This book shows how Zapotec peasants migrating to Mexico City utilize paisanazgo--which prescribes solidarity among people from the same locale--as the basis for cooperation and mutual aid within a new environment. This study focuses on three groups of Mountain Zapotecs to explain why migrant associations were created and why they took different forms, citing regional variations in ethnicity, solidarity, occupational pursuits, and sociopolitical articulation to the nation in the three points of origin.

Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, an anthropologist, is the George and Sakaye Aratani Professor of the Japanese American Internment, Redress & Community and chair of the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.