Peter Guarnaccia

— 5th — (1977) Jimmy Carter

Since 1972, I have lived in various parts of Cambridge, doing as many different kinds of things as I could find to do. This year I am doing a little of all those things in the hope that some clearer directions will present themselves soon. I am presently a family planning consultant, primarily with Planned Parenthood of Massachusetts, and a vasectomy counselor at a local clinic. I also teach discotheque dancing at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, and call contra and squares around New England. During the day I am substituting in the Boston Bilingual Education program working with Spanish-speaking students. I am also a member of the New Cambridge Morris Men, a group that has revived in Cambridge ancient English fertility dances. I am also a student of the Quadrivium, a group which performs medieval and renaissance music, dance, and theater.

— 10th — (1982) Ronald Reagan

I am currently a fourth-year medical anthropology graduate student at the University of Connecticut. I am presently doing my dissertation field research on childhood asthma among residents of one of Hartford's public housing projects. I also work on program and curriculum development with the Hispanic Health Council, a Puerto Rican research and advocacy agency in Hartford. I am still calling square and contra dances. This summer I ran a series of dances at the arts center where my companera Linda Melamed (Michigan '71) is a potter. I continue to dance with the Newtowne Morris Men and invite all members of the Class of '72 to join us in dancing up the sun on May Day morning on the banks of the Charles River.

— 15th — (1987) Ronald Reagan

After completing my Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut, where I worked with the Puerto Rican community in Hartford and spent six months on a nutrition project in Mexico, my wife and I returned to Boston for two years. I had an exciting post-doctoral fellowship in medical anthropology in the Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School. Linda worked on a Master's in art education at Massachusetts College of Art. Our son, Jaime, was conceived in Boston and born in New Brunswick. I am now an assistant professor in the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers University. I teach courses in the social sciences of health. I continue to call country dances and perform the ancient rites of morris dancing. I can always be found at dawn on May Day dancing the sun up on the banks of the Charles River.

— 20th — (1992) George H. W. Bush

I continue as an assistant professor in the department of human ecology and at the Institute for Health at Rutgers University. I am up for tenure this year and hope to be an associate professor by the time of our Reunion. My work focuses on mental health issues facing minority communities in the U.S.

Recently, I have also been working in Puerto Rico on cross-cultural issues in mental health. Linda has been consulting to educational testing services on innovative approaches to art education evaluation in public secondary schools. Our family has grown by one since the last Report-Shara was born last year on Linda's birthday! Shara is just about ready to walk and should be in full stride in June. Jamie started kindergarten this year and seems to be learning something new every day. We bought our first house in Highland Park last summer-we're right near exit ten on the New Jersey turnpike! We have recently reconnected with old friends from Jordan J and hope to see others at the Reunion.

— 25th — (1997) Bill Clinton

IT is striking to me how much of the last twenty-five years of both my professional and personal life have been shaped by my experiences at Harvard. My fascination with anthropology started as a member of the Harvard Chiapas Project (I no longer have to describe where Chiapas is) during the summers of 1970 and 1971. I followed a circuitous path from 1972 to 1978 until I found the graduate program in medical anthropology at the University of Connecticut. After receiving my Ph.D. in 1984, I was fortunate to return to Harvard Medical School for a two-year post-doc which set me on the path of studying Latino mental health issues. For the past decade, I have been an assistant and now associate professor in the Department of Human Ecology and at the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research at Rutgers University. I have greatly enjoyed working for several years with colleagues at the University of Puerto Rico Medical School connections which link in a variety of ways to my post-doc experience at Harvard Medical School.

My academic work has always been multi-or trans-disciplinary-a direct legacy of my majoring in social studies. My focus on Latin America, my attraction to "critical" social science approaches, and my ability to work across the medical social sciences and medicine are legacies of the stimulating seminars in the social studies program.

Another theme in my work has been a commitment to working in the urban U.S., and particularly in public housing projects. My two years as a Phillips Brooks House Big Brother at Columbia Point both shaped my commitment and taught me important skills in negotiating the complex communities that housing projects are. During my six-year sojourn between college and grad school, I often found myself working in and around public housing projects as a teacher, as an educational planner at UMassBoston at Columbia Point, and as a family planning health educator on the North Shore of Massachusetts. During graduate school, I helped develop a community health center in a public housing project in Hartford, Connecticut, where I subsequently did my dissertation on how Puerto Rican and African-American families coped with childhood asthma (a problem which has recently received national attention). I continue to do most of my research in poor urban communities in New Jersey and Puerto Rico.

My involvement in American and English traditional music and dance also date back to my time in South House and the dance events that were held in the Currier fish bowl. I still participate in Morris dancing and was pleased to lead the May Day ceremonies on the banks of the Charles two springs ago. All went according to our twenty year tradition, including running afoul of the local constabulary (this time the security guards at Holyoke Center said we all of a sudden needed permits to dance there-privatization! — but we persevered).

I continue to enjoy playing the saxophone, although not as often. We just acquired an alto saxophone so my son, Jaime, could start learning it in school. It was great to attend his fourth grade band concert, which I hope will be the first of many. We hope to join the Harvard Band at this year's Harvard-Princeton game.

The communal experience of Jordan J has continued in our multi-family vacations. We usually spend July 4th near Plymouth, Massachusetts, with two other families. Our combined six children share a sleeping house and are growing more independent (the start of co-op living!). The rule among the adults is still, "If you cook, you don't have to clean up!". I hope to dig out my photo essay on life in Jordan J for the Twenty-fifth Reunion.

Two roles Harvard didn't train me for are being a husband and father. These joyous, challenging and ever-evolving roles now occupy a large part of my time. I am glad that I can share with Linda, Jaime and Shara my appreciation of Latin culture, sense of social justice, and love of traditional music and dance which are legacies of my Harvard experience.

— 30th — (2002) George W. Bush

A lot has happened in the few years since our Twenty-fifth Reunion. We bought a new house in Highland Park that gives us more space as our children get older. And more space to host visitors, so stop in if you're passing exit 9 on the New Jersey Turnpike!

I have completed fifteen years as a professor at Rutgers. I am up for promotion to full professor this year. I continue to work on Latino mental health issues and am part of a network of researchers based in Puerto Rico, where I visit regularly. I teach courses in medical anthropology and health and disease a course I developed on new diseases is continually relevant, particularly this past fall with the anthrax outbreak. I am also involved in training local community mental health agencies in cultural competence issues to meet the needs of the rapidly diversifying communities of New Jersey. Linda continues her work in art education. She directs a program in family arts and creativity that brings together teachers, community artists, students and their parents to explore arts together in exciting after-school programs.

It is amazing to watch our children mature and to begin to see indications of the adults they are quickly becoming. Jaime is now a sophomore in high school and is actively involved in playing saxophone, soccer and tennis. Shara is in fifth grade. She plays clarinet, which we have fun practicing together, and piano and loves to dance. I coached her traveling soccer team this fall. This past summer, Jaime spent a month in Oaxaca, Mexico studying Spanish and absorbing the culture. We met him at the end of his trip and went on a wonderful week-long tour of places in Central Mexico, where Linda and I had lived for six months in 1983.

— 35th — (2007) George W. Bush

Plus fa change.... In preparing to write my update for this Anniversary Report, I went back to see what I had written for the Thirtieth Reunion and was struck by the continuities. I was promoted to full professor in the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers University and was shortly after elected chair of the department for a three-year term, which is thankfully ending this year. I've discovered I much prefer teaching and writing to administration. I complete my twentieth year at Rutgers this year.

Some highlights of my academic life include the appearance this year of my first book project-a book coedited with two historian colleagues at Rutgers on the Jessica Santillan case, entitled A Death Retold: Jessica Santillan, the Bungled Transplant, and the Paradoxes of Medical Citizenship, published by the University of North Carolina Press. Authors examine the case of this young Mexican woman who received a mismatched heart-lung transplant from the perspectives of media studies, transplant medicine, medical ethics, history of the treatment of immigrants, medical anthropology, and immigration studies. It was a creative and challenging process to shape the book through two intensive conferences and much follow-up editorial work. I have also become coeditor in chief of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, a journal that crosses the boundaries of anthropology, psychiatry, and psychology, housed in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. This year, I was honored by the National Latino Psychological Association as a pioneer in Latino mental health research, and by Rutgers as a leader in diversity for my directorship over the past decade of Project LEARN, a National Institute of Mental Health-funded mental health training program for Latino and African American undergraduates.

Linda and I will celebrate our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary next year. This year, Linda will publish two manuals of many of the activities she has developed with collaborating teachers and artists for the Family Arts and Creativity program that she directs.

Jaime is a junior at Harvard, majoring in sociology and Near Eastern languages and cultures. Jaime has been an adventurous traveler over the past year. He has been to Cluna twice, once with his martial arts teacher to the Shaolin Temple, and over the summer to Hong Kong, where he taught English through the Summerbridge Program. Over last spring break, he went to the Bahamas with his roommates, one of whom had family that welcomed the group into their home. And this fall, he is studying social change and politics in Fiji, living with a Fijian family and playing on a local soccer team. He hopes to spend the spring in Israel, learning Hebrew in Jerusalem.

Shara is also becoming a traveler, spending three weeks in Oaxaca, Mexico, this summer. She hiked in the Sierra Norte, through villages that are developing ecotourism programs; lived with a family in Oaxaca City, where she studied Spanish and salsa dancing and experienced Mexican politics firsthand; and then volunteered at an orphanage in the city of Juchitan. Shara is now a sophomore in high school, and is active in Model U.N. and spends several evenings a week studying ballet. I cannot fathom the political situation of our country and hope to talk with classmates at the Reunion who have been writing lucidly about politics over the last several years. I hope that by the time we get together, the shape of politics will have been altered significantly.

We continue to live in Highland Park, New Jersey, in the house we had just bought at the time of the last Report. We are really equidistant between Exits 9 and 10 of the New Jersey Turnpike, and welcome old friends to stop in for a visit.

— 40th — (2012) Barack Obama

After completing my term as chair of my department at Rutgers University in 2009, I took a year sabbatical to set some new directions for myself. It worked! I developed an international service learning program on community health in Oaxaca, Mexico, and started taking students to Oaxaca for five weeks in 2010. The program connects the growing Oaxacan community in New Brunswick, New Jersey, with communities in Mexico. I teach a weekly seminar on the medical anthropology of Mexico and lead reflection seminars each Friday. Students spend three half-days a week providing service in a variety of community health programs in Oaxaca and learning medical Spanish. The students have been a dynamic and engaged group. Oaxaca is a beautiful city and an anthropologist's dream. I also developed a new research project entitled "What Makes Acculturation Successful?," funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The study explores, through focus groups, the experiences of diverse Rutgers students who come from immigrant families in balancing their families' cultural worlds with learning US culture. I am in the second year of a two-year study. The project is proving to be theoretically rich and practically important. It has been a delight to get to know our students through hearing their stories. I have also been playing whistle, recorder, and saxophone in a faculty folk band. We recently played a local college happy hour and performed music from traditional Irish tunes to U2 to Adele.

Linda and I will celebrate our thirtieth wedding anniversary this coming November. Linda has discovered a new pottery studio in an old Stangl pottery factory and is making pots again. Jaime spent a year in an egalitarian Yeshiva in New York City studying Torah and exploring new ways to live a Jewish life. He completed the New York City Teaching Fellows Residency Program last year and is now a high school special education and English teacher in the Bronx. Shara is in her junior year at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She has spent this last year travelling. For seven weeks last summer, she explored Southeast Asia with a friend from the House Page Program. She studied educational reform in Chile and Argentina in the fall and interviewed high school students about the national educational strike and school occupations they were involved in. This spring she is in Cuba, where she is combining her interest in education with her love of dance. Imagine our surprise when she wrote home about taking a tourist boat trip down the Mekong River and swimming in the Bay of Pigs!

— 45th — (2017) Donald Trump

After reading my Fortieth narrative, which was about change and new directions, I realize that this one is about continuities for me. I am chair of the Department of Human Ecology again, but as a one-year fill-in this time. Administration is the least favorite part of my job. Teaching is one of my favorites. I continue to teach courses about the cultural and social dimensions of health and have taken on our new capstone course this spring, which has connected me to the exciting work of our seniors. I am going back to Oaxaca, Mexico, for my eighth summer of Culture and Community Health and continue to be engaged with our local Oaxacan community. In 2013 we brought back a great exhibit about an ancient map from a small Oaxacan community, and many people from that town came to the event, which we held in the New Brunswick Public Library. I have finished the study of acculturation processes among immigrant students and am working on writing my first book. (You can find a report on the project at

http://www.ihhcpar.rutgers.edu/downloads/acc_study_report.pdf.) I participated in what turned out to be an exciting task force looking at instituting a language requirement at Rutgers, and we came up with some really interesting proposals, including building on the rich language resources of the many immigrant students at Rutgers. I still play in our faculty folk band and enjoy the creative energy of making music together. I hope to expand that in retirement, which will probably happen before our Fiftieth Reunion.

Linda continues to make pots that fuel her creative energies and make for nice additions to our own and our children's and our friends' collections. Our son, Jaime '08, and his wife, Wangui '09, have been living in New York City for several years. Jaime has been teaching special education English and coaching the high school soccer team in a public high school in the Bronx. Wangui has been pursuing a doctorate in the history of medicine at Princeton. This summer they will be moving to the Boston area, where Wangui will be a postdoc at Brandeis and Jaime will teach at Gann Academy. Our daughter, Shara (NYU Gallatin '13), spent three years in Baton Rouge doing City Year and is already living in Boston working with Boston Partners in Education. So there are many trips to Boston in the next few years.

Look forward to seeing people at our Reunion and joining the Harvard Band on saxophone at the football game.

— 50th — (2022) Joseph Biden

As I write my report for the 50th Reunion Report, I am on the road to retirement from 35+ years as a Professor at Rutgers University. This is my last semester teaching; I am teaching my signature Health & Society course where COVID-19 has had a central role and the Capstone seminar for seniors in our major. I hope to be on sabbatical when we gather for our Reunion and then retirement in December 2022.

Being a professor has been an exciting career! I have never had the same day twice. My biggest accomplishment since our last report was publishing my book on my study of immigrant students at Rutgers and how they balanced family and U.S. cultures to get to college. The book, Immigration, Diversity and Student Journeys to Higher Education, was published by Peter Lang in 2019 in their series Equity in Higher Education Theory, Policy and Praxis. Another fun aspect of the book was that my brother Steven, who is a well-known illustrator, did the cover. Look for it in the Harvard Authors Bookshelf – Holiday Edition in the November/December 2021 issue of Harvard Magazine.

I seemed to work in decades (more or less) during my career. From 1996-2008, I was Faculty Director of Project L/EARN, a mental health research training program for underrepresented undergraduates based at the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research and funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. From 2009-2018, I was Faculty Director of Culture & Community Health in Oaxaca, Mexico, an International Service Learning Program through Rutgers Study Abroad. These were both dynamic programs that attracted diverse students from Rutgers and nationally. If anyone plans to travel to Oaxaca, Mexico contact me for ideas and if you are in New Brunswick, NJ we can sample the rich Oaxacan cuisine of our many local Mexican restaurants.

On a more personal note, Linda and I became grandparents for the first time this summer. Our son Jaime and daughter-in-law Wangui, who met at Harvard, had a beautiful baby girl who they named Aida Simone Guarnaccia. We are thrilled! We spent five weeks in Cambridgeport so that we could be there to meet our granddaughter and help out in as many ways as we could. Jaime teaches Special Education at a Jewish Day School in Waltham and Wangui is an Assistant Professor of History and African American Studies at Brandeis University. During those 5 weeks, we also got to spend a lot of time with our daughter Shara, who lives in Jamaica Plain with her partner Ryan. Shara got her masters at Lesley University and is in her second year as a 3rd grade English Language Learner Teacher in the Framingham Public Schools. Ryan mentors young children in the Boston Public Schools and provides various supports to their families.

Linda suspended making pottery during the Pandemic, but hopes to be back teaching and making pots by the time of our reunion. Her vegetable garden provides us with lots of tomato sauce, soups and pesto throughout the year.

The Pandemic also put my musical activities on hold, but I hope they will start up again soon. I continue to play Irish and American folk music with the Cook College Ramblers, our faculty/staff band (you can find us on our Youtube Channel). I play pennywhistles, recorder and sometimes soprano saxophone. I have also enjoyed playing with the Highland Swing Orchestra, a 15 piece community swing band. I play alto sax in that group. I hope to expand my musical involvements in retirement.

In anticipation of our Reunion, I am digitizing the negatives (part of a broader de-cluttering) from the photo essay I did of the kitchen table at Jordan J. Originally done for Robert Gardner’s “Film and Anthropology” course, the essay has stood the test of time and I look forward to being able to share it with classmates from Jordan J. I am also digitizing negatives and slides from my time on the Harvard Chiapas Project (1970-71), that launched me somewhat circuitously on my anthropological career.

Look forward to seeing classmates in Cambridge in the spring and sharing reminiscences from the last 50 eventful years.

Award

Peter Guarnaccia was the recipient of the 2022 Clement A. Price Human Dignity Award for a member of the Rutgers faculty. The Clement A. Price Human Dignity Award recognizes outstanding individuals who have demonstrated extraordinary achievement and commitment to promoting and practicing diversity, inclusion, equity, and access within the University and/or in partnership with community organizations.

Recipients of the Clement A. Price Human Dignity Award will meet any or all of the following criteria:

• amassed a body of work in research, community work, leadership, or teaching that has positively changed the relevant environment with respect to diversity, equity, inclusion and access;

• has demonstrated a sense of social responsibility that drives their work and motivates others; is respected as a role model and a changemaker;

• has reduced prejudice as a result of their work and created an inclusive community and climate of civility among students, faculty and staff;

• has a proven history of developing sustainable projects at the university.

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