Peace Corps Volunteers in the 1960s: Storytelling, (W)rites of Passage, and Transculturation

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ABSTRACT With more than 240,000 volunteers serving abroad since 1961, the Peace Corps can be considered a storytelling factory based on the substantial materials produced by the volunteers, from letters home, oral history interviews, and personal diaries to official reports, newsletters, and fiction writing. In the light of a narrative turn in geography and leaning on what can be conceived as small stories, this paper aims to reflect on the lived experience and geographical imagination of volunteers, from their initial application and basic training to the stay in their host country and their return to the United States. Inspired by a transculturation model and the idea of (w)rites of passage, this article engages with the trajectory of a single and singular Peace Corps returnee, Linda Frye, who worked in a female prison in Venezuela between 1966 and 1968. Through Linda’s stories of frustration and human goodness, told in newsletters and mailed to friends, it is possible not only to reveal general assumptions about the challenges of Peace Corps volunteers in the 1960s, but also to infer how ordinary people in unusual places situate themselves in different cultures, cope with otherness, and (re)shape their identities.