ABSTRACT
In 1980 the project was officially over. I wrote a final report to the funding agency, started analyzing the data and presented it in a series of papers to fellow anthropologists, and wrote an article for a popular journal. Some of my colleagues and students encouraged me to publish the data. In the public arena, my analysis pointing to street-dealing in drugs as an alternate avenue for earning a living in a situation of diminishing jobs was useful and was widely quoted by social scientists. Privately, Puerto Rican students in the courses I taught throughout the metropolitan area told me that I was describing the lives of their families very accurately.
