This award provides support to the Department of Anthropology at City College of the City University of New York to establish an REU Site Project to involve undergraduates in the study of contem porary socio-cultural change among the highland Maya and Mexican national (Ladino or Mestizo) communities of Chiapas, southeastern Mexico. Students will live with families in Indian villages three days a week, coming in to the research center in the city of San Cristobal de las Casas for seminars, Maya language lessons, and discussion with the PI. Group trips to handicraft production cooperatives, experimental agricultural stations, and government offices will take place periodically in accord with the research needs of the project. Students will learn basic censusing techniques, extensive interviewing and oral narrative accounts, participant observation, and apprenticeship training to learn the socialization process in handicraft production. They will write daily diaries and submit a summary report at the end of the project. The observations of students located in families in five different communities will add up to an account of coping strategies in the debt crisis Mexico is undergoing. She will draw on the expertise of George Collier, Jan Rus, and Nancy Modiano who will help in the allocation of students and enter into weekly seminar discussions.
