Field trip

1 hour meeting, 4 hours researching, 2 hours compiling data, page count = 203

Despite the many sources on my cart at the NYPL - and a bunch more that arrived today - there are still some texts that simply aren't available there. Thanks to the beauty of WorldCat, to which the NYPL helpfully provides a link from its research catalog, I was able to track down the 1909-10 budget for Mexico. This is an important document for me, as it's on the eve of the revolution, so I'm very interested to compare the relative budget and troop strength of the army and police. The catch: it's only held locally at the Princeton library. Luckily, a week's guest pass for a grad student from another institution is very reasonably priced, so it was time for another field trip.

As it happened, the Latin American Studies center at Princeton was having a mid-day seminar on Colombia, specifically the situation of demobilized guerrillas and paramilitaries. And I was able to have lunch with Villager Val Wang. The day was all lined up, but as usual, life interferes. After I hustled to make an earlier train from New York, the "dinky" shuttle from Princeton Junction to Princeton left me and a couple of other people on the platform, high and dry. That was really the only blip, though. The next dinky got me to campus just in time for a very very interesting seminar on Colombia's demobilized combatants. The speaker, an anthropologist, argued that we need to understand demobilization not from the national level where peace settlements, but from the local level, where the demobilized have to live alongside the victims of their crimes. Her work was to understand the motivations and prospects of the demobilized, and her argument was that we need to take into account the twin cultures of masculinity and revenge within which these (mostly) men operated, both as combatants and afterward. After all, economic incentives are never going to be enough to get people to stay demobilized; they can make much more money in the drug trade. So the incentives will have to be non-monetary, and for that, we have to understand what motivates these men, and based on this researcher's work, being seen as a desirable man is a big part of that. In a context of war, that means owning a gun and helping to maintain order in a culture of impunity (the vast majority of crimes in Colombia go completely unpunished). Fascinating stuff.

After a great lunch with Val, I hit the library, which is charmingly old-school (there are coathooks, akin to the ones in old-timey pubs, on the outside of the study carrels). The 1909-10 Mexico budget was there, but in an unexpected surprise, so was the 1879-80 one; the closest I had found to my target "before" date of 1880 at the NYPL was 1894-95. That's the beauty of being able to wander open shelves: the serendipitous find. I never would have thought to search for "history of public finances in Venezuela" in an online catalog, but lo and behold, there was a forty-volume set on the Princeton shelves right near a Colombia source. As it turns out, the NYPL has it too, but it would have taken forever to have found it, if at all, when one's only access to the shelves is through the catalog.

After a productive day, I just made the dinky, and connected to my train home with no problems.