The Secret: Love, Marriage, and HIV

Acknowledgments

vii Acknowledgments Both collectively and as individuals, we’ve accumulated quite a list of people without whom the “Love, Marriage, and HIV” project and this book would not have been possible. The project had its genesis in Carlos del Rio’s off-the-cuff remark to Jennifer in the spring of 1999 that for most women in the world, their biggest risk of HIV infection comes from having sex with their husbands. For that provocation, and for his encouragement during the sometimes daunting process of submitting an R01 grant application to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), we will be forever grateful. If Carlos was our godfather, Susan Newcomer was certainly our fairy godmother, and we were fortunate indeed to have had such a loyal and enthusiastic project officer. Although he joined us late in our journey, Michael Ames has earned our deepest gratitude for his unflagging enthusiasm for our project and for his willingness to risk taking on such an unconventionally organized approach to scholarship. We thank also our anonymous reviewers, the staff at Vanderbilt University Press (particularly Jessie Hunnicutt), and Lavina Anderson, who prepared the index. During the initial years of this project, Bruce Knauft and Marjorie Muecke provided critical intellectual support and mentorship as its senior advisors, and we feel lucky to have counted them as part of our intellectual community as we developed the research instruments and conceptual framework, while we were in the field, and during the early processes of data analysis. The dry phrase “administrative infrastructure” does not begin to capture the critical nature of the logistical and grants management support that made the fun part of this collaboration possible. Enormous thanks are due to Laurie Ferrell and Maria Sullivan at Emory; to Kathryn Valdes and Mayra Pabon at Columbia; to Tom Alarie at Brown; to Elaine Beffa and Gloria Lucy at Washington University in St. Louis; to Deanna Pong at the University of Toronto; and to the Department of Anthropology (and especially John Cady) at the University of Washington. Since mid-2004, the logistical complexity of our collaboration has been somewhat simplified by the fact that the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, under Richard Parker’s visionary leadership, has provided such a congenial home to two of the six of us. We are grateful as well to the students who were such able note-takers at our project meetings: Jenny Higgins , Ellen Stiefvater, and Harris Solomon provided us with very detailed records of our conversations, to which we referred repeatedly during the process of carry- viii The Secret: Love, Marriage, and HIV ing out the research and writing up our findings, and Sonia Alam was patient and meticulous as she compiled the final manuscript. Each of us has also accrued our own individual set of debts over the years. Jennifer S. Hirsch: I thank my husband, John Santelli, for his wry humor (manifest in his frequent reminders to friends and colleagues that everything he knows about infidelity, he learned from his wife); for supporting my work by giving me “permission” to be away from home to do research, as I repeatedly had to reassure my informants in the field; and for driving with the boys and me there and back to show his support . Most of all, I thank him for his willingness to move our family to New York, where on Riverside Drive and in Sociomedical Sciences both my family and this book have found, I think, the best homes imaginable. My parents, David and Ellen Hirsch, have done so much to facilitate what frequently felt to me like an impossible task—raising semi-civilized children while working full-time—as have Araceli Rosas, Jorge Gonzalez, and Brittany Brogdon (my children’s wonderful caregivers). They all deserve more thanks than I could ever begin to express. I also thank Isaac and Jacob, who were never asked their opinion about spending six months in Mexico, where I shamelessly used them as research instruments, toting their cute little gringo selves around town in a quest to ingratiate myself with prospective informants. I learned deep lessons about embodiment and social hierarchy as I watched them shamed, little by little, into kissing the cheeks of adults they did not know by way of greeting, as proper children do. During that time, Isaac (as he never fails to remind me) suffered more than Jacob: dear little easygoing two-year-old Jacob spent the time happily eating tacos in the plaza...