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4 Rosa Introduction One of the first things I noticed about Rosa was how she laughed. She didn’t laugh loudly or with wild abandon but gently and shyly, with her eyes dancing and her whole face lighting up. In the course of many interviews with rural-to-urban migrant women in Guayaquil and Cuenca, I would regularly joke with the children to lighten the mood, which was often far more somber than it needed to be. It usually worked: women would relax a bit, and sometimes smile, although few laughed. Rosa did. She was not laughing at me, however, but at her own children’s obvious pleasure. It struck me right then that I liked her because she took real joy in the laughter of her children. She was dressed that day in the ‘‘typical’’ outfit of the chola Cuencana, with her hair in two long braids, wearing a blue pollera, a white blouse, and a blue paisley sweater.1 She listened carefully when I spoke, obviously taking pains to understand me despite my accent, looked me squarely in the eye, and gave thoughtful responses to my questions. When I asked her at the end of the interview if I could come back someday to talk more, she smiled and replied, ‘‘Of course.’’ And, indeed, I did go back. I got to know Rosa and her family as their lives and routines were revealed to me in bits and pieces over lunch or afternoon snacks and on trips to their home village of Cumbe. Over time Rosabecamemymosttrustedinformantaswellasareliablefriend.During the first field trip from late  to December , I experienced all of the angst and loneliness of the first-time ethnographer; and on those occasions I found comfort in her warm kitchen. Many an impromptu afternoon was spent there making and eating empanadas, drawing pic-  From Cuenca to Queens tures with the children, learning to knit, and, always, gathering anthropological ‘‘data.’’IfoundRosaeasytobewithbecauseshewasgentlewith her children and patient with me. She found me easy to be with because I ate all her food with gusto. We always had something to talk about, and I was continually surprised upon leaving her house to find that night had fallen and the cobblestone streets of Cuenca were jammed with people returning home at the end of the workday. Whole afternoons would pass this way, sometimes several times a week. From the start, my relationship with Rosa was for the most part an easy one, as our personal styles suited one another. For example, she and I share a tendency not to push each other to talk about things that make us uncomfortable. This meant that sometimes her family stories or personal problems took months or even years to be fully revealed to me. It was also not unusual for Rosa to gloss over an answer to a question the first time I asked it and then spontaneously discuss the same issue later. I once asked about ‘‘envy illness,’’ which at the time she dismissed as something ‘‘only old people believe in nowadays.’’2 I was rewarded a few weeks later on a trip to her rural home with a long and detailed story about her personal experience with envy illness. Rosa never pushed me for answers to questions that made me uncomfortable. It was not uncommon for people in Cuenca bluntly to ask how much money I had, how much I paid in rent, what my father’s occupation was and how much he earned, how much money my grant gave me to live on, or what consumer goods I could call my own. Some of these questions, of course, seem shockingly rude to a North American, and I never really got past bristling at them. I know that sometimes I was barely able to control my annoyance—especially if the interlocutor was especially tenacious. OvertheyearsIhavecometodependonRosa’ssenseofpropriety,which remarkably often coincides with my own. Rosa and her husband had moved to the city of Cuenca around , mainly, she said, so that they could provide their children with better educational opportunities. Schools in the rural areas are generally thought to be of poor quality; urban schools offer more choices, but they cost a good deal more. In  Rosa’s main goal for the future was to educate her children, with her stated objective of seeing them graduate from high school. She wanted them to have a ‘‘career’’ so that they would not face the economic insecurities that she and Lucho have had to deal with...

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