good research news

The life history interviews that Voices of Our America is providing for me will be ready December 1st! I am very lucky to have made contact with the professor who runs the project. She has been immensely generous in assisting me and allowing me access to their research. I sent her an abstract of my project, they identified interviews that might help me, spoke with their AV team and will have them ready for me in a few weeks.
Why this is good:  Listening to life histories of my research population is basically my receiving raw data. I get to hear not only the structure of how people organize their lives (from what I understand the interviews were unscripted), but also what stories, details and events they feel are important to understanding their particular (and hopefully group) struggles and successes.

I had to change one measly sentence on my IRB application (arrrgghhhh), so any second now I can roll out my own research methods...  IRB APPROVAL FINALLY which is great news because

Not only do I have people ready to take my survey, a friend of mine is trying to get me an interview with a former police officer (he was a police officer during the invasion) who has VERY strong feelings about the invasion and the ongoing presence of Americans.

Also exciting in my world,

I have been talking to a Panamanian anthropologist here whose had written about adding racial and ethnic identification on Panama's 2010 census. Right now, those questions only apply for indigenous groups. I will talk more about this as it develops, but I had not thought about how to use the upcoming census in my project at all until I read her article. She references the US census, so it will be very interesting to compare processes, forms, and levels of participation between the two countries, and, of course, how/where/when/under what circumstances  racial and ethic identification come into play.

Those are the big things. In smaller news, I finished Luna Verde and enjoyed it. I can understand why it was so controversial in its time. In essence, the novel is about the protaganist's (and his family's) academic and moral decay while under US jurisdiction in the Canal Zone and his re-education to fight for his country.  I thought about giving you some great passages, but most of you don't read Spanish.  Here is one memorable theme: "Los estupidos quieren ser gringos, los inteligentes prefieren aprender ingles" [The dumb want to be gringos while the smart ones prefer to learn English]

Next book: Gamboa Road Gang. It is also about the Zone and the racial/nation-based discrimination that characterized it.