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In February 2006 I was traveling in a crowded van snaking its way along a dusty, potholed dirt road in the state of Guerrero, Mexico. The van serves as a small bus that takes people back and forth between the city of Iguala and one of the smaller towns whose inhabitants do their shopping and run errands there. I sat between two men and a woman sharing a narrow bench. Everyone spoke Nahuatl, the language used in that part of Guerrero. I struck up a conversation with the young man sitting on my left and found out that his parents had taken him and several of their other children with them to Houston, Texas, several years earlier. He switched to Spanish, then English, telling me he had recently come back from northern Mexico to make sure that his mother made it safely back across the border after a short visit to their hometown. The son planned to stay a bit longer before returning to the United States. This young man also told me the person who had most helped him learn English was a retired teacher in Houston, and he asked me for my e-mail address to give to her. It turns out that the teacher, who writes juvenile fiction, was interested in the native people of Mexico, a topic on which I have considerable expertise. I corresponded with her and a year later stayed at her house during my first trip to the United States to start doing research on undocumented workers. My experience in that van is typical of the work done by anthropologists whose investigations sometimes lead us in unexpected directions.
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