Coyotes

"He’s not an anthropologist only because he lacks the degree. In every other respect, I think, he’s a model of anthropological research. His work is widely used in anthropology courses, not only this book but also the work that he did in Sing Sing. I think of Ted Conover as what an anthropologist would be like if we didn’t have the IRB [Institutional Review Board]. He gets to do all of this crazy, cool stuff that if you’re working at a university they would never let you get away with. They would never let you sneak across the border and go on a plane with people and take them from place to place. But he can do that stuff because he has this freedom. What’s really appealing to me about Conover’s work is that he has this access that’s just unparalleled. But also he has the freedom to write about it in this totally engaging way. He doesn’t have to go through the motions of framing his work in some theoretical body of literature. He just gets to the nitty-gritty. His work is so accessible and so interesting. This is a work that you’ll read and 10 years later you’ll remember these scenes of being in the airport and these guys trying to get on the escalator and they’re not really sure what’s going on. It’s really incredibly written. In terms of how the questions have changed or not changed, one of the things that’s so interesting about this work – this was published in 1987, so probably he did this fieldwork in the early 80s – is that things are so much the same. You still have workers struggling to get from place to place, from job to job, working really hard in these degraded jobs, living as adult men in households with lots of other adult men – just trying to get by. There have been some changes, though, of course. One of the things is that the workers in Conover’s book, in spite of the struggles they had getting from place to place – driving an old beat-up car from California to Florida, and flying on a plane – the movement of undocumented immigrants is even more restricted now. There’s no way you could get on a plane. It didn’t used to be the case that you had to have all this identification to board a plane, and now, of course, you do. It also used to be the case that a lot of states would issue drivers’ licences to people who didn’t have social security numbers. And that’s getting more and more rare. There are very few states that allow you to do that now. In I think that probably is a difference between an anthropological approach and the approach of a journalist. [Conover] probably took more liberties in quoting people. I wondered that about his work when I read it, because he has all these quotes in there. If he wasn’t taking exact notes, he was probably quoting somewhat liberally. In our work I would never quote somebody liberally. I have to take them word for word. There’s a balance there. On the other hand, what emerges is this beautifully written work that’s also very humanising. He opens the book with a discussion of how people tend to quote Mexican immigrants. They tend to get quoted in a way that makes them sound weird or provincial, like, “My donkey is good, yes?” He says, I’m not going to do that here. I’m going to quote them in a way that makes them sound natural, because, in their language, they sound natural. So why would I quote them in English in a way that makes them sound stilted or odd? I get that, I think that’s good."