we are all contaminated - Sistema de Bibliotecas de la Universidad ...

“here” nor “there,” native or foreigner. Each “side” of my identity is further complicated by
the biographical particularities I carry with me, questioning, to paraphrase Kirin Narayan
(1993), how “native” I could be as an anthropologist anyway. Studying and researching for
years in both the United States and Uruguay have shaped me profoundly but in oftencontradictory
ways, reflecting the differences between a Euro-American academic tradition of
detached scholarship and the Latin American tradition of the “public intellectual” who
critically analyzes and directly engages with social problems (Caldeira 2000: 7). My
anthropology and my writing, then, carry an “accent,” to echo Teresa Caldeira (2000), but one
that is doubly marked.
In Montevideo, I lived at my old maternal grandmother’s home in the working class
barrio Nuevo París, adjacent to La Teja and at a walking (or biking) distance from many of
my fieldwork sites there. Montevideo is a relatively easy city to navigate, and I usually took
the public bus to other research sites spanning much of the city. Living in Nuevo París, of a
family from there, afforded symbolic capital when engaging with grassroots activists in La
Teja. I first met Carlos Pilo via his brother Cholo, who owns and runs a small paint shop
across the street from my house. Carlos would often tell people as he introduced me, “He’s
one of us, an ex-pat Uruguayan from Nuevo París.” Indeed, one of the reasons I became
interested in researching the lead issue is that it felt “close to home,” as La Teja and Nuevo
París share similar characteristics as long-standing working class neighborhoods undergoing
prolonged decline, impoverishment and de-industrialization. My grandmother is deceased,
but I still have cousins and many friends in the neighborhood. We were also living in the
“contamination zone,” so lead for me was always a personal as well as an academic concern.
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