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An approachable ethnography of how grasshoppers are harvested, sold, and consumed in Oaxaca.

Chapulines (toasted grasshoppers) are not a delicacy in Oaxaca. They are just food—good food—and a protein-rich seasonal snack that is the product of a long-standing industry based overwhelmingly on the labor of women. Jeffrey Cohen has interviewed dozens of these chapulineras, who harvest insects from corn and alfalfa fields, prepare them, and sell them in urban and rural marketplaces. An accessible ethnography, Eating Grasshoppers tells their story alongside the broader history of chapulines.

For tourists, chapulines are an experience—a gateway to the “real” Oaxaca. For locals, they are ordinary fare, but also a reminder of Indigenous stability and rural survival. In a sense, eating chapulines is a declaration of independence from a government that has condemned eating insects as backward. Yet, while chapulines are a generations-old favorite, eating them is not an act of preservation. Cohen shows that the business of this traditional food is thoroughly modern and ever evolving, with entrepreneurial chapulineras responding nimbly to complex and dynamic markets. From alfalfa fields to online markets, Eating Grasshoppers takes readers inside one of the world’s most fascinating food cultures.

Significant scholarship exists on anthropological fieldwork and methodologies. Some anthropologists have also published memoirs of their research experiences. Renowned anthropologist Jeffrey Cohen’s Eating Soup without a Spoon is a first-of-its-kind hybrid of the two, expertly melding story with methodology to create a compelling narrative of fieldwork that is deeply grounded in anthropological theory.

Cohen’s first foray into fieldwork was in 1992, when he lived in Santa Anna del Valle in rural Oaxaca, Mexico. While recounting his experiences studying how rural folks adapted to far-reaching economic changes, Cohen is candid about the mistakes he made and the struggles in the village. From the pressures of gaining the trust of a population to the fear of making errors in data collection, Cohen explores the intellectual processes behind ethnographic research. He offers tips for collecting data, avoiding pitfalls, and embracing the chaos and shocks that come with working in an unfamiliar environment. Cohen’s own photographs enrich his vivid portrayals of daily life.

In this groundbreaking work, Cohen discusses the adventure, wonder, community, and friendships he encountered during his first year of work, but, first and foremost, he writes in service to the field as a place to do research: to test ideas, develop theories, and model how humans cope and react to the world.

Since the late 1970s, a new folk hero has risen to prominence in the U.S.-Mexico border region and beyond—the narcotrafficker. Celebrated in the narcocorrido, a current form of the traditional border song known as the corrido, narcotraffickers are often portrayed as larger-than-life "social bandits" who rise from poor or marginalized backgrounds to positions of power and wealth by operating outside the law and by living a life of excess, challenging authority (whether U.S. or Mexican), and flouting all risks, including death. This image, rooted in Mexican history, has been transformed and commodified by the music industry and by the drug trafficking industry itself into a potent and highly marketable product that has a broad appeal, particularly among those experiencing poverty and power disparities. At the same time, the transformation from folk hero to marketable product raises serious questions about characterizations of narcocorridos as "narratives of resistance."

This multilayered ethnography takes a wide-ranging look at the persona of the narcotrafficker and how it has been shaped by Mexican border culture, socioeconomic and power disparities, and the transnational music industry. Mark Edberg begins by analyzing how the narcocorrido emerged from and relates to the traditional corrido and its folk hero. Then, drawing upon interviews and participant-observation with corrido listening audiences in the border zone, as well as musicians and industry producers of narcocorridos, he elucidates how the persona of the narcotrafficker has been created, commodified, and enacted, and why this character resonates so strongly with people who are excluded from traditional power structures. Finally, he takes a look at the concept of the cultural persona itself and its role as both cultural representation and model for practice.

Embodied Archive focuses on perceptions of disability and racial difference in Mexico’s early post-revolutionary period, from the 1920s to the 1940s. In this period, Mexican state-sponsored institutions charged with the education and health of the population sought to strengthen and improve the future of the nation, and to forge a more racially homogeneous sense of collective identity and history. Influenced by regional and global movements in eugenics and hygiene, Mexican educators, writers, physicians, and statesmen argued for the widespread physical and cognitive testing and categorization of schoolchildren, so as to produce an accurate and complete picture of “the Mexican child,” and to carefully monitor and control forms of unwanted difference, including disability and racialized characteristics. Differences were not generally marked for eradication—as would be the case in eugenics movements in the US, Canada, and parts of Europe—but instead represented possible influences from a historically distant or immediate reproductive past, or served as warnings of potential danger haunting individual or collective futures.

Weaving between the historical context of Mexico’s post-revolutionary period and our present-day world, Embodied Archive approaches literary and archival documents that include anti-alcohol and hygiene campaigns; projects in school architecture and psychopedagogy; biotypological studies of urban schoolchildren and indigenous populations; and literary approaches to futuristic utopias or violent pasts.  It focuses in particular on the way disability is represented indirectly through factors that may have caused it in the past or may cause it in the future, or through perceptions and measurements that cannot fully capture it. In engaging with these narratives, the book proposes an archival encounter, a witnessing of past injustices and their implications for the disability of our present and future.

A study of how Latin poetry shaped colonial aspirations in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century South and Central America.
 
Accompanying Iberian colonizers to the Americas, Virgil’s Aeneid inspired generations of colonial elites to write their own epic poems in Latin—priming imaginations for Spanish and Portuguese rule in the Americas. In Empire’s Companion, Erika Valdivieso recovers this lost strain of poetry for classicists and early Americanists alike. Each chapter introduces readers to a new poem that adapts Virgil for a different geographic context. These epics, Valdivieso argues, show elites working to reshape the New World in their own image, drawing on Virgil to think about the conquest of Indigenous peoples, to form new ideas about the globe, and to consider the shifting power dynamics between America and Europe. A powerful corrective to prevailing ideas about the reception of Virgil in the Americas, Empire’s Companion reveals the imperial potential of the Aeneid in the hands of governing elites.

Five deadly epidemics, chiefly typhus and smallpox, struck Mexico City in the years between 1761 and 1813, claiming a minimum of fifty thousand lives. Mexico City was at that time the major metropolis of the New World and the capital of New Spain—by far the richest and most sophisticated city in that vast empire. It had the best medicines, the best doctors, and the best hospitals of the New World. What caused these devastating epidemics?

Donald B. Cooper here makes a thorough study of the problem. Based almost entirely on unpublished manuscript materials from the national archives of Mexico and the municipal archives of Mexico City, his work represents the first detailed study of the impact of epidemic disease on the history of New Spain, primarily of its capital. The course of each epidemic, its inclusive dates, the mortality it caused, and its effect upon the community are fully described.

At the time a major epidemic was in progress, the author says, all levels of government, national and local, secular and ecclesiastical, became involved in varying degrees in providing resources and leadership. The Church, wealthy corporations, and private citizens contributed the main funds. During the actual time of crisis, an outbreak could be prosecuted with remarkable success and cooperation.

Once an epidemic was over, however, little was done to prevent another. No single person or agency in Mexico City was sufficiently cognizant of the diverse problems involved to cope with them within a national or regional range—not even the viceroy. Such vital public works as aqueducts, waterlines, roads, and canals were inadequately maintained. Such essential municipal services as cleaning streets and canals, collecting garbage and refuse, and caring for the muddy, shallow cemeteries were poor if not nonexistent. Government officials, as well as the populace, were insufficiently concerned with the relation between sanitation and disease.

The practice of medicine in eighteenth-century Mexico had few scientific or professional aspects. The close relation of medicine and theology tended to inhibit experimentation that might have effectively broadened the frontiers of medical knowledge. Traditionalism acted as a barrier to the adoption of innovations. In the epidemic of 1779, for instance, inoculation—which could have saved innumerable lives—was totally rejected; in the outbreak of 1797 it was accepted only by the small upper class; when vaccination came to Mexico in 1803 it met the same militant opposition. The wonder, then, is not that so many died of disease, but that so many lived.

A groundbreaking historical narrative of corruption and economic success in Mexico.

Ethnic Entrepreneurs, Crony Capitalism, and the Making of the Franco-Mexican Elite provides a new way to understand the scope and impact of crony capitalism on institutional development in Mexico. Beginning with the Porfiriato, the period between 1876 and 1911 named for the rule of President Porfirio Díaz, José Galindo identifies how certain behavioral patterns of the Mexican political and economic elite have repeated over the years, and analyzes aspects of the political economy that have persisted, shaping and at times curtailing Mexico’s economic development.

Strong links between entrepreneurs and politicians have allowed elite businessmen to receive privileged support, such as cheap credit, tax breaks, and tariff protection, from different governments and to run their companies as monopolies. In turn, successive governments have obtained support from businesses to implement public policies, and, on occasion, public officials have received monetary restitution. Galindo notes that Mexico’s early twentieth-century institutional framework was weak and unequal to the task of reining in these systematic abuses. The cost to society was high and resulted in a lack of fair market competition, unequal income distribution, and stunted social mobility.

The most important investors in the banking, commerce, and manufacturing sectors at the beginning of the twentieth century in Mexico were of French origin, and Galindo explains the formation of the Franco-Mexican elite. This Franco-Mexican narrative unfolds largely through the story of one of the richest families in Mexico, the Jeans, and their cotton textile empire. This family has maintained power and wealth through the current day as Emilio Azcárraga Jean, a great-grandson of one of the members of the first generation of the Jean family to arrive in Mexico, owns Televisa, a major mass media company with one of the largest audiences for Spanish-language content in the world.
 

Why have Latin American democracies proven unable to confront the structural inequalities that cripple their economies and stymie social mobility? Brian Palmer-Rubin contends that we may lay the blame on these countries’ systems of interest representation, which exhibit “biased pluralism,” a system in which the demands of organizations representing economic elites—especially large corporations—predominate. A more inclusive model of representation would not only require a more encompassing and empowered set of institutions to represent workers, but would also feature spaces for non-eliteproducers—such as farmers and small-business owners to have a say in sectoral economic policies.

With analysis drawing on over 100 interviews, an original survey, and official government data, this book focuses on such organizations and develops an account of biased pluralism in developing countries typified by the centrality of patronage—discretionarily allocated state benefits. Rather than serving as conduits for demand-making about development models, political parties and interest organizations often broker state subsidies or social programs, augmenting the short-term income of beneficiaries, but doing little to improve their long-term economic prospects. When organizations become diverted into patronage politics, the economic demands of the masses go unheard in the policies that most affect their lives, and along the way, their economic interests go unrepresented.

At the end of the Spanish civil war, Mexico was the only country to offer open refuge to the thousands of Republican emigrés who fled from Spain in 1939–1940. Exiles and Citizens is a study of these political exiles, especially those with intellectual and professional backgrounds and ambitions. It focuses on their adjustment to Mexico, on their continued ties to Spain, and on their impact on Mexican development.

The critical dilemma faced by the Spanish exiles was that, despite having fought for their political and social ideals in Spain, they forfeited in exile their active role in Spanish history. In Mexico they found a political and social system that seemed to include many of the ideals that had inspired the Spanish Republic; moreover, they were able to incorporate themselves economically, professionally, and intellectually into Mexican national life. Yet, because they were not native-born citizens, they had little or no creative part to play in the politics of their adopted country.

For Mexico, the impact of the refugees from Spain was enormous. Integrated from the first into nearly all intellectual, professional, and cultural fields, their skills proved an important catalyst to Mexican development. Yet, outside these fields, Mexico was never an effective "melting pot." The Republicans themselves were divided in their loyalties, and the Mexicans, from the beginning, were reluctant to encourage the full participation of their guests in national affairs.

Two goals were shared by most of the exiles: to ensure that the world would remember the liberal, creative, and open Spain they had created and thus reject Franco; to show their gratitude by working for the benefit and progress of Mexico. These goals, although frequently contradictory, sustained the emigration and gave meaning to exile. The refugees tried to maintain their identity by coming together in formal and informal associations that were intended either to act on behalf of the homeland or to re-create the Spanish Republican structures and values in exile. To maintain a Spanish identity, however, proved difficult, and for the second and third generations in Mexico, the initial goals had already lost their meaning. For them, economic and professional, as well as familial, ties were strongly Mexican.

Spanish Republicans in Mexico represented a fairly rare phenomenon: a large group of skilled, relatively well educated immigrants to a country where persons of their attainments and status were not numerous. Moreover, as political exiles, they approached the problems of acculturation differently from economic emigrants. Patricia Fagen's study thus offers a further understanding of an important exile community and the characteristics that set it apart from other examples of immigrant experiences. In addition, the study sheds new light on the intellectual history of Mexico and the far-reaching effects of the Spanish civil war.

Mexico's export assembly industry has been the object of an intensely polarized debate. While some observers laud the maquiladora industry as a source of much-needed employment and foreign exchange for Mexico, others berate it as a vehicle for exploitation and pollution. Exports and Local Development attempts to transcend the dichotomy by taking a practical look at how this export industry could be better utilized to promote local development.

Using data gathered from a field survey of more than seventy maquiladora plants, Patricia A. Wilson compares the Mexican industry with its more successful Asian counterparts to determine how policy initiatives might help Mexico use local linkages to tap the potential of both local and foreign-owned assembly plants.

The study grounds its analysis of the maquiladora industry in leading-edge issues including the rise of free trade, changing corporate sourcing strategies, the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing, the Japanese challenge, the spread of flexible technology and management methods, the impacts of export-led development strategies, the importance of business networking, and the role of small business. It will be of interest to a wide audience in international business, economic development planning, public policy, and economic geography.