It Takes a Decade to Raise a Village
Greenwich Village was a very different place in 1969. Not that I have any idea, but I can imagine, and it’s what everyone told me when I was living there in in 1985. Everyone said that it had changed, and it wasn’t nearly as good as it used to be, that it had become too commercial, and that no one was really doing any interesting work here any more. They all said that outside of luxury hotels, New York City just wasn’t getting any better, and that what we were seeing then was the end of an era. Or perhaps it was the last gasp that we were all witnessing.
In 1996 I returned to New York, after having lived away, working as a photojournalist in Guatemala. That was going to be a short trip, to cover some of the more visible after-effects of the war, and to put together a story about a growing movement just to the north, in Chiapas. Things were much more complicated than they appeared, of course, as they always are, and I wound up living there for a few years. Long after the job was over, I decided to stay, because there were interesting connections I was making with some of the local communities, or maybe they were making them with me.
Either way, when it was obvious that the money was long gone, an old friend wired me a ticket back to the city. She told me that New York had changed a lot, that it simply wasn’t the same as it was when I lived there nearly a decade before that.
It’s hard to anticipate where any road is leading, and when you’ve decided to change jobs, from journalist to anthropologist, there’s really no telling. But it did surprise me when I realized that after having lived in Port Au Prince, I would be moving back to the city once again, to do a project in urban ethnography. This was, by far, the most rewarding work I’d done, and not just because it’s what I’m doing right now at this moment. I like the people I work with now, and it’s fulfilling. But it also fascinates me when people tell me how Greenwich Village has changed, that it’s never going to be the same, and not nearly as cool as it was in 1985.
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