could give them something in exchange and that was that all the tokens that the farmer gave me for my work we go to them it's not completely ethical but I'm happy with that I'm happy with being unethical like that now here is the other thing is that I conducted all the interviews in Spanish because they don't speak English and would you like to see the book when it comes out? well that was two years down the road and I had almost to start the process all over like looking for Esperanza and Maria and Laura I don't know where they are anymore there's scatter some of them have been deported some could be dead I had to go back and look for them again all over up and down the peninsula with my books feeling this this commitment this was part of the deal I told you that you would have the result and I found three of them and if you go to my website we just a little bit neglected if you go to looking for Esperanza you will see the pictures of the women with the book three of them I don't remember the first one but the nursing one the one with the crazy question and so here's the book and she goes in English and it don't mean what a stupid woman I was it had not crossed my mind that what I owe was a book in Spanish that I could read and relish and say that's me, that's my story they couldn't do that and in all those years between the investigation and the interviewing and the reporting and the publishing never crossed my mind to have the book in Spanish for them but it was too late and it was just a short comment it's just the way it is that's what happened and I found three of them Laura's husband speaks English so he read the book to her and that was really cool and Carlitos' mom doesn't speak English and she was the one that I was very interested in finding because I wanted to see Carlitos again I wanted to see how he was doing and I wanted because I'm not seeing like that I just wanted to find out the result of the trial the lawsuit found them I went looking for them and it was very difficult to find they were very difficult to find and they're living in this grandiose house a cul-de-sac two Dutch ran trucks parking in the driveway I'm thinking I guess that's my answer that's my answer right here they invited me in the house was amazing this is the kitchen with this aisle of running that went on forever so nice your house is so nice it was a beautiful beautiful house Carlitos was he's gonna say probably a man and he had grown funny enough the little torso that he had it had grown so he was a bigger kid and he had grown too so you could tell that he was no longer the little baby that had met had state of the art wheelchair with all the gadgets and the whistles and everything he was just moving with his mouth and just going around the house and it was just so beautiful to see that he was not the little Carlitos with those contraptions he had technology some people had come to the aid and they say we see potential do you wrong here it is go live the rest of your life with whatever we can give you did he speak English? yeah yes he did he said you wanna be my girlfriend I don't wanna be your girlfriend so yeah that's the answer to your question did I answer it? yeah do you find it it's hard it's hard to separate your own personal compassion from dealing for your subjects when you have to go into professional setting or do you not tend to go into that boundary because you just appreciate it for your human being overwides some of the protocols it's such a dangerous such a dangerous field this is what happened in Kuwait and I'm going to answer to the question with a story because I am a storyteller right? when I went into the work camp to work with Indian women in Kuwait I already knew the result of the research I already knew it I knew that they were neglected I knew that they were exploited I knew that they fell under the category of modern slaves I knew they were voiceless and all these things I knew that my job was easy all I had to do was go and corroborate my suspicions I have preconceived ideas all I had to do was go spend two years with them and check the boxes yep I was right I knew this I knew this I knew that and the results were devastating because they did not match my preconceptions for instance I saw them as exploited neglected and pretty much in a bad shape and they were very proud of being in Kuwait because for them to be in Kuwait put in way above the hierarchy that they otherwise wouldn't be in India I saw the gender segregation as a hindrance for development of sexual donations or everything they had no contact with men for two years and I go how crazy is that because women are young they're beautiful they're strong and they don't have companionship because of this gender segregation rule here right? that's terrible and they're like oh my goodness we are not happy it is fantastic no one feeds us up no one gives us pregnant no one abuses us this is great right? how about air conditioning systems we don't like air conditioning systems we don't need these units they're noisy heat is nuts we like that that's India and I just came back from spending 45 days in India I was in a match one and I was reflecting all this I'm living with Indians eating what Indians eat living the Indian life and the Himalayas and it's 99% humidity because the air is just so humid and so heavy and no one is using this we just have a malfunctioning fan and that's plenty for everyone they felt very privileged to be in Kuwait because many of them were Iroba Iroba in Indian the caste system disappears when they leave Indians so they felt liberated they were more caste system they were all equal how wrong was that I had gone there to say I already know the answer to all my questions all I had to do was ask a few questions and hang out with them observe and check the boxes and I had to start all over it is hard it is hard when you start studying culture not to walk in with preconceived notions I don't know how to do it you already have preconceived ideas of when you are going to find it I don't know how to do it otherwise you just have to go and admit when you have closed that line and go back and take a step back start all over what do you have to do about pesticide exposure I mean you were in the fields with the pesticides what people did to check up did you take something to prevent there was no there wasn't any irrigation the times that I went out with that no I was not exposed to that I actually never crossed my mind I didn't know about doing something working with apple pickers to do an article for a season and then I looked at the contract which said you will be exposed to this and this and this and this and I said well you are about something else that's interesting I never crossed my mind to check but I was never exposed to any chemicals along those lines what were you ever worried about your safety in those ghetto areas with that nice truck not really I felt a little bit aware of certain difficulties when I would go to a woman's trailer park and say you need to leave before fly because Francisco can't fly and he doesn't want me to spill my names to him I don't want him to know that I'm talking to strangers or the day I walked into the trailer park and this woman's sister had a black eye and I knew the guy was there and I couldn't do anything but I knew there was violence and it was palpable and it was just part of the culture they all got beat up by their husbands and it was just like having a cult sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't it's just the way it is it's just the way it is but not my personal safety and I think the fact that I am Latina and that I look like them that kind of just creates a sense of safety it's different I would imagine I don't know I would imagine that it would be different if you are quite blue-eyed blonde walking into a group of undocumented Mexicans maybe it would be different because you would be perceived as odd and what does you want but once I was there I was just one of them so there was no mystery but I was aware of some violent men in where I was without feeling afraid I was aware that they were around can you talk about when it came time to put the book together and the vision of the chapters that are the women's stories themselves so the letter to your mother and the second person essay can you talk about why they were important for you to include I wrote my mother's funeral first that was my first book when it was impolished and I was working on looking for Esperanza when my mother died and it was just very perfect in time for me I didn't have the energy to honor these women when I felt that I should be honoring my mom so I just kind of wanted to channel everything on my energy I just wanted to pay tribute to my mom and I had nothing left for the women I just wanted to sit and mourn and in the process of mourning I included my mom in the story how wonderful it would be even rather than compartmentalizing my mourning and my tribute pain how about if I could just make a package and make my mom part of it and I had written a letter to my mom which I never finished but we had this conversation over the phone because she thought it was the most ridiculous thing that I would spend so much money chasing a woman that she would even want to talk to me yet the reason she was so certain that Esperanza wouldn't have talked to me is because they have secrets and things that are put in the back we were talking about it yesterday all the things that our mothers don't tell us because they belong in the past and they don't know where to reveal this we move on and my mom understood that and that put her so close to Esperanza somehow we move on just don't go waking up it's all in the past and so the letter came I had a literary agent and she was very well respected and I was over the moon that she would even look at me her name was Anne Hawkins and she worked for J.H. Hawkins agency which is the oldest literary agency in New York she has this huge hit a few years ago it was Ronald Reagan's biography and he was a bedseller and she was just looking at me and I said I'm interested in your work and I was like my god this is fantastic right so I wrote the thing I gave it to her and she had it for about four years four years during which I didn't get any feedback nothing every time she got a rejection letter or it was a close call Ariana such and such said that it was really good but they just published Enrique's journey this is really good but they just did a documentary of love it just never happened but I never knew why it wasn't selling because she's not a writer herself she's a saleswoman so what she does is she grabs a product and she sells it well but she's not a writer so she never went through the manuscript and said okay this isn't working you need tweaking here and modifying there I never get that but one of the things that she told me and this is the things that I shared with you in the workshop is that the question that you need to ask is how do I make my book stand out because if you look for justice memoirs social justice memoirs thousands of them and the only way your book is going to sell is if you make a footprint and that is when I decided that maybe this introduced the way they were initially were not going to work that they needed to be interspersed and I needed more meat in between so the idea of the the scenario was good I think it works as a literary device because it allowed me to jump so I do a little bit of jumping but you get the idea because every paragraph gives you an idea of a different aspect of the subculture that I was working with the letter to my mom I just used the letter that I initially wrote and finished the letter with the bits of conversations that we had over the course the web lags are coming it just came to me like an epiphany it was pretty much one day I just had this vision of them coming out of the river with gills you know just coming wet and just kind of shaking their gills and getting rid of the water and it was just almost an image that just came and I just wrote with it and I just wrote it just one after none and I never went back I never revised never edited it is the way I wrote it that afternoon and what I did is just I didn't want to have a continuum of interviews I just wanted to have a little bit of music just to have a little bit of rhythm to the breathing so it didn't become too thick, too dense, too heavy and that's the way the way the book is organized yeah did I answer your question? can you talk a little bit more about the decisions you made about what information to include about you mentioned that there was those details that you didn't include because they weren't relevant so how did you decide if they weren't relevant because they were going to make the reader lose sympathy for her or distract from the story of her journey what way makes that decision so when you're right about social justice you make lots of ethical decisions because you have to decide what information goes into the book and what you leave out and that is ethical you choose the ton of the book first you decide what kind of tone your book is going to have is it going to be an expose do you want to teach, do you want to compel do you want to move is just a collection of stories once you decide what you want to do you start eliminating so you associate let's say I have 120 stories 25 stories are about losing a baby so I can do just one of them the one that represents the widest scope of the journey so I choose that interview and eliminate the other 24 not because they are not relevant but because I don't have the space for 25 women losing their babies in a book so I choose the one that is the widest scope and that's the one that goes the other 25 the other 24 just feed information that do not make it to the book so you make associations and choose one that represents the biggest scope of that of that circle here right so you choose the voice you choose the kind of sentiment that you want to arouse and then you choose and group the stories and then you just put it all together it's not important for the reader that Esperanza is an alcoholic I'm talking about a woman making a journey from A to B on food and losing a baby in the journey whether or not she drinks is irrelevant did you change her being an alcoholic to her being sick? no she was sick the day I found her she had a broken fever yeah nothing was changed nothing was changed it was omitted intentionally just because it didn't help the narrative it didn't help the tone you had to make lots of little ethical decisions did I answer your question? you mentioned that you had to set out to write a book when you started seeking out these women looking for Esperanza at what point did you make the decision and what was sort of the approach I mean I guess you had the notes obviously because you're an anthropologist so you were writing things down and then turning it into a book for you that's pretty much the way I said earlier it was this just feeling every time I got home and let's say I had five interviews in one day and I would be at home just taking a walk there's so much here I mean I can't believe this woman has crossed the border 32 times I can't believe she swam, she crawled she jumped, she did everything I mean it's like an athlete it's just fantastic to be like the border Olympics 101 ways to make it to the USA very creative it was just the amount and the heft of the stories that compelled me to write it I just, I could not just put it aside and say well that's not Esperanza it was just a call and I think it was the connection for being a woman I think it had it been a man I don't think this would have translated into a book I don't think the urgency would have been as heavy and as compelling as it was knowing that there were women, mother, immigrants me I think there was just a more visible connection to the women that was hearing that they were just sharing their lives and their journeys and their dramas with me I think it was just something very visceral that compelled me to put everything together yeah, something tells me Brazil didn't want to have people she just wanted money but see, she doesn't help the cause but I think she's important because she's the great not everything is I wonder if I can dream for my kids no, I mean, she wants money and I don't think that her presence in the book is important because it's realistic I mean, it's a real woman and she'll get her penny in any way she can so the story goes that when Abraham leaked in that he said, so here's the woman that started the war from Uncle Tom's heaven and so one of my questions to you is, are you doing anything to market your book to increase the popularity so that perhaps the next person who might end up in the office would read that book and have a different perspective on the current narrative to market no, Beno Press is a very small press I have visions of this guy printing the books in his garage I mean, the guy just somewhere there just doing it's a very small press they are fantastic in as much as they publish social justice books and I really admire that and I know he doesn't make a lot of money and he keeps publishing these books every year but there was no money no budget for promotion from the beginning when the book was published and he won a few awards and got little bits of some accolades I was called to do a reading in New York to two different places it was probably like three months after the book was published and it was huge it was a big moment for me as a writer because I have never read anything in public and God bless the baristas because they were the only ones in the place and I say that and it's very humbling because when you write a book you think everyone is crazy about it and when you do a reading in New York you have these visions like if they can do the wave it's a very humbling process nobody was there just the baristas and I'm just there waiting for anyone to show up with a big smile and a big just thinking a few people were watching for coffee and the baristas were kind enough to say the coffee is on the house if you stay for a while so they stayed and that's fine because that's part of being a writer that was my promotion that's how I promoted the book and the other reason it didn't go any better it's just now that I know when I realize how foolish it was to pretend to have a full house in New York when nobody knew me New York is the huge ocean and I am a little tadpole it just doesn't work when you're a tadpole you just choose a little tank and that's where you go so I'm not a promotion I'm just a word of mouth and the hope that you tell your family and your neighbors and that we read the book and we can't afford the book that we share the book so more of us become aware and we do something and if we don't do something that's good too because part of the process is to bring awareness good but half of my job is to make you aware so whether or not you choose action that's up to you for as long as you're aware I'm happy so let's share the book when it was in its initial stages did you ever think about possibly doing it as a journalistic piece like a feature of some sort or was it always going to be a memoir from the onset or like in serial pieces no this little thing that I read in the newspaper was part of a long I don't know what you call it like a documentary and the newspaper was from the Palm Beach Post John Lantigua was the journalist that interviewed Esperanza and he was instrumental in the writing of the book now he writes through crime so he's a journalist based in Miami and he is there all the time documenting crimes and writing fantastic novels about all the all the glory in Miami but from the from the beginning it was a memoir are we doing it for time? any questions? now the question that I have for you did we see the intersection of these three things how many times in what we do journalism anthropology and memoirs intersect did we see that? that's the point of being here cool are we good?