Prehistoric farmers in Mexico invented irrigation, developed it into a science, and used it widely. Indeed, many of the canal systems still in use in Mexico today were originally begun well before the discovery of the New World. In this comprehensive study, William E. Doolittle synthesizes and extensively analyzes all that is currently known about the development and use of irrigation technology in prehistoric Mexico from about 1200 B.C. until the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century A.D.

Unlike authors of previous studies who have focused on the political, economic, and social implications of irrigation, Doolittle considers it in a developmental context. He examines virtually all the known systems, from small canals that diverted runoff from ephemeral mountain streams to elaborate networks that involved numerous large canals to irrigate broad valley floors with water from perennial rivers. Throughout the discussion, he gives special emphasis to the technological elaborations that distinguish each system from its predecessors. He also traces the spread of canal technology into and through different ecological settings.

This research substantially clarifies the relationship between irrigation technology in Mexico and the American Southwest and argues persuasively that much of the technology that has been attributed to the Spaniards was actually developed in Mexico by indigenous people. These findings will be important not only for archaeologists working in this area but also for geographers, historians, and engineers interested in agriculture, technology, and arid lands.

Nellie Campobello, a prominent Mexican writer and "novelist of the Revolution," played an important role in Mexico's cultural renaissance in the 1920s and early 1930s, along with such writers as Rafael Muñoz and Gregorio López y Fuentes and artists Diego Rivera, Orozco, and others. Her two novellas, Cartucho (first published in 1931) and My Mother's Hands (first published as Las manos de Mamá in 1938), are autobiographical evocations of a childhood spent amidst the violence and turmoil of the Revolution in Mexico. Campobello's memories of the Revolution in the north of Mexico, where Pancho Villa was a popular hero and a personal friend of her family, show not only the stark realism of Cartucho but also the tender lyricism of My Mother's Hands. They are noteworthy, too, as a first-person account of the female experience in the early years of the Mexican Revolution and unique in their presentation of events from a child's perspective.

The Casa del Deán in Puebla, Mexico, is one of few surviving sixteenth-century residences in the Americas. Built in 1580 by Tomás de la Plaza, the Dean of the Cathedral, the house was decorated with at least three magnificent murals, two of which survive. Their rediscovery in the 1950s and restoration in 2010 revealed works of art that rival European masterpieces of the early Renaissance, while incorporating indigenous elements that identify them with Amerindian visual traditions.

Extensively illustrated with new color photographs of the murals, The Casa del Deán presents a thorough iconographic analysis of the paintings and an enlightening discussion of the relationship between Tomás de la Plaza and the indigenous artists whom he commissioned. Penny Morrill skillfully traces how native painters, trained by the Franciscans, used images from Classical mythology found in Flemish and Italian prints and illustrated books from France—as well as animal images and glyphic traditions with pre-Columbian origins—to create murals that are reflective of Don Tomás’s erudition and his role in evangelizing among the Amerindians. She demonstrates how the importance given to rhetoric by both the Spaniards and the Nahuas became a bridge of communication between these two distinct and highly evolved cultures. This pioneering study of the Casa del Deán mural cycle adds an important new chapter to the study of colonial Latin American art, as it increases our understanding of the process by which imagery in the New World took on Christian meaning.

Chichén Itzá ("mouth of the well of the Itza") was one of the great centers of civilization in prehistoric America, serving between the eighth and twelfth centuries A.D. as a religious, economic, social, and political capital on the Yucatán Peninsula. Within the ancient city there were many natural wells or cenotes. One, within the ceremonial heart of the city, is an impressive natural feature with vertical limestone walls enclosing a deep pool of jade green water some eighty feet below ground level. This cenote, which gave the city its name, became a sacred shrine of Maya pilgrimage, described by one post-Conquest observer as similar to Jerusalem and Rome. Here, during the city's ascendancy and for centuries after its decline, the peoples of Yucatán consulted their gods and made ritual offerings of precious objects and living victims who were thought to receive prophecies.

Although the well was described by Bishop Diego de Landa in the late sixteenth century, its contents were not known until the early 1900s when revealed by the work of Edward H. Thompson. Conducting excavations for the Peabody Museum of Harvard University, Thompson recovered almost thirty thousand artifacts, most ceremonially broken and many beautifully preserved by burial in the deep silt at the bottom of the well. The materials were sent to the Peabody Museum, where they remained, unexhibited, for over seventy years.

In 1984, for the first time, nearly three hundred objects of gold, jade, copper, pottery, wood, copal, textile, and other materials from the collection were gathered into a traveling interpretive exhibition. No other archaeological exhibition had previously given this glimpse into Maya ritual life because no other collection had objects such as those found in the Sacred Cenote. Moreover, the objects from the Cenote come from throughout Mesoamerica and lower Central America, representing many artistic traditions. The exhibit and this, its accompanying catalog, marked the first time all of the different kinds of offerings have ever been displayed together, and the first time many have been published.

Essays by Gordon R. Willey and Linnea H. Wren place the Cenote of Sacrifice and the great Maya city of Chichén Itzá within the larger context of Maya archaeology and history. The catalog entries, written by Clemency Chase Coggins, describe the objects displayed in the traveling exhibition. Some entries are brief descriptive statements; others develop short scholarly themes bearing on the function and interpretation of specific objects. Coggins' introductory essay describes how the objects were collected by Thompson and how the exhibition collection has been studied to reveal the periods of Cenote ritual and the changing practices of offering to the Sacred Cenote.

2023 de la Torre Bueno® First Book Award, Dance Studies Association

The impact of folkloric dance and performance on Mexican cultural politics and national identity.

The years between 1910 and 1940 were formative for Mexico, with the ouster of Porfirio Díaz, the subsequent revolution, and the creation of the new state. Amid the upheaval, Mexican dance emerged as a key arena of contestation regarding what it meant to be Mexican. Through an analysis of written, photographic, choreographic, and cinematographic renderings of a festive Mexico, Choreographing Mexico examines how bodies in motion both performed and critiqued the nation.

Manuel Cuellar details the integration of Indigenous and regional dance styles into centennial celebrations, civic festivals, and popular films. Much of the time, this was a top-down affair, with cultural elites seeking to legitimate a hegemonic national character by incorporating traces of indigeneity. Yet dancers also used their moving bodies to challenge the official image of a Mexico full of manly vigor and free from racial and ethnic divisions. At home and abroad, dancers made nuanced articulations of female, Indigenous, Black, and even queer renditions of the nation. Cuellar reminds us of the ongoing political significance of movement and embodied experience, as folklórico maintains an important and still-contested place in Mexican and Mexican American identity today.

La crisis, a period of political and economic turmoil in Mexico that began in the late 1960s, spawned a new era in Mexican cinema. Known as el Nuevo Cine (the New Cinema), these films presented alienated characters caught in a painful transition period in which old family, gender, and social roles have ceased to function without being replaced by viable new ones. These are the films explored by Charles Ramírez Berg in Cinema of Solitude, the first book-length critical study of Mexican cinema in English.

Berg discusses the major films and filmmakers of el Nuevo Cine in depth. He analyzes dozens of commercial movies, from popular comedies and adventures to award-winning films. Introductory chapters address the issue of mexicanidad (Mexican national identity) and outline Mexican history, the history of film as popular culture and as a leading national industry, and the ideological dynamics of Mexican cinema.

In thematically arranged chapters, Berg investigates the images of women, men, and social structures portrayed in New Cinema films. He finds that women characters have begun to reject traditional stereotypes for more positive images, while male characters have grown ambiguous and undefined as machismo is abandoned. Other chapters trace the continuing marginalization of Indians in Mexican culture, the changes in male dominance within the family, and the disruptive social and economic effects caused by migration.

For everyone interested in Mexican culture as reflected in its major cinematic productions, as well as students of film theory and national cinemas, this book will be important reading.

After the modern Mexican state came into being following the Revolution of 1910, hyper-masculine machismo came to be a defining characteristic of "mexicanidad," or Mexican national identity. Virile men (pelados and charros), virtuous prostitutes as mother figures, and minstrel-like gay men were held out as desired and/or abject models not only in governmental rhetoric and propaganda, but also in literature and popular culture, particularly in the cinema. Indeed, cinema provided an especially effective staging ground for the construction of a gendered and sexualized national identity.

In this book, Sergio de la Mora offers the first extended analysis of how Mexican cinema has represented masculinities and sexualities and their relationship to national identity from 1950 to 2004. He focuses on three traditional genres (the revolutionary melodrama, the cabaretera [dancehall] prostitution melodrama, and the musical comedy "buddy movie") and one subgenre (the fichera brothel-cabaret comedy) of classic and contemporary cinema. By concentrating on the changing conventions of these genres, de la Mora reveals how Mexican films have both supported and subverted traditional heterosexual norms of Mexican national identity. In particular, his analyses of Mexican cinematic icons Pedro Infante and Gael García Bernal and of Arturo Ripstein's cult film El lugar sin límites illuminate cinema's role in fostering distinct figurations of masculinity, queer spectatorship, and gay male representations. De la Mora completes this exciting interdisciplinary study with an in-depth look at how the Mexican state brought about structural changes in the film industry between 1989 and 1994 through the work of the Mexican Film Institute (IMCINE), paving the way for a renaissance in the national cinema.

Mexico City assumed its current character around the turn of the twentieth century, during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911). In those years, wealthy Mexicans moved away from the Zócalo, the city's traditional center, to western suburbs where they sought to imitate European and American ways of life. At the same time, poorer Mexicans, many of whom were peasants, crowded into eastern suburbs that lacked such basic amenities as schools, potable water, and adequate sewerage. These slums looked and felt more like rural villages than city neighborhoods. A century—and some twenty million more inhabitants—later, Mexico City retains its divided, robust, and almost labyrinthine character.

In this provocative and beautifully written book, Michael Johns proposes to fathom the character of Mexico City and, through it, the Mexican national character that shaped and was shaped by the capital city. Drawing on sources from government documents to newspapers to literary works, he looks at such things as work, taste, violence, architecture, and political power during the formative Díaz era. From this portrait of daily life in Mexico City, he shows us the qualities that "make a Mexican a Mexican" and have created a culture in which, as the Mexican saying goes, "everything changes so that everything remains the same."

From the mid-1930s to the late 1950s, Mexican cinema became the most successful Latin American cinema and the leading Spanish-language film industry in the world. Many Cine de Oro (Golden Age cinema) films adhered to the dominant Hollywood model, but a small yet formidable filmmaking faction rejected Hollywood’s paradigm outright. Directors Fernando de Fuentes, Emilio Fernández, Luis Buñuel, Juan Bustillo Oro, Adolfo Best Maugard, and Julio Bracho sought to create a unique national cinema that, through the stories it told and the ways it told them, was wholly Mexican. The Classical Mexican Cinema traces the emergence and evolution of this Mexican cinematic aesthetic, a distinctive film form designed to express lo mexicano.

Charles Ramírez Berg begins by locating the classical style’s pre-cinematic roots in the work of popular Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada at the turn of the twentieth century. He also looks at the dawning of Mexican classicism in the poetics of Enrique Rosas’ El Automóvil Gris, the crowning achievement of Mexico’s silent filmmaking era and the film that set the stage for the Golden Age films. Berg then analyzes mature examples of classical Mexican filmmaking by the predominant Golden Age auteurs of three successive decades. Drawing on neoformalism and neoauteurism within a cultural studies framework, he brilliantly reveals how the poetics of Classical Mexican Cinema deviated from the formal norms of the Golden Age to express a uniquely Mexican sensibility thematically, stylistically, and ideologically.

Classic-Period Cultural Currents in Southern and Central Veracruz explores the diverse traditions and dynamic interactions along the Mexican Gulf lowlands at the height of their cultural florescence. Best known for their elaborate ballgame rituals and precocious inscriptions with long-count dates, these cultures served as a critical nexus between the civilizations of highland Mexico and the lowland Maya, influencing developments in both regions.

Eleven chapters penned by leading experts in archaeology, art history, and linguistics offer new insights into ancient iconography and writing, the construction of sociopolitical landscapes, and the historical interplay between local developments and external influences at Cerro de las Mesas, Tres Zapotes, Matacapan, and many lesser-known sites. The result is a new, vibrant perspective on ancient lifeways along the Mexican Gulf lowlands and an important updated source for future research in the region.

Climate change is today’s news, but it isn’t a new phenomenon. Centuries-long cycles of heating and cooling are well documented for Europe and the North Atlantic. These variations in climate, including the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), AD 900 to 1300, and the early centuries of the Little Ice Age (LIA), AD 1300 to 1600, had a substantial impact on the cultural history of Europe. In this pathfinding volume, William C. Foster marshals extensive evidence that the heating and cooling of the MWP and LIA also occurred in North America and significantly affected the cultural history of Native peoples of the American Southwest, Southern Plains, and Southeast.

Correlating climate change data with studies of archaeological sites across the Southwest, Southern Plains, and Southeast, Foster presents the first comprehensive overview of how Native American societies responded to climate variations over seven centuries. He describes how, as in Europe, the MWP ushered in a cultural renaissance, during which population levels surged and Native peoples substantially intensified agriculture, constructed monumental architecture, and produced sophisticated works of art. Foster follows the rise of three dominant cultural centers—Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, Cahokia on the middle Mississippi River, and Casas Grandes in northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico—that reached population levels comparable to those of London and Paris. Then he shows how the LIA reversed the gains of the MWP as population levels and agricultural production sharply declined; Chaco Canyon, Cahokia, and Casas Grandes collapsed; and dozens of smaller villages also collapsed or became fortresses.

Winner, Roland H. Bainton Book Prize, The Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, 2019

Some sixty years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, a group of Nahua intellectuals in Mexico City set about compiling an extensive book of miscellanea, which was recorded in pictorial form with alphabetic texts in Nahuatl clarifying some imagery or adding new information altogether. This manuscript, known as the Codex Mexicanus, includes records pertaining to the Aztec and Christian calendars, European medical astrology, a genealogy of the Tenochca royal house, and an annals history of pre-conquest Tenochtitlan and early colonial Mexico City, among other topics. Though filled with intriguing information, the Mexicanus has long defied a comprehensive scholarly analysis, surely due to its disparate contents.

In this pathfinding volume, Lori Boornazian Diel presents the first thorough study of the entire Codex Mexicanus that considers its varied contents in a holistic manner. She provides an authoritative reading of the Mexicanus’s contents and explains what its creation and use reveal about native reactions to and negotiations of colonial rule in Mexico City. Diel makes sense of the codex by revealing how its miscellaneous contents find counterparts in Spanish books called Reportorios de los tiempos. Based on the medieval almanac tradition, Reportorios contain vast assortments of information related to the issue of time, as does the Mexicanus. Diel masterfully demonstrates that, just as Reportorios were used as guides to living in early modern Spain, likewise the Codex Mexicanus provided its Nahua audience a guide to living in colonial New Spain.

Spain's attempt to establish a "New Spain" in Mexico never fully succeeded, for Spanish institutions and cultural practices inevitably mutated as they came in contact with indigenous American outlooks and ways of life. This original, interdisciplinary book explores how writing by and about colonial religious women participated in this transformation, as it illuminates the role that gender played in imposing the Spanish empire in Mexico.

The author argues that the New World context necessitated the creation of a new kind of writing. Drawing on previously unpublished writings by and about nuns in the convents of Mexico City, she investigates such topics as the relationship between hagiography and travel narratives, male visions of the feminine that emerge from the reworking of a nun's letters to her confessor into a hagiography, the discourse surrounding a convent's trial for heresy by the Inquisition, and the reports of Spanish priests who ministered to noble Indian women. This research rounds out colonial Mexican history by revealing how tensions between Spain and its colonies played out in the local, daily lives of women.

A thousand years ago, the Comitán Valley, in the Mexican state of Chiapas, was the western edge of the Maya world. Far from the famous power centers of the Classic period, the valley has been neglected even by specialists. Here, Caitlin C. Earley offers the first comprehensive study of sculpture excavated from the area, showcasing the sophistication and cultural vigor of a region that has largely been ignored.

Supported by the rulers of the valley’s cities, local artists created inventive works that served to construct civic identities. In their depictions of warrior kings, ballgames, rituals, and ancestors, the artists of Comitán made choices that reflected political and religious goals and distinguished the artistic production of the Comitán Valley from that of other Maya locales. After the Maya abandoned their powerful lowland centers, those in Comitán were maintained, a distinction from which Earley draws new insights concerning the Maya collapse. Richly illustrated with never-before-published photographs of sculptures unearthed from key archaeological sites, The Comitán Valley is an illuminating work of art historical recovery and interpretation.

The ease with which Cuba slipped into its relationship with Communism revived in the United States its recurring nightmare in which other Latin American countries, particularly Mexico, become satellites of Russia or Red China. But such an occurrence is most unlikely in Mexico, according to Karl Schmitt, former intelligence research analyst with the United States Department of State.

Communism in Mexico traces efforts during the early twentieth century to create a Soviet-style society in one of the largest and most strategically situated of the Latin American countries. Schmitt writes authoritatively of the Mexican Communist movement, tracing its development from an early and potentially powerful political-economic base to the increasingly fragmented and weakened collection of parties and front groups of the 1960s. He follows the various schisms and factional divisions to the mid-1950s, when the process of disintegration became most noticeable, and explores and analyzes in detail Communist attempts since then to establish unity among the many quarreling and frustrated groups of the now-splintered movement.

Three Communist parties in Mexico, a score of front groups, and numerous infiltration cells in non-Communist organizations such as student and labor groups, all recognize in a broad way a common and ultimate goal: the creation of a Soviet-style society. But their attempts at unity have consistently led only to further bickering and frustration. This period is subjected to a thorough study and analysis in an effort to understand and explain the Communists' lack of success. Schmitt presciently concludes that Communism's future in Mexico will be as cloudy as its past, and that the accelerating economy and improving social conditions there will serve to weaken the movement still further.

Mexico leads the world in community management of forests for the commercial production of timber. Yet this success story is not widely known, even in Mexico, despite the fact that communities around the globe are increasingly involved in managing their own forest resources. To assess the achievements and shortcomings of Mexico's community forest management programs and to offer approaches that can be applied in other parts of the world, this book collects fourteen articles that explore community forest management from historical, policy, economic, ecological, sociological, and political perspectives.

The contributors to this book are established researchers in the field, as well as many of the important actors in Mexico's nongovernmental organization sector. Some articles are case studies of community forest management programs in the states of Michoacán, Oaxaca, Durango, Quintana Roo, and Guerrero. Others provide broader historical and contemporary overviews of various aspects of community forest management. As a whole, this volume clearly establishes that the community forest sector in Mexico is large, diverse, and has achieved unusual maturity in doing what communities in the rest of the world are only beginning to explore: how to balance community income with forest conservation. In this process, Mexican communities are also managing for sustainable landscapes and livelihoods.

This biting commentary on the follies of humankind by a noted Mexican author cuts deeply yet leaves readers laughing—at themselves as well as at others. With his surgical intelligence, Juan José Arreola exposes the shams and hypocrisies, the false values and vices, the hidden diseases of society. Confabulario total, 1941–1961, of which this book is a translation, combines three earlier books—Varia invención (1949), Confabulario (1952), Punta de plata (1958)—and numerous later pieces.

Although some of the pieces have a noticeably Mexican orientation, most of them transcend strictly regional themes to interpret the social scene in aspects common to all civilized cultures. Arreola’s view is not limited; much of his sophistication comes from his broad, deep, and varied knowledge of present and past, and from his almost casual use both of this knowledge and of his insight into its meaning for humanity. His familiarity with many little-known arts and sciences, numerous literatures, history, anthropology, and psychology, and his telling allusions to this rich lode of fact, increase the reader’s delight in his learned but witty, scalding but poetic, satire.

In the middle of the fifteenth century, ominous portents like columns of fire and dense fog were seen above the skies of Constantinople as the Byzantine capital fell under siege by the Ottomans. Allegedly, similar signs appeared a few decades later and seven thousand miles away, forecasting the fall of the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan—Tlatelolco to the Spanish and their indigenous allies. After both cities had fallen, some Greeks and Mexica turned to poetry and song to express their anguish at the birth of what has come to be called the “modern” era.

This study probes issues of collective memory and cultural trauma in three sorrowful poems, the “Lament for Constantinople,” the “Huexotzinca Piece,” and the “Tlaxcala Piece.” Composed by anonymous authors soon after the conquest of the two cities, these texts describe the fall of an empire as a fissure in the social fabric and an open wound on the body politic. They are the workings of creators who draw on tradition and historical particulars to articulate, in a familiar language, the trauma of the conquered.

Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, 2011

With a cast ranging from Pancho Villa to Dolores del Río and Tina Modotti, Constructing the Image of the Mexican Revolution demonstrates the crucial role played by Mexican and foreign visual artists in revolutionizing Mexico's twentieth-century national iconography. Investigating the convergence of cinema, photography, painting, and other graphic arts in this process, Zuzana Pick illuminates how the Mexican Revolution's timeline (1910–1917) corresponds with the emergence of media culture and modernity.

Drawing on twelve foundational films from Que Viva Mexico! (1931–1932) to And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (2003), Pick proposes that cinematic images reflect the image repertoire produced during the revolution, often playing on existing nationalist themes or on folkloric motifs designed for export. Ultimately illustrating the ways in which modernism reinvented existing signifiers of national identity, Constructing the Image of the Mexican Revolution unites historicity, aesthetics, and narrative to enrich our understanding of Mexicanidad.

From the dramatization of local legends to the staging of plays by Shakespeare and other canonical playwrights to the exploration of contemporary sociopolitical problems and their effects on women and children, Mayan theatre is a flourishing cultural institution in southern Mexico. Part of a larger movement to define Mayan self-identity and reclaim a Mayan cultural heritage, theatre in Mayan languages has both reflected on and contributed to a growing awareness of Mayans as contemporary cultural and political players in Mexico and on the world's stage.

In this book, Tamara Underiner draws on fieldwork with theatre groups in Chiapas, Tabasco, and Yucatán to observe the Maya peoples in the process of defining themselves through theatrical performance. She looks at the activities of four theatre groups or networks, focusing on their operating strategies and on close analyses of selected dramatic texts. She shows that while each group works under the rubric of Mayan or indigenous theatre, their works are also in constant dialogue, confrontation, and collaboration with the wider, non-Mayan world. Her observations thus reveal not only how theatre is an agent of cultural self-definition and community-building but also how theatre negotiates complex relations among indigenous communities in Mayan Mexico, state governments, and non-Mayan artists and researchers.

In the villages and small towns of Oaxaca, Mexico, as in much of rural Latin America, cooperation among neighbors is essential for personal and community survival. It can take many forms, from godparenting to sponsoring fiestas, holding civic offices, or exchanging agricultural or other kinds of labor. This book examines the ways in which the people of Santa Ana del Valle practice these traditional cooperative and reciprocal relationships and also invent new relationships to respond to global forces of social and economic change at work within their community.

Based on fieldwork he conducted in this Zapotec-speaking community between 1992 and 1996, Jeffrey Cohen describes continuities in the Santañeros' practices of cooperation, as well as changes resulting from transnational migration, tourism, increasing educational opportunities, and improved communications. His nuanced portrayal of the benefits and burdens of cooperation is buttressed by the words of many villagers who explain why and how they participate-or not-in reciprocal family and community networks. This rich ethnographic material offers a working definition of community created in and through cooperative relationships.

Since the colonial era, Mexican art has emerged from an ongoing process of negotiation between the local and the global, which frequently involves invention, synthesis, and transformation of diverse discursive and artistic traditions. In this pathfinding book, María Fernández uses the concept of cosmopolitanism to explore this important aspect of Mexican art, in which visual culture and power relations unite the local and the global, the national and the international, the universal and the particular. She argues that in Mexico, as in other colonized regions, colonization constructed power dynamics and forms of violence that persisted in the independent nation-state. Accordingly, Fernández presents not only the visual qualities of objects, but also the discourses, ideas, desires, and practices that are fundamental to the very existence of visual objects.

Fernández organizes episodes in the history of Mexican art and architecture, ranging from the seventeenth century to the end of the twentieth century, around the consistent but unacknowledged historical theme of cosmopolitanism, allowing readers to discern relationships among various historical periods and works that are new and yet simultaneously dependent on their predecessors. She uses case studies of art and architecture produced in response to government commissions to demonstrate that established visual forms and meanings in Mexican art reflect and inform desires, expectations, memories, and ways of being in the world—in short, that visual culture and cosmopolitanism are fundamental to processes of subjectification and identity.

Ciudad Juárez has recently become infamous for its murder rate, which topped 3,000 in 2010 as competing drug cartels grew increasingly violent and the military responded with violence as well. Despite the atmosphere of intimidation by troops, police, and organized criminals, women have led the way in civil society activism, spurring the Juárez Resistance and forging powerful alliances with anti-militarization activists.

An in-depth examination of la Resistencia Juarense, Courage, Resistance, and Women in Ciudad Juárez draws on ethnographic research to analyze the resistance’s focus on violence against women, as well as its clash with the war against drugs championed by Mexican President Felipe Calderón with the support of the United States. Through grounded insights, the authors trace the transformation of hidden discourses into public discourses that openly challenge the militarized border regimes. The authors also explore the advocacy carried on by social media, faith-based organizations, and peace-and-justice activist Javier Sicilia while Calderón faced U.S. political schisms over the role of border trade in this global manufacturing site.

Bringing to light on-the-ground strategies as well as current theories from the fields of sociology, political anthropology, and human rights, this illuminating study is particularly significant because of its emphasis on the role of women in local and transnational attempts to extinguish a hot zone. As they overcome intimidation to become game-changing activists, the figures featured in Courage, Resistance, and Women in Ciudad Juárez offer the possibility of peace and justice in the wake of seemingly irreconcilable conflict.