"A Sixth Memo for the Next Millennium: Vulnerability"

Ruth Behar’s first book was The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village: Santa Maria del Monte (Princeton, 1986; expanded paperback edition, 1991), the story of how a small village negotiated its relation to the past in the wake of social transformations that removed people from the land during the late Franco years. Her second book, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story (Beacon Press, 1993), an account of her friendship with a Mexican street peddler, gained her national prominence. Translated Woman was named a Notable Book of the Year for 1993 by the New York Times and was adapted for the stage by PREGONESTheater, a Latino company based in New York which will premiere the production at The Painted Bride in Philadelphia in November 1998. (see the end of the lecture for more information on Ruth Behar).

A Sixth Memo for the Next Millennium: Vulnerability

Ruth Behar

As I write, my house is being painted by workers from Costa Rica. When I bought the house, an 1880s Victorian, nearly ten years ago, it was Wedgewood blue, the dark gray blue of a business suit, and it was trimmed in white. I didn’t dare change the colors; there was paint left in the basement and it was easier simply to keep patching up the flaking façade each summer with the old colors. It took me almost ten years of living in the house to realize the house was truly mine and I could change the colors; to realize, too, that I could even paint the house in more than just two colors.

After weeks of poring over "painted lady" books and experimenting on sheets of plywood, I chose nine and then narrowed the selection down to seven colors, some of them simply because I loved their names. I have not let go of the color blue, because blue pays tribute to the sea and to the goddess Yemayá, who owns the waters and to whom I feel a strong

kinship as a child of many diasporas and ocean crossings. But I have many blues now: there’s Stratford Blue, the gentle color of the ocean on a clear day; there’s Blue Epic, the periwinkle color of the ocean on a moonlit night; and there’s Matisse Blue, a glittering turquoise, the stone of Turkey, from where my father’s Sephardic family comes. And then there’s Poet’s Purple (a contemplative lilac), there’s Sea Queen (a minty Caribbean green), there’s Amber Light (a sunny yellow, for the gables), and there’s Carnation Kiss (a hot

pink, for the accents). With these colors I want to begin celebrating my son Gabriel’s upcoming bar mitzvah next summer -- the yellow in my color design is there for Gabriel, who insisted on some maize and blue, the colors of Michigan football, to which he is passionately loyal. With these colors and those of my own I am also marking a joy I had not yet dared allow myself -- the joy of claiming the place where I live as home. You see, I still dream of a house in Cuba, even though I left the island as a child. But in the meantime, I am learning to cherish my tent in Ann Arbor whose colors both express my son’s rootedness in Michigan and my own nostalgia for the island and the sea.

Right outside the left-hand window of my office is Bernardo, who is standing at the top of a long ladder, giving the Poet’s Purple a second coat. I can see the top of his head, and when I hear him sneeze repeatedly I worry about the damage to his lungs from the painting he’s doing for me. While he paints my house I write. I write about him, because I cannot ignore his presence outside my window as I collect the thoughts I will present at the Getty. Bernardo works hard, from early morning till dusk, while his wife and six children wait for him in Costa Rica. He thought to come to the United States for a few months, earn some money and return, but it’s been four years and he hasn’t gone back; maybe this

Christmas he’ll go, he says. Bernardo is part of a family operation run by his brother-in-law, Marvin, an engineer and contractor who recently married an anthropology graduate student and has settled in Ann Arbor, where he now has more requests for his fine workmanship than he can accommodate. Marvin’s older brother, Saul, also works with the group; he too has left a wife and children behind in Costa Rica, and I imagine they must miss this thoughtful man, who fortunately made a mistake in the placement of the Sea Queen green that turned out to be so beautiful it’s now part of the design.

Indeed, rather than complaining about my desire for so many colors, Bernardo and Saul are enjoying the exuberance, which is more reminiscent of the popular aesthetics of Costa Rica than the beige and tan houses they usually are asked to paint in Ann Arbor. I’m glad they are the ones painting my house. I take pleasure in talking Spanish with them, in hearing the names of the colors in Spanish. They tell me stories of how they live -- they share an apartment with Marvin’s and Saul’s father, Bolívar, a master carpenter who is the father of eleven children, and with Dennis, Marvin’s brother-in-law by his first marriage; they attend to the cooking and laundry on Sundays; they spend little and send money home. Their stories, their presence in Ann Arbor, help me to imagine how it must have been for my maternal great-grandfather, Abraham Levin, to arrive alone in Cuba and share an apartment with four other men while working for several years to bring the family out of Poland in the decade before the Holocaust.

I will not forget that it is the labor of Latinos from the other side of the border, men who have chosen to be separated from their families in the hope of offering them a better life, which is making possible the enactment of my vision of the home I want to make for myself on this side of the border. I am a woman who writes at home, whose life teeters between agoraphobia and wanderlust. As I put down these words, I turn and see, at the right-hand window, Saul balanced on the last rung of the ladder, painting the roof trim in the Sea Queen green, looking in and perhaps wondering what it is I spend so many hours doing at the computer that somehow allows me to earn enough money to hire men like him to paint my house.

* * *

I know you didn’t come to the Getty to hear me speak about painting my house. I have promised to talk about lofty subjects -- vulnerability and the approaching millennium -- and please be assured I will do so. But my opening story is not a divertimiento. It sets the stage for much that I want to say today about immigration, diaspora, identity, inequality, and the new world order that we have created on the eve of the turn of the century. I have told you the story about painting my house because I am interested in conjunctures. I am drawn, in my life and work, to the unexpected crossing of paths. Anthropology, the discipline I chose at a young age when I was desperately seeking an intellectual framework that would help me to make sense of the mixing of cultures and diasporas to which I was born, is the studied effort to make unexpected paths cross. It is a staging of difference, a theater of the human relationships created when an observer marks a subject and a territory for intimate observation. It is a theater of encounters that are often surreal, a theater rooted in a need to cross borders and in a deep faith in the possibility of translation.

When unexpected paths cross, there is vulnerability on both sides. There is the vulnerability of the observer, putting herself or himself in the risky position of choosing to go on red alert and become a witness to another’s reality, and then there is the vulnerability of the observed, whose actions are being watched and questioned. Lately, the borders between observer and observed are no longer so clear, and the distances between them and the places they inhabit have grown smaller. The observer is also being observed, and her or his presence as a witness often challenged. I spent years traveling back and forth to Mexico to work on my book Translated Woman, the life story of Esperanza Hernández, a Mexican street peddler. When I was done I discovered another border much closer to home, similarly marked by race and class differences. My friend Marta, from the same town as Esperanza, settled in gritty inner-city Detroit, a half hour away from the convalescent quiet of tree-lined Ann Arbor, and she became the one who came to my house and commented on the way I live; I no longer had a hiding place, I felt exposed, my privilege all too visible.

It is the border, now literally located at my home, that I am encountering in my interactions with Marvín, Saul, Bernardo, and the patriarch Bolívar. We have Spanish in common and similar longings for homelands left behind. Saul and Bernardo, who’ve come from the countryside of Costa Rica directly to Michigan, treat me with deference, but they also joke easily with me. And while I’m paying them extremely well for their work, each day I feel embarrassed that I’m not offering them big meals at lunchtime, for I know this is the Latino way of doing things, I know my mother cooks up a huge pot of arroz con pollo for her housecleaner, and the men have indeed hinted to me that they like Cuban food. But I don’t even cook for my husband; how am I going to cook for the Costa Rican workers? So I offer cake and fruit salad and sodas and the promise of a fiesta when the house is done.

Sometimes I think it would have been easier to have hired McCauley and Sons, a local painting company whom I also considered for the job and whose estimate for the work was exactly the same, because there would have been no attachments, no obligations, no misgivings. Of course the fact is I chose Marvin and his family to do the job because I felt a connection to their immigrant work ethic and their struggle as Latinos to better their lives. They are here for the same reasons I am here. Ultimately I chose to put myself in a situation where the sense of personal bonds would make our relationship both more rewarding and more full of angst.

This encounter of a Cuban Jewish anthropologist and a family of Costa Rican artisans is, I realize, only a tiny spark in the unprecedented global movement of capital, goods, and people across vast borders, which has become the hallmark of our time. And I realize there are political and socioeconomic ramifications to our crossing of paths in Ann Arbor, where Latinos are few and far between. But what interests me most are the emotional ramifications, the human consequences, the vulnerability. I am vulnerable because I can’t be businesslike with the Costa Rican artisans I’ve hired; and they are vulnerable because there’s too much heart invested in their work and in all that they -- and I too -- hope their work will yield.

I believe it is vulnerability such as this that more and more of us are taking with us to the next millennium.

* * *

The Italian writer Italo Calvino had planned to deliver his Six Memos for the Next Millennium as the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. Upon his death in 1985, shortly before he was due to leave for the United States, he had completed five of six lectures: on lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity; the sixth lecture, on consistency, was left unwritten. Each of these themes, for Calvino, addressed a value that he felt should be cherished in literature. I believe that Calvino’s themes also describe values that characterize our end-of-century life. Light, quick, exact, visible, multiple -- these are the qualities of the current idealist vision of a vast information highway linking people across the globe in the virtual reality of the Internet and empowering them to seek all the knowledge they desire at the touch of a finger. While I long to know what Calvino would have said, had he lived, about the idea of consistency, I have taken the liberty of proposing a different sixth memo, that of vulnerability. I think this term more closely expresses a value that we are coming both to cherish and to fear about our emerging new world order and the intellectual, political, socioeconomic, and emotional transformations it has wrought.

To be vulnerable is to be susceptible, to be open to the possibility of being wounded or attacked. Our new world order draws us ever closer to one another but leaves each of us in peril of becoming ever more anonymous, ever more identified with our social security numbers and our frequent flyer numbers and our e-mail addresses. Such anonymity, I would add, is the price of privilege; the sadder anonymity, the truly painful vulnerability, is that of the large populations around the world mired in hunger, poverty, oblivion, and underdevelopment. And despite improvements in the quality of life for the privileged few, humanity has never been so fragile, so susceptible to massive car crashes and nuclear explosions and airplane disasters, so susceptible to cruel illnesses like AIDS and cancer, so susceptible to the nasty fallout of an environment that we ourselves have damaged more mercilessly in the past century than in the thousands of years that preceded our existence on this planet. In this era of information overload and media-saturation, we keep abreast of strife, suffering, and yearnings for liberation in nations scattered about the globe, but compassion fatigue threatens constantly to drain us of sympathy for the struggles of others. All of us, in pockets of the developed world around the globe, are bombarded daily with too much knowledge to process and too many choices to make about everything from the

shampoo we use to the music we listen to. The increasing mediation of human relationships via the virtual realities of television and computer screens can produce a sense of alienation if we come to lose the vitality and improvisational play of face-to-face interaction. Is it any wonder that depression and anxiety are the most widespread illnesses of our society? These aspects of our current vulnerability are truly worrisome and ought to be approached with trepidation.

But there is no going back. Throughout this century solutions to the discontents of our modernity have been sought in utopian models of primitivism, back-to-the-land varieties of kibbutzim, and state collectivism, but none have proved fully successful. Utopias have bred post-utopias. What faith there once was in radical visions of social emancipation -- especially the socialist dream of equality and freedom from want -- has largely been lost, though it has not died and resurfaces every now and then in fiery rebellions like that of the Zapatistas in Mexico. My family left Cuba because they became disenchanted with the revolution, and yet I still hoped Cuba’s revolution would succeed because I yearned to see paradise. To observe, instead, the unraveling of Cuba’s utopian social project, which has made even Che Guevara and Fidel Castro mere emblems on T-shirts, doesn’t call forth triumphalist pride in me but a sense of profound mourning. How was it possible, I believe we must ask, that some of the most idealistic dreams for humanity fell so terribly far short, in Cuba and elsewhere? The only course available now to us as a society seems to be globalization driven by private profit and the corporate agenda. There is no getting away from capitalism, though some who still seek alternative models want to learn to live with capitalism but not identify with its "spirit." Nevertheless, with the MacDonaldization of the world, it no longer seems possible or even relevant to imagine, let alone try to enact, utopias.

Post-utopias flourish now, it seems to me, in the growth of religious faith and practice that social theories of modernity, convinced of an easy and direct path to secularism, failed to predict. I think here of the role played by popular Catholicism and evangelical movements in Latin America, or the resurgence of Catholicism and Afro-Cuban Santería in contemporary Cuba, or the growth of Islam in the Middle East. Or, as I recently witnessed, the increasingly strong role played by ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel, who are attempting to impose a single definition of Jewishness by devaluing the Jewishness of their secularist co-citizens, whom they call "Hebrew-speaking goyim." The importance and beauty of religion and ritual have always been appreciated by anthropologists, and the new world order, with its mix of fax machines and faith, offers a fascinating panorama to explore, but increasingly I think we must watch for the excesses of fanaticism and the intolerance that righteousness too often breeds.

Foucault’s lesson -- that knowledge is power -- has become the force driving our lives. The computer, with its Internet and Web and other functions, is an incredible invention. How absolutely miraculous that the archives and libraries of the world can be accessed from a single machine and consulted at any time of day or night at home and in virtually every part of the world. But we’re human and we use our new tool in ways both lofty and downright prosaic and vicious. Junk mail and unwanted messages proliferate. Someone sends a message about the sale of a used car to hundreds of people on lists supposedly established for academic discussion and debate; many of those who receive the message ask to be taken off the list, and their message, in turn, inadvertently gets sent to another few hundred, who likewise protest, and you end up with the maddening e-mail spirals of an Escher drawing. Pornography on the net is rampant, and racist and anti-Semitic hate mail arrive unbidden to our screens. But, on the other hand, great deeds can also be accomplished: the recent Javanese uprising was mobilized through e-mail. As a communicative tool, the Internet is fast and effective, though its democratic promise has yet to be totally fulfilled. To own a computer or even to have access to one at an institution is not an automatic right of most citizens of the world; besides a high standard of living, what must be attained first is literacy and education, and they have not yet been attained by the vast majority of people. It is still not possible for me to communicate, for example, with Esperanza Hernández, the subject of my life history work, on e-mail. Maybe, one day, it will be possible for me to do so with her children.... Yet there is no question that the treasury of knowledge on the computer is truly a source of power, which is why in Cuba, where the state still controls access to information, it is impossible to surf the Web or have private e-mail addresses.

I have painted a gloomy picture of our end-of-century world, and yet I think there is much to cherish about our current historical moment. In particular, I want to consider the positive aspects of our vulnerability, which are many, and will be important to carry with us into the future. Technology has never been more advanced than it is today and, as I’ve noted, it allows for the rapid movement of peoples and goods across huge expanses, and for encounters across cultural differences that even anthropologists can barely begin to imagine. Only a few weeks ago, in Jerusalem, I had dinner at a kosher Italian restaurant where I was served by a Japanese waiter fluent in Hebrew. He responded to my curiosity about his identity by saying quite matter-of-factly, "I’ve been here for twenty years. I married a nice Jewish girl and came to Israel with her." As a counterpoint, I think of the way in recent years there has been a fascinating Jewish turn toward Buddhism, as in the case of the poet Allen Ginsberg, among others.

In years to come we will witness new encounters: mixtures, crossroads, and ever widening forms of love and attachment that will, I hope, be the building blocks for greater tolerance and acceptance of difference as well as for the creation of new hybrid cultures. The role of museums and educational information centers like the Getty is of crucial importance in this process of inventing culture. Our grand museum complexes have become the repositories of our cultural capital, the cathedrals of our souls, the new public plazas. Thus the Getty Center seeks to be, in the words of its own promotional literature, "a crossroads, where scientists and schoolchildren, eminent scholars and first-year graduate students, families on weekend outings and visitors from around the world converge." One of the challenges facing an institution like the Getty must be whether it can provide an arena that is welcoming without being too safe, too neutral, too sanitized, and too predictable. As a crossroads, it must allow space for the unexpected, for risk, for vulnerability, and for human convergences of greater meaning and memorableness than those you find in an airport. Its immensity and resources should inspire awe, yet not humiliate us about our smallness in this all too large world.

But in an era of growing anonymity, as computers become more intelligent by the day and threaten to know more about us than we know about ourselves, we seem to be waging a struggle to maintain a strong sense of unique personal identity. The rise of multiculturalism and the celebration of selfhood in all its complexity as a product of gender, race, class, nationality, and religion speak to the concern to mark difference in a world of increasing sameness. This shift, in turn, is having an impact on the arts and public culture.

Autobiography and memoir, the most personal of all forms of writing, are the genres that are flourishing now in the publishing world. Responding, it seems, to the excessive mediation of reality by TV and computer screens, in the arts we are witnessing the rise of spoken word performances and poetry slams, the resurgence of theater, and a growing interest in oral storytelling and dance. The clutter of information overload and the stress of frequent flying and commuting is increasingly, again among the privileged few, counterbalanced with Thai massage, Zen meditation, Body Shop aromatherapy, and many varieties of mind/body cleansings that try to rid the individual of excessive weight and bring on feelings of lightness and quiet. While these forms of attending to the self are often dismissed by the cynical as New Age obsessions, I think on the whole the emphasis on self-reflection and awareness should be taken seriously and learned from.

* * *

But there is no going back. Throughout this century solutions to the discontents of our modernity have been sought in utopian models of primitivism, back-to-the-land varieties of kibbutzim, and state collectivism, but none have proved fully successful. Utopias have bred post-utopias. What faith there once was in radical visions of social emancipation -- especially the socialist dream of equality and freedom from want -- has largely been lost, though it has not died and resurfaces every now and then in fiery rebellions like that of the Zapatistas in Mexico. My family left Cuba because they became disenchanted with the revolution, and yet I still hoped Cuba’s revolution would succeed because I yearned to see paradise. To observe, instead, the unraveling of Cuba’s utopian social project, which has made even Che Guevara and Fidel Castro mere emblems on T-shirts, doesn’t call forth triumphalist pride in me but a sense of profound mourning. How was it possible, I believe we must ask, that some of the most idealistic dreams for humanity fell so terribly far short, in Cuba and elsewhere? The only course available now to us as a society seems to be globalization driven by private profit and the corporate agenda. There is no getting away from capitalism, though some who still seek alternative models want to learn to live with capitalism but not identify with its "spirit." Nevertheless, with the MacDonaldization of theworld, it no longer seems possible or even relevant to imagine, let alone try to enact, utopias.

* * *

Moving now to the realm of scholarship, the vast transformations I have described have led to key shifts in the way social science and humanities disciplines are rethinking the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity in their analysis. I believe these shifts form part of a growing turn toward "vulnerability" as a central paradigm for the way scholars, writers, and artists are approaching the representation of reality. I called my book The Vulnerable Observer because I felt that this image expressed not only my view of myself as an anthropologist, but the manner in which many of us, across the disciplines and in the arts as well, are now describing individual, social, and cultural reality.

In a range of academic disciplines, vulnerable observation has become key to producing profound insights into the world around us. We have psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison revealing in her memoir, An Unquiet Mind, that many of her insights into manic-depressive illness, as well as her fierce need to understand the illness, come from her own experience as someone who has the illness she studies and treats. We have African-American lawyer Patricia Williams opening another window onto the history of contract law by gazing at it from the perspective of someone who has studied the deed of sale of her own great-great grandmother to a white lawyer. We have British historian Carolyn Kay Steedman calling for a revision of the way British working-class history has been written that can take into account her mother’s tremendously resentful and unfulfilled desires for the things of the world. We have Chicana poet and critic Gloria Anzaldúa creating a blurred genre in her text Borderlands/La Frontera that can encompass the history of Mexican struggles for self-definition in the United States as well as her own quest for new forms of writing between poetry and prose.

I have purposely given examples from the work of feminist scholars because I think feminist thinking has played a major part in challenging the politics of theory. It is feminist analysis that has questioned what counts as theory and how it is that the gendering of intellectual products is connected to a prestige hierarchy. And it is feminist analysis that has offered suggestions for how theory might be done through an analysis that is self-reflexive rather than simply self-referential. It was feminist researchers who early on asked whether it was a contradiction in terms for women to study other women, and who have worked hardest to create new methodologies for doing scholarship that does not "other" the other woman but places her in a relationship to her observer. By pushing at the limits of subjective analysis, continually seeking to remove the veil, reveal the pretense, of objectivity, we are better able to understand how knowledge is gained through an inter-subjective process rooted in shared experience.

The emotions are centrally visible within the new turn toward vulnerable writing in scholarship, and that makes some people extremely uncomfortable. I and others have been accused of bringing back into contemporary scholarship an old feminine Victorian sentimentality. My sense is that it is not sentimentality that’s at issue but a keen awareness of the need to carry out projects that have a certain urgency, or immediacy to them, projects in which how we come to know what we know and why we need to know what we know are burning issues. There is, in this work, a tremendous amount at stake emotionally and intellectually; the research is no mere academic exercise. I think, here, of a unique and crucial work in the history of American anthropology, the film by and about Barbara Meyerhoff, "In Her Own Time," which is an account of her fieldwork with Hasidic Jews in the area of Fairfax in Los Angeles, carried out while she was dying of lung cancer in the mid-1980s. Indeed, she turned to her subjects not only for information about their lives and worldview, but for rituals and magic and a sense of Jewish spiritual wholeness that she dreamed might cure her in the hour of her greatest need. The film beautifully expresses how realities get saturated with the emotional sensibility and vulnerability the observer brings to the scene. And it documents, profoundly, the impossible yearning of a secular intellectual to make a leap of faith and truly believe, as do her subjects, at a time in her life when she desperately needs to believe in the possibility of healing and spiritual redemption.

Ultimately, Meyerhoff is unable to cross over to the other side, unable to let down her anthropological guard and achieve the total insiderhood she both seeks and fears. But there are moments when she comes so heartbreakingly close, and it is precisely when her striving and her vulnerability are most palpable that we gain the greatest insight not merely into her own quest as an anthropologist but into the lives of the people she is both studying and being consoled by.

Since Meyerhoff’s pioneering work what has changed dramatically in the last fifteen years is the key role now played by various "insiders" or "native anthropologists" in representing familiar realities in such a way that they can be understood by those outside and not betray those on the inside, who are one of the key audiences for the account. Anthropologists working at home or in places that were once home, as in the case of diasporic anthropologists like me, find ourselves in the position of being cultural translators more than purveyors of cultural difference. I place my writing not only within anthropology but within the large body of cultural writing being done by the growing community of Latina and Latino writers in the United States, writers who are of Latin American descent but write in English about experiences lived in the Spanish language and in a Latin American milieu. Authority, in this context of insiders telling inside stories, has to be evaluated differently. We are less likely to ask whether the observer maintained his or her objectivity and distance in producing a cultural translation and more likely to ask whether the observer was enough of an insider to bring back an authentic account from home.

For me, the bottom line about anthropology, at least as I practice it, is that it is about forming relationships; it is about the search for connection across borders, whether of gender, race, class, age, ethnicity, or nationality. It is about identifying with "an other" deeply and soulfully without becoming an impersonator. My sense is that you can never be enough of an insider, because by virtue of putting yourself in the position of the observer and the writer you have already stepped across the line and become at least a partial outsider, a deeply interested and involved outsider, to be sure, but one who has a foot within and another without. The question then becomes how to remain vulnerable in the sense of being accountable and responsible to those who have granted you access to an intimacy that was allowed you precisely because you were thought to be a trusted insider who would not reveal all the secrets of the tribe. Being vulnerable in this sense is about the effort not to take with one hand and betray with the other, not to act in bad faith -- and yet ultimately all anthropologists and writers are secret sharers and we do betray, against our own best intentions, those who take us in.

* * *

In my own work I have continually put myself in situations where I am vulnerable, where my authority is put into question, or where I must share authority with those I write about, or where I feel anguish about having authority in the first place. I am currently beginning to write what I call an "untellable story" -- the story of my relationship to Caridad Martínez, the Afro-Cuban woman who was my nanny until my family left Cuba in 1961, when I was not quite five years old. During the last seven years, as I have traveled back and forth to Cuba for more than a dozen visits, I have become increasingly close to Caro, the name by which Caridad is known, as well as to her children, grandchildren, extended family, and neighbors. In my writing I am mixing autobiographic, ethnographic, and fictional voices to see if I can forge another way of telling a story that could too easily and dangerously reproduce a racial cliché of black/white class relations. This subject cuts close to the bone for both me and Caro, and the work is in many ways wrenching. A further challenge is my desire to explore the way the Jewish diaspora world of my family -- who immigrated to Cuba in the 1920s at a time when the United States was closing its doors to Jews -- meshed with the African diaspora world that Caridad Martínez brought to the intimate space of domestic work. Although this project raises uncomfortable issues, I am pursuing it because I am convinced that the most exciting anthropological thinking takes place exactly on this kind of border between subjective and objective knowledge, and in troubling situations like this, where issues of inequality and vulnerability must be addressed by the ethnographer.

Just last summer Caro gave me two nightgowns which belonged to my mother and which she kept, untouched, for thirty-six years. The gowns now hang from plump satin hangers on the door to the room where I write. They are of nylon and lace and are terribly haunting items of intimate, erotic, and profound feminine longing; pale peach and pale yellow, they are as transparent as mantles of nakedness. Last summer Caro pulled them out of a double wrapped plastic bag and said she had been meaning to give them to me for a long time; she said she had hoped to give them to my mother herself, but she no longer believed my mother would return to visit Cuba or that she, Caro, now 72, would ever have a chance to see my mother in New York. "Here, you take them," she said. "Tell your mother I’ve been saving them for her."

As I take the nightgowns from Caro’s hands, I feel I am being given something precious and eerie from the past. A chill creeps up my spine -- these were my mother’s nightgowns, kept from the years when she was in her early twenties, kept from the first five years of her marriage, kept from the last five years she spent in Cuba, from 1956 to 1961, before we left the island. "Your mother was so thin then," Caro says to me. "Look at that cinturita, the little waist she had. She only weighed 99 pounds when she got married." I try to imagine my mother’s body when she was young, before I was born from her. Is it possible she wore these nightgowns in the presence of Caro, her live-in housekeeper and baby-sitter? Or did she perhaps never wear them again after the honeymoon in Varadero? Or maybe she never wore them at all -- maybe they were just an ornamental part of the trousseau that a proper white middle-class woman of 1950s Cuba had to bring with her to marriage. When I tell my mother about the nightgowns, she too feels a chill creep up her spine. She doesn’t quite remember when she wore them. That was so long ago.... And then I touch the lace, and I go back to a yet farther past: I see my beloved grandfather, a

Russian Jewish immigrant to Cuba, arriving in the 1920s and working on sugarcane plantations and the building of the railroad, and gradually moving from being a peddler to owning the little lace shop on Calle Aguacate in Old Havana that never brought in much of a profit. I see the lace and I see his large, strong hands, measuring and cutting the lace. Whey did Caro keep my mother’s delicate lingerie during so many tumultuous years of revolution and change? She won’t say, so she asks me to imagine instead. With what amazing grace she held on to those nightgowns from the past, never thinking to take them for herself or her daughter, letting the years pass, waiting. And now they are her gift tome, a gift that marks the contradictions of our kinship, the impossible desire for kinship.

On my numerous return trips to Cuba in recent years, Caro has accompanied me to the airport. Come to say the last good-bye. The way she did when we left Cuba. I was a child. I don’t remember our departure, at least not consciously. But some trace of memory remains in my body, which inevitably goes into a state of panic on my trips to and from Cuba, no matter how hard I try to work on my desensitization treatment. Anthropology is about departures, about leaving home to return home -- but when I go to Cuba, every departure is fraught with trauma. Yes, I was a child when we left and now I am a grown woman, but when Caro waves good-bye to me at the airport, as she did in 1961, I am a child again, taking a plane and feeling grief, sorrow, and fear, without knowing why. Caro says she cried when we left. Cried waiting until our plane took off.... She comes with me to the airport to re-enact the primal scene of departure, to stage the drama of our difference, she as a black woman of the island, I as a returning white girl of the diaspora, no longer sure if what I seek in Cuba is anthropology, healing, memory, or my interrupted childhood. It is a strange anthropology I am engaging in, a most unusual form of longitudinal research; in this case my research subject knew me as a child, when I was helpless and under her control, and now I return, with privilege and status, to restore contact with her and learn her story as well as the story of my family’s life in Cuba.

I am the granddaughter of Jewish emigrants who arrived in Cuba after the United States closed the door to Jews with the 1924 Immigration and Nationality Act, the same year, not accidentally, that the United States created the Border Patrol to surveil and control the entrance of Mexicans to a territory that a century earlier had been theirs. The same xenophobia that sought to keep out Jews also sought to keep out Mexicans. My family were among those Jews escaping pogroms and growing nationalisms in the aftermath of the first World War, who were forced to imagine a future for themselves in the other America south of the border. Over the years I have come to understand that I am Cuban because I am Jewish. I descend from people who were racialized as something other than white, people who were unwanted cargo in the United States. Yet they found a home for themselves in Cuba -- and only because of this did not perish. And not only did they find a home: many of these Jews, who in Cuba rose from their status as peddlers to become small shopowners, prospered enough that they could hire black women to work as maids in their houses, caring for their children and serving them symbolically in the construction of their white bourgeois selves (though, of course, not all did; my Turkish-born Sephardic grandfather stayed a peddler, a source of deep humiliation for my father).

These Jews, whose racial purity was unacceptable to the United States in the 1920s, in Cuba proved white enough to offer "hope" to the white ruling sector, which in the first decades of the century feared that the growth of the black population during the final years of slavery and the prominent role played by Afro-Cubans in the wars for independence would lead them to take over the island. Haiti, as a black-ruled nation, was for the white Cuban ruling sector the great mistake, the peril to avoid at all costs. The Cuban government encouraged massive immigration of European workers and their families, including Jews, to dilute "the black peril." My family were among those who came, unknowingly, to dilute the rising tide of blackness and to forestall the possibility of Cuba becoming a black nation. My family presumably whitened Cuba a little more; that was how we paid our historical debt for the refuge Cuba offered us and other desperate Jews.

I keep returning to Cuba to pay my debt, but subversively now, refusing the purpose for which my family was thought worthy of saving, embracing the blackness that we were meant to dilute. My suitcases are always full of things for Caro and her family, though I am aware, always, of how weighted these gifts are with a long history of tormented feminist relations of giving and receiving between white women as employers of black women whom they hired as their maids, in which giving signified concern, care, and love, but also an assertion of one’s superiority, a way of enhancing self-esteem and neutralizing racial and class inequalities.

I grew up with a sense of shame about being the daughter of gusanos, of those who abandoned the revolution. As an adolescent coming of age in a crowded New York apartment overlooking the abandoned hemisphere of the World’s Fair, I wanted to atone for not having participated in the Cuban revolution. Most of all I wanted to atone for having things, for wanting things. And so, I realize now, did my mother. She had a persistent habit -- which I came to reproduce in my own life -- of going on shopping binges, trying the clothes out for a day or two, and then returning everything to the store, in what was nothing less than a castigating form of bulimia/anorexia about wanting the things of the world and feeling that one just did not deserve them. And so I wonder sometimes: What kind of accountability do I seek now with my suitcases for Caro?

Alice Childress, an African-American writer who worked briefly as a domestic, wrote ironically in her Like One of the Family: Conversations From a Domestic’s Life, originally published in 1956, about the duplicity of the idea that the black domestic worker is a member of the family: "You think it is a compliment when you say, ‘We don’t think of her as a servant...’ but after I have worked myself into a sweat cleaning the bathroom and the kitchen...making the beds...cooking the lunch...washing the dishes and ironing Carol’s pinafores...I do not feel like no weekend house guest. I feel like a servant."

In my relationship with Caro, it is she and her family who claim me as a member of their family. I am their link to the Cuban diaspora, to the United States and its power, to the world of things that cannot be found on the island and which I gladly bring to them on my trips, such things as cinnamon and bay leaves, comfortable shoes, underwear, clothes for Caro’s granddaughters, book to learn English, and a Sony Walkman. And they, in turn, are my most intimate link to Cuba and to the life my family had there, the short-lived life I had there, the life I want to have there as a returning immigrant girl-woman. Increasingly, I am entering into the ritual world of Santería, in which sacrifices are given to the spirits in ways that help me to imagine the offerings the ancient Hebrews made to God, and it is Caro who has been with me as my guide and spiritual teacher.

The black women in Caro’s neighborhood say of me: Mira que bien sabe agradecer la crianza de Caro ["Look at how well she shows her gratitude to Caro for raising her"]. They call me hija de Caro, a daughter of Caro, and Caro’s twin sons and daughter, just a few years younger than me, call me hermana, a sister. I want nothing more in the world than to believe that I can accept this kinship, the illusion of this kinship, without causing harm.

* * *

When we left Cuba in 1961, we did not come directly to the United States. My parents decided to leave the island only after the failed invasion at Bay of Pigs, and by that point the United States embassy had already shut down. They did not have passports because they’d never left the island. Cuba at that time gave Jews the option of "repatriating" in Israel, the new Jewish homeland. My parents took leave of the island and, penniless, they went to Kibbutz Ga’ash founded in 1948 by my maternal grandmother’s youngest brother, Jaime, and other Latin American Jews. They left behind a Cuban vision of socialism for a Jewish vision of socialism, but neither, it turned out, were utopias my parents wanted to live in; after a year on the kibbutz they decided to go on to New York, where my mother’s parents and other family had chosen to settle. For me, it is significant that I inherited two abandoned homelands -- the island of Cuba and the island of the Jews. Both nations are unbearably complex, tormented, soul-searching places and both produce in me a deep sense of attachment and ambivalence. Both are under the constant eye of the rest of the world because both promised to create paradise on earth; both await the Messiah and both will be scrutinized as the year 2000 approaches.

I revisited Israel when I was fifteen and had not returned again until last month. Going to Israel it is easy to justify what I’m looking for -- my Jewish identity, right? But what exactly is it that I go in search of when I go to Cuba? At the peak of its population, in the 1950s, there were maybe 15,000 Jews in Cuba; now there are about a thousand, at most, and among those who are left only a handful want to stay on the island. Qué tu buscas en Cuba? my family used to ask. Lately they’ve given up asking; I go too often. I think I go to Cuba not to lose my Jewish claim to that land, that culture, the Cuban people. In Cuba, Caro is the witness to our abandoned Jewish existence in Cuba; the memory of our presence there resides with her. My connection to her extends and nourishes my Jewish lifeline.

I have spoken of the unprecedented movements of people across borders during the course of this century, and one of the most significant of such displacements has surely been that of Jewish people, who are now primarily concentrated in the United States and Israel. The extraordinary range of Jewish cultures once found throughout the world are being lost. And Yiddish and Ladino, secret tongues once spoken by Jews from Eastern and Southern Europe, are on the way to extinction, and the revival of klezmer and Sephardic music, although very exciting, will not bring them back as living languages. Soon all that will be left in the abandoned ruins of a Jewish existence will be Jewish ghosts. And, of course, tourist sites like the synagogues of Toledo and Córdoba, or the camps at Auschwitz. The remaking of Jewish identity taking place in the shadow of the Holocaust both in this country and in Israel must surely count as one of the major developments of our epoch.

In the next year we’re going to see a lot of millennium mania. But for me, as a Jew, the coming of the year 2000 raises issues of loss and memory and the same sense of uncertainty as does Christmas each year, but on a grander scale. Is Christmas a civic holiday of gift-giving or the celebration of Christ’s birthday? Is the year 2000 a universal date by which we will mark a threshold for all of humanity? Or a system of counting from the year Christ was born? In any case, we’re talking about an extremely recent way of marking time. Worldwide use of the Christian calendar didn’t begin until the end of the nineteenth century and grew in tandem with the spread of European imperialism and commerce. Jews, Hindus, Muslims, among many other groups, have their own calendars for marking the passage of historical time. In Europe the year 1000 came and went with barely a nod because the calendar was not yet widely used. What is significant about the coming of the next millennium is that this time most everyone around the globe knows about it. Disney World is booked solid for New Year’s Eve 1999, and in Jerusalem they are rushing to finish building new hotels for the vast numbers of pilgrims expected in the year 2000. My new checkbook has a blank line for the date.

I suppose it is also the anthropologist in me that couldn’t allow me to come here today without acknowledging that the next millennium is a concept rooted in Western colonialism and Christian hegemony, not in universal human yearnings. But having acknowledged this important fact, I must hasten to say that, for better or worse we all live now in a shared world with one calendar for our global civic life. We are inextricably connected to one another and balanced on the same tightrope, though it is more frayed for some than for others. If, as a global society, we could make one single resolution, I would wish for that to be that we strive to be vulnerable so as not to cease being human. I can think of no more essential goal than to continue searching for ways to forge unheard-of connections, so that our absolutely essential acknowledgment of our differences never becomes indifference, invulnerability. Although we must lament all we have lost, we must continue searching, as well, for ways to tell stories in languages we’ve never used before, about lives, our own and those of others, that are so vulnerable because we can’t know how to know them since they’ve never been lived before. More than ever, we must invoke Elegguá, the trickster god of the Afro-Cuban Santería faith, who has the power to both open and close doors, to protect us in all our border crossings and always to bring us back home.

* * *

But what is home? In an age of unending displacement and diaspora, does that word mean anything any more? For a long time, I refused to believe that, for me, home could be a town in Michigan. But my own Elegguá, which I received in Cuba, resides in Michigan, and it will go wherever I go, together with the mezuzahs on my doors. And while I, for the moment, am daring to consider myself settled, I come from people who taught me to live with a suitcase by my bedside and who valued the lightness of the violin and the oud over the heaviness of the piano, so when the artisans from Costa Rica are finished working on my house, I will throw a party, with Cuban food and Cuban music, and we will celebrate the fork in the road that allowed our paths and our yearnings to converge. Surrounded by so many blues and quieted by the Poet’s Purple, I will try to imagine Cuba from such a distance and long for the day when I can have a house there too. In my newly painted house in Michigan, I will no doubt continue to prepare lectures on lofty subjects like the millennium for institutions like the Getty. And while I reflect on vulnerability, the patriarch Bolívar will be working to buy a used pick-up truck. His son Saul has already found an eleven-year-old Toyota and he’s getting the special license plate you pay extra for that will have his name on it. When they’ve made just a little more money, they will pack up and drive all the way home to Costa Rica. I wish them well and hope they get there before the millennium.