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This chapter examines volunteers’ first community work experiences, before arriving in Latin America, in poor neighborhoods of cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., as well as in communities in Mexico and Puerto Rico, where a considerable number of volunteers in the 1960s received training. The chapter dedicates special attention to New Mexico, where the University of New Mexico became a principal training site for volunteers bound for Latin America. The chapter also takes up volunteers’ involvement in community efforts associated with the War on Poverty launched in 1964 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. This preparation in the United States points to the contradictions that sprang from the Peace Corps’ ostensible mission of helping poor countries in the Third World transition to modernity. Countries such as the United States were supposedly modernity incarnate, but revealed themselves as less than completely modern.

After covering the historiography around to the Peace Corps, the chapter discusses the book’s main contributions and central arguments. In particular, it highlights the thesis that the Peace Corps Volunteers acted as intermediaries who occupied a kind of “middle ground” within the framework of the global war on poverty. In contrast to unidirectional narratives about the Peace Corps that focus exclusively on volunteers in terms on objectives designed in Washington, D.C., analyses of experiences on the ground show that actions designed and implemented within the so-called Third World led volunteers to mediate between objectives proposed both in Washington and South America.

This chapter approaches volunteers’ training as a means to examine the paradigms of community social intervention that the Peace Corps intended to enact. The chapter discusses how characteristics common among different programs reinforced the distance and cultural asymmetry with South American societies. It then discusses the formative spheres and their functionality in order to analyze the main changes that occurred through the decade. These changes sprang from the combination of interactions within local societies, criticisms lodged by former volunteers, and contributions by different actors who circulated their ideas. The final part of the chapter explains the result of these interactions: the shift toward “in-country training” that moved preparation of the volunteers to inside the host societies.