Over the twelve years of our fieldwork, we were assisted by seven additional ethnographers: Maxwell Burton, Dan Ciccarone, Mark Lettiere, Ann Magruder, Joelle Morrow, Charles Pearson, and Jim Quesada. We did not include their names in the text so as not to confuse readers with too many characters; instead, we occasionally refer to “members of the ethnographic team” when drawing on events they documented.
Our collaboration with Charles and Mark was the most intensive. Charles first brought Philippe to a homeless encampment on Edgewater Boulevard in November 1994 and worked on the project until the spring of 1995. Excerpts from his fieldnotes and tape recordings were especially useful in the first chapter for detailing daily life before the white flight episode, as well as in several sections of the chapters on employment and families.
Mark worked on the project from spring 1996 to spring 1998. Excerpts from his tape recordings (and to a lesser extent from his fieldnotes) contributed to at least two dozen conversations and descriptions reported in the text. His material focused on constructions of gender, racial tensions, violence, illegal income-generating strategies, and life histories.
The materials collected by Joelle, Ann, and Jim contributed to some half dozen descriptions of events in the book. Maxwell shared with us his knowledge of San Francisco streets and corrected some of our interpretations of events and street terms. Dan Ciccarone’s ethnographic contribution drew on his experience as a medical doctor working with heroin injectors. He not only treated the Edgewater homeless in their encampments and visited them in the hospital but also took a half dozen sets of fieldnotes and served as our consultant on medical issues and epidemiological and clinical methods throughout the second half of the project. We consulted with several additional quantitative research colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, including Andrew Moss, Brian Edlin, Alex Kral, Judy Hahn, Paula Lum, Peter Davidson, and Jennifer Evans.
We thank the many clinicians at San Francisco General Hospital and in the Department of Public Health’s community-based clinics who provide outstanding services to the homeless (especially the medical residents who work in the primary care program directed by Margaret Wheeler). Doctors Michelle Schneiderman and especially Daniel Wlodarczyk earned our admiration for saving the lives of several of the main characters in this book. During the final years of our fieldwork, Josh Bamberger, the medical director of Housing and Urban Health in the Department of Public Health, arranged for permanent housing for several of the homeless individuals who appear in these pages.
Rob Borofsky convinced us to sign a book contract before we thought we were ready, and we are grateful for that impetus. We thank Naomi Schneider at University of California Press for supporting this project since its inception as part of the public anthropology series. Mary Renaud indefatiguably copyedited a challenging multivoiced manuscript, and Dore Brown graciously coordinated all aspects of production. We truly appreciate Nola Burger’s dedication to creating the design and layout of the photographs and text. Javier Auyero and João Biehl provided useful detailed comments that helped reshape the book. Laurie Hart deserves to be a co-author; her edits and restructuring of our theoretical analysis were invaluable.
We are especially thankful to Ann Magruder, who coded, organized, and reviewed notes and transcripts and sat side by side with us to type the first drafts. Additional heavy lifting (typing, editing, formatting, and yet more editing) was performed by Emi Bretschneider, Xarene Eskandar, David Hess, Jesse Davies-Kessler, Joelle Morrow, Mary Katherine Sheena, Lisa Lisanti, and Mimi Kirk. Zoe Marquardt vetted final copy edits; Fernando Montero Castrillo incorporated the last set of edits, fact-checked, revamped the bibliography, and coordinated the preliminary submission of the photos and files with remarkable elegance, patience, clarity, and good cheer. Last-minute emergency help was provided by Emiliano Bourgois-Chacon, Nick Iacobelli, and Ross Lerner.
This project was primarily funded by National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant DA10164, which was initially shepherded by Richard Needle, Susan Coyle, Nick Kozel, and especially Mike Agar. The grant subsequently was expertly guided for ten years at the NIH by Elizabeth Lambert, with additional help from Jacques Normand and Angela Pattatucci Aragón. We also received funds from N01-DA-3–5201, DA-263-MD-519210, the California University AIDS Research Program (UARP) R99-SF-052, the Russell Sage Foundation 87–03–04, the National Endowment for the Humanities RA-20229, two NIH diversity supplements, the Wenner Gren Trustee Program, the President’s Office at the University of Pennsylvania (through a Richard Perry University Professorship), and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The collection of comparative background and historical data was supported by California HIV/AIDS Research Program ID-06-SF194, UARP R99-SF-115, Center for Substance Abuse Treatment H79-TI12103, the Office of AIDS at the California Department of Health Services (SYNC Project 06–55787), the Social Science Research Council, the Ford Foundation, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, as well as NIH grants DA06413, DA012803, DA01064, DA016165, DA09532, DA013245, DA016159, DA017389, DA021627, NR08324, MH054907, MH078743, and MH064388. The analysis presented in this book does not necessarily represent the views of the funders.
Above all, we thank the Edgewater homeless for allowing us into their lives.