Once Upon a Time in Ecuador: Memories of Miki

Abstract

I arrived as a graduate student at the University of Illinois in the fall of 1961, joining the relatively new Department of Anthropology under the direction of Joseph B. Casagrande. Muriel (Miki) Crespi (nee Kaminsky) had already been a graduate student for a full year. We became fast friends immediately. Shy, timid, quiet, and midwestern, I was not exactly a likely running buddy. But from the beginning, she was my mentor. After all, she was already wiser in the mysteries of graduate school; and as time passed, I came to know her as a wonderfully warm, intelligent woman from New York who also happened to be Jewish. I had never before connected with anyone who was so urbane and effortlessly gregarious. Mick's and my friendship further blossomed in our shared selection of Dr. Casagrande as our dissertation advisor and of Ecuador as our fieldwork area. Early on, Miki knew she wanted to study the impact of land reform on a government-owned hacienda high in the Ecuadorian sierra, working primarily with Indios or campesinos. She saw nothing out of character to live at an elevation of 11,000 feet, nor to speak Quechua. She left Illinois briefly to go to Cornell to learn the rudiments of Quechua. (Later she was devastated to find that the Quechua taught at Cornell was a different dialect altogether.)