Interview with a vampire

by Paul, 7/3/08 • Virtually every day, one or more of our interview subjects postpones or just doesn’t show (despite the standard 2-3 confirmation phone calls that precede each interview). Usually, their excuses for bailing are lame, but today we had a good one.

This blog is written as its authors work on a new research project titled “Women on the Frontlines: Resource Battles, Popular Movements, and Gender Dynamics in Bolivia and Ecuador.” An Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) grant for innovative faculty-student collaboration supports Paul Dosh and Nicole Kligerman in an effort to craft a new model of faculty-student “complementary collaboration.” One way that they share their efforts is through a blog titled “Equal Footing: Collaboration at 13,000 Feet” (equalfooting.blogspot.com). This post is taken from their Equal Footing blog.

Our final interviewee was right where he was supposed to be at the appointed hour… but we couldn’t get to him because the building was locked down in a three-way stand-off among riot police, our interviewee’s allies who had barricaded themselves inside, and a garrot of striking sanitation workers encircling the building with placards denouncing our interview subject (by name, in 2,000-point font) as an “Enemigo de los Trabajadores, Traidor, Chupa Sangre” (“Enemy of the Workers, Traitor, and Blood Sucker”).

Said Nicole: “Maybe this isn’t the best day to interview him.”

Hopefully we’ll interview the vampire tomorrow, but aside from him we are basically done with our Bolivian interviews, and we head for Peru on Saturday.