"In recent decades the study of borders and borderlands has been gaining a more active role in activism throughout academia. Nonetheless, border scholars and border activism are not new features in intellectual thought. The anthropologist Carlos G. Vélez-Ibañez shares, in his recent book, insights into his 50-year journey from an early graduate student to his current position as a renowned professor in the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University."—Journal of Borderlands Studies
“This is a brilliant collection of essays written by a highly respected and distinguished anthropologist, Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez. The essays focus on transnational border issues related to the United States and Mexico. Each essay explores issues of marginality, transborder and transnational issues, tandas, confianza, nonconsensual sterilization cases of Mexican women in California, networks of monetary exchange, political ecology of credit, debt and class, barrioization, women and the border, and the issue of hegemonic language politics.”—Maria Herrera-Sobek, University of California, Santa Barbara
“Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez has given us a collection of valuable writings and an intellectual autobiography enriched by wisdom earned over a lifetime of inventive scholarship and institution building across disciplines and borders. Velez-Ibanez’s long intellectual pilgrimage is marked by battles that, won or lost, have made subsequent generations of scholars who they are. We can be deeply grateful to him for explaining this inheritance and pointing the way for others to embark on journeys where his footsteps leave off.”—Casey Walsh, author of Virtuous Waters: Mineral Springs, Bathing, and Infrastructure in Mexico— -