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later that my slight accent and position as foreign researcher lent me an authority the activists
could make use of. I thus fortuitously and literally found myself taking a “seat at the table”
with the CVSP. From that day forward, I received direct invitations to participate in CVSP
activities, I became a regular participant in the CVSP public talk circuit, and I was invited to
their weekly organizational meetings.
In addition to public talks, I was interviewed several times on commercial and
community radio, and I collaborated with print media articles on lead. I regularly passed
along scientific articles on lead poisoning to the CVSP and the lead poisoning clinic. The
Brecha weekly published a letter to the editor in which I supported an article written by
Carlos Amorín on cutting edge research on lead poisoning that I had given to him and helped
him interpret (Canfield et al 2003). I mentored undergraduate students conducting
investigative journalism, social psychology, social work, and sociological studies on the lead
issue. I volunteered time at the lead poisoning clinic and helped organize CVSP activities,
and I played a primary role in organizing the first Social Encounter on Lead, drawing together
over one hundred fifty activists, academics, citizens, officials and professionals involved in
the lead issue (see Chapter 6). Finally, I set up contacts between the lead poisoning clinic, the
Toxicology School and the Catholic University of Uruguay, and lead researchers at Cornell
and Harvard Universities, which resulted in ongoing collaborative research on lead poisoning
in Uruguay.
In participating in the movement, I took an active, unabashed stance of solidarity,
which is variously referred to as an activist, engaged, militant, or “barefoot” form of
anthropological research (Farmer 1999; Hale 2006; Merry 2005; Scheper-Hughes 1995). I
took an engaged stance primarily for reasons of personal and political affinity, but it was also
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