162 ACCESSING AND GENERATING DATA
❖❖❖I remember my immigrant grandparents’ one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx. It was a
long time before I realized the implications of the fact that my father and his two brothers
had been brought up in that one-bedroom apartment with the dining room renamed and
reconceptualized as a bedroom.
I somehow imagined they had lived like us, one-bedroom-one-child, not putting together
what I saw with my eyes—a dining-room-turned-bedroom—and what I knew with my
intellect—there simply weren’t enough bedrooms for each child to have his own.
—Ellen Pader, personal reflection“I wouldn’t have seen it if I didn’t believe it.”
—AnonymousMy first night of fieldwork in Mexico stands out as one of the most enlightening experiences of
my life. I arrived in Monterrey late one afternoon with my traveling companions Señor and Señora
Padilla, a couple in their sixties who had moved to Los Angeles from La Chaneja, a small village
in Mexico, some forty years earlier.^1 I knew them, most of their twelve children, and many grand-
children quite well by this time, as their extended family was the focal point of my ethnographic
fieldwork in Los Angeles on the changing relations between domestic space use and social rela-
tions (Pader 1993, 1994a, 1994b). We were traveling together to La Chaneja and other parts of
Mexico, where they still had strong connections, to do additional, comparative Mexico-U.S. field-
work.^2 As commonly happens with ethnographic research, as I learned more about the family’s
sociospatial relations in Los Angeles, new, and sometimes unexpected, questions arose. It quickly
became clear that in order to understand the meanings of current sociospatial relationships and be
in a position to interpret changes in those relationships, I had to learn more about the people and
places the Padillas had left behind.
Before traveling some 1,000 miles to their natal village, where I was to do the bulk of that
work, we were visiting with their relatives in Monterrey for a few days. After eating dinner and
catching up on family news, it was time for sleep. Where, I wondered, was I to sleep? I hadn’t
really thought about this in any concrete manner before taking off on the trip, and I’m not sure
what I had imagined. But here we were, two bedrooms, six adults, and four children ranging in
age from toddler to seventeen. With some panic, I realized that I’d be sharing a room with three
other adults (the children’s parents and grandmother) and the four children—and I’d be sharing
the top of a narrow bunk bed with the seventeen-year-old girl, who had been asking her parents if
she could be the one to share her sleeping space with the American guest (as is customary for
many Mexican hosts). The Padillas, as the senior guests, had the adjoining bedroom, the one the
parents usually slept in, to themselves. Although I’d shared sleeping quarters in camp, in college,
in youth hostels, and the like, I wasn’t prepared for this density and array of generations and
genders in a private home. It was totally out of my experience. The thought of it made me ex-
tremely uncomfortable, but I knew I had no choice, and anyway, if I really believed in the prin-
ciples underlying participant-observation as a way of learning about and interpreting culture, I
needed to accept this arrangement as just one step in putting them into practice. Little did I imag-
ine how important a step it was to be.
I dutifully climbed up the ladder to the top and stiffly lay there wondering if I would spend the
rest of the three-week trip with no privacy of body or mind, since the unaccustomed density level
so enwrapped me that I could barely think private thoughts lest they somehow be heard by the