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“Why are you pursuing this career?”
“When I was younger, I suppose in middle school or maybe even younger, I was really interested in meeting different kinds of people. I did a foreign exchange in high school and I had wanted to go to Latin America because I had a really good friend growing up whose parents were immigrants from Argentina and they had fled from the Dirty War—they were being persecuted there for their political beliefs. And so I thought maybe I’ll go to Argentina, and then my father pressured me to go to Spain instead. I had learned Spanish there and when I came back I wanted to use my Spanish, so I worked with immigrants.
Several people told me that (Anthropology) was the major for me, so I guess I believed them.”
Dr. Shakow explained how a conversation she had overheard of her Argentinian friend’s mother advanced this curiosity. It shows that as immigrants from a South American country, the family was experiencing the quintessential cross-cultural struggle—to maintain memory and pride in their homeland while becoming accustomed to a new lifestyle. And Dr. Shakow was right there by her friend while her family experienced this.
“I heard [the mother] talking about how my friend’s sister, who was five when they came to the U.S., wasn’t able to speak Spanish fluently anymore. So, it made me more interested in cross-cultural communications.”
“What one experience changed your view of yourself and the world?”
Dr. Shakow shared the story of when she and two friends were stuck at a train station in Philadelphia late at night because they had missed the last train. She was a senior at Swarthmore (this is pre-cell phone era) and it was a freezing January night during her final winter break of college.
“We looked around and realized there were all these people still in the station even though the last trains had left. We slowly realized these were homeless people who didn’t have any other place to go.
A policeman came and ordered everyone out of the stations. We were kind of worried for ourselves but it was also really eye-opening. You know, there were all these people who had no place to go and it was so cold you could freeze.”
Dr. Shakow and her friends eventually gathered the change to call for a ride home from the train station. Then, the reality of her surroundings sunk in.
“We saw people walking around to stay warm and stay awake—you know, so they wouldn’t die. It really brought home to me how there’s such terrible inequality in the U.S. and how the safety net is basically in tatters for people have hit bottom. So that was a really jarring experience for me.”
— Story and Interview by Jack Meyers
— Photography by Jack Meyers