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Making a foundational contribution to Mesoamerican studies, this book explores Aztec painted manuscripts and sculptures, as well as indigenous and colonial Spanish texts, to offer the first integrated study of food and ritual in Aztec art.

Aztec painted manuscripts and sculptural works, as well as indigenous and Spanish sixteenth-century texts, were filled with images of foodstuffs and food processing and consumption. Both gods and humans were depicted feasting, and food and eating clearly played a pervasive, integral role in Aztec rituals. Basic foods were transformed into sacred elements within particular rituals, while food in turn gave meaning to the ritual performance.

This pioneering book offers the first integrated study of food and ritual in Aztec art. Elizabeth Morán asserts that while feasting and consumption are often seen as a secondary aspect of ritual performance, a close examination of images of food rites in Aztec ceremonies demonstrates that the presence—or, in some cases, the absence—of food in the rituals gave them significance. She traces the ritual use of food from the beginning of Aztec mythic history through contact with Europeans, demonstrating how food and ritual activity, the everyday and the sacred, blended in ceremonies that ranged from observances of births, marriages, and deaths to sacrificial offerings of human hearts and blood to feed the gods and maintain the cosmic order. Morán also briefly considers continuities in the use of pre-Hispanic foods in the daily life and ritual practices of contemporary Mexico. Bringing together two domains that have previously been studied in isolation, Sacred Consumption promises to be a foundational work in Mesoamerican studies.

The village of San José de Gracia is not mentioned in any history of Mexico, nor is it referred to in any of the annals of the state of Michoacán. It is not to be found at all on most maps, and almost none show its correct location. It is an unknown point in space, in time, and in the consciousness of the Mexican republic.

In Luis González's classic history of the world of San José, he turns his attention in every direction: toward what is lasting and what is ephemeral, everyday and unusual, material and spiritual. The story is, to some extent, the story of rural life anywhere, in any age; to some extent it is peculiar to the world of the peasant all through Mexico's history; and to some extent it can be said to be true only of San José.

The history of San José is also the history of the village as victim of the megalopolis, not only in Mexico but everywhere in our time. With the small community will be lost traditions and a sense of continuity that may prove irreplaceable and essential to human wellbeing. While Luis González does not suggest that he knows what the fate of San José will be, one feels that he knows all too well, and that his questions are only "How?" and "How soon?"

Winner, Presidio La Bahia Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas, 1978

In their efforts to assert dominion over vast reaches of the (now U.S.) Southwest in the seventeenth century, the Spanish built a series of far-flung missions and presidios at strategic locations. One of the most important of these was San Juan Bautista del Río Grande, located at the present-day site of Guerrero in Coahuila, Mexico.

Despite its significance as the main entry point into Spanish Texas during the colonial period, San Juan Bautista was generally forgotten until the first publication of this book in 1968. Weddle's narrative is a fascinating chronicle of the many religious, military, colonial, and commerical expeditions that passed through San Juan and a valuable addition to knowledge of the Spanish borderlands. It won the Texas Institute of Letters Amon G. Carter Award for Best Southwest History in 1969.

In Scales of Resistance Maylei Blackwell narrates how Indigenous women’s activism in Mexico and its diaspora weaves in and between local, national, continental, and transborder scales. Drawing on more than seventy testimonials and twenty years of fieldwork spent accompanying Indigenous women activists, Blackwell focuses on how these activists navigate the blockages to their participation and transform exclusionary spaces into scales of resistance. Blackwell shows how activists in Mexico and those in the migrant stream that runs from Oaxaca into California redefined women’s roles in community decision-making. They did so by scaling down Indigenous autonomy to their own bodies, homes, and communities; grounding their political claims within Indigenous epistemologies and the gendered nature of social organization; and scaling up to regional, national, and continental contexts. This allowed them to place themselves at the heart of Indigenous resistance and autonomy, decolonizing gender hierarchies and creating new scales of participation. Blackwell reveals the importance of moving across different types of scale and contrasting colonial divisions of scale itself with Indigenous conceptions of scale, space, solidarity, and connection.

Cavernous, often cold, always dark, with the lingering smell of popcorn in the air: the experience of movie-going is universal. The cinematic experience in Mexico is no less profound, and has evolved in complex ways in recent years. Films like Y Tu Mama Tambien, El Mariachi, Amores Perros, and the work of icons like Guillermo del Toro and Salma Hayek represent much more than resurgent interest in the cinema of Mexico. In Screening Neoliberalism, Ignacio Sanchez Prado explores precisely what happened to Mexico's film industry in recent decades. Far from just a history of the period, Screening Neoliberalism explores four deep transformations in the Mexican film industry: the decline of nationalism, the new focus on middle-class audiences, the redefinition of political cinema, and the impact of globalization. This analysis considers the directors and films that have found international notoriety as well as those that have been instrumental in building a domestic market. Screening Neoliberalism exposes the consequences of a film industry forced to find new audiences in Mexico's middle-class in order to achieve economic and cultural viability.

Honorable Mention, Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, Modern Language Association, 2023
Honorable Mention, Premio al Mejor Libro en Humanidades, Latin American Studies Association–Mexico Section, 2025

No book until now has tied in two centuries of Mexican serial narratives—tales of glory, of fame, and of epic characters, grounded in oral folklore—with their subsequent retelling in comics, radio, and television soap operas. Wright’s multidisciplinary Serial Mexico delves into this storytelling tradition: examining the nostalgic tales reimagined in novelas, radionovelas, telenovelas and onwards, and examining the foundational figures who have been woven into society.
 
This panorama shows the Mexican experience of storytelling from the country’s early days until now, showcasing protagonists that mock authority, make light of hierarchy, and embrace the hybridity and mestizaje of Mexico. These tales reflect on and respond to crucial cultural concerns such as family, patriarchy, gender roles, racial mixing, urbanization, modernization, and political idealism. Serial Mexico thus examines how serialized storytelling’s melodrama and sensationalism reveals key political and cultural messaging.
 
In a detailed yet accessible style, Wright describes how these stories have continued to morph with current times’ concerns and social media. Will tropes and traditions carry on in new and reimagined serial storytelling forms? Only time will tell. Stay tuned for the next episode.

A gateway at the U.S.-Mexico border, Tijuana is a complex urban center with a sizeable population of sex workers. An in-depth case study of the trade, Sex Work and the City is the first major ethnographic publication on contemporary prostitution in this locale, providing a detailed analysis of how sex workers' experiences and practices are shaped by policing and regulation.

Contextualizing her research within the realm of occupational risk, Yasmina Katsulis examines the experiences of a diverse range of sex workers in the region and explores the implications of prostitution, particularly regarding the spheres of class hierarchies, public health, and other broad social effects. Based on eighteen months of intensive fieldwork and nearly 400 interviews with sex workers, customers, city officials, police, local health providers, and advocates, Sex Work and the City describes the arenas of power and the potential for disenfranchisement created by municipal laws designed to regulate the trade. Providing a detailed analysis of this subculture's significance within Tijuana and its implications for debates over legalization of "vice" elsewhere in the world, Katsulis draws on powerful narratives as workers describe the risks of their world, ranging from HIV/AIDS and rape (by police or customers) to depression, work-related stress, drug and alcohol addiction, and social stigma. Insightful and compelling, Sex Work and the City captures the lives (and deaths) of a population whose industry has broad implications for contemporary society at large.

Mainstream Mexican views of indigenous women center on them as problematic mothers, and development programs have included the goal of helping these women become "good mothers." Economic incentives and conditional cash transfers are the vehicles for achieving this goal. With ethnographic immediacy, Shaping the Motherhood of Indigenous Mexico</> examines the dynamics among the various players--indigenous mothers, clinicians, and representatives of development programs. The women's voices lead the reader to understand the structures of dependency that paradoxically bind indigenous women within a program that calls for their empowerment.

The cash transfer program is Oportunidades, which enrolls more than a fifth of Mexico's population. It expects mothers to become involved in their children's lives at three nodes--health, nutrition, and education. If women do not comply with the standards of modern motherhood, they are dropped from the program and lose the bi-monthly cash payments. Smith-Oka explores the everyday implementation of the program and its unintended consequences.

The mothers are often berated by clinicians for having too many children (Smith-Oka provides background on the history of eugenics and population control in Mexico) and for other examples of their "backward" ways. An entire chapter focuses on the humor indigenous women use to cope with disrespectful comments. Ironically, this form of resistance allows the women to accept the situation that controls their behavior.

Migration journeys are arduous, with migrants tormented by risk, abuse, threats, and xenophobia. Shelters, staffed by humanitarian workers and volunteers, provide safe spaces for those in transit. Shelter on the Journey examines how these sites, often faith-based civil society associations, create solidarity and help politicize migrants, giving them a sense of themselves as an empowered, rights-holding people.

Solano, who volunteered at shelters in Mexico, chronicles the activity in three of the nearly 100 shelters along a unique humanitarian trail that many Central Americans take to reach the United States. She outlines the constraints faced by these sites and their potential to create social transformation and considers how and why migration security is currently framed and managed as both a criminal and humanitarian issue.

Shelter on the Journey explores the politics of the shelters, their social world, and the dynamics of charity and solidarity, as well as the need for humanitarian assistance and advocacy for dignified and free transit migration.

In Since Time Immemorial Yanna Yannakakis traces the invention of Native custom, a legal category that Indigenous litigants used in disputes over marriage, self-governance, land, and labor in colonial Mexico. She outlines how, in the hands of Native litigants, the European category of custom—social practice that through time takes on the normative power of law—acquired local meaning and changed over time. Yannakakis analyzes sources ranging from missionary and Inquisition records to Native pictorial histories, royal surveys, and Spanish and Native-language court and notarial documents. By encompassing historical actors who have been traditionally marginalized from legal histories and highlighting spaces outside the courts like Native communities, parishes, and missionary schools, she shows how imperial legal orders were not just imposed from above but also built on the ground through translation and implementation of legal concepts and procedures. Yannakakis argues that, ultimately, Indigenous claims to custom, which on the surface aimed to conserve the past, provided a means to contend with historical change and produce new rights for the future.

Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico helped establish the field of archaeoastronomy, and it remains the standard introduction to this subject. Combining basic astronomy with archaeological and ethnological data, it presented a readable and entertaining synthesis of all that was known of ancient astronomy in the western hemisphere as of 1980.

In this revised edition, Anthony Aveni draws on his own and others' discoveries of the past twenty years to bring the Skywatchers story up to the present. He offers new data and interpretations in many areas, including:

• The study of Mesoamerican time and calendrical systems and their unprecedented continuity in contemporary Mesoamerican culture
• The connections between Precolumbian religion, astrology, and scientific, quantitative astronomy
• The relationship between Highland Mexico and the world of the Maya and the state of Pan-American scientific practices
• The use of personal computer software for computing astronomical data

With this updated information, Skywatchers will serve a new generation of general and scholarly readers and will be useful in courses on archaeoastronomy, astronomy, history of astronomy, history of science, anthropology, archaeology, and world religions.

Using new archaeological data from four major cities of the Classic Maya world, this book explores how gender, age, familial and community memories, and the experience of living in an urban setting interacted to form social identities.

Social Identities in the Classic Maya Northern Lowlands plumbs the archaeological record for what it can reveal about the creation of personal and communal identities in the Maya world. Using new primary data from her excavations at the sites of Yaxuna, Chunchucmil, and Xuenkal, and new analysis of data from Dzibilchaltun in Yucatan, Mexico, Traci Ardren presents a series of case studies in how social identities were created, shared, and manipulated among the lowland Maya.

Ardren argues that the interacting factors of gender, age, familial and community memories, and the experience of living in an urban setting were some of the key aspects of Maya identities. She demonstrates that domestic and civic spaces were shaped by gender-specific behaviors to communicate and reinforce gendered ideals. Ardren discusses how child burials disclose a sustained pattern of reverence for the potential of childhood and the power of certain children to mediate ancestral power. She shows how small shrines built a century after Yaxuna was largely abandoned indicate that its remaining residents used memory to reenvision their city during a time of cultural reinvention. And Ardren explains how Chunchucmil’s physical layout of houses, plazas, and surrounding environment denotes that its occupants shared an urban identity centered in the movement of trade goods and economic exchange. Viewing this evidence through the lens of the social imaginary and other recent social theory, Ardren demonstrates that material culture and its circulations are an integral part of the discourse about social identity and group membership.

"Anthropologists Murphy and Stepick trace urbanization in the capital city of the state of Oaxaca for more than 2,000 years. Their study represents a micro perspective that describes the colonias populares, the poor neighborhoods, and the struggles of Oaxacans to survive and improve life in marginal communities.... The book is well organized, with excellent annotated footnotes and a reading list." --Choice This may be the only book that analyzes the urbanization of one area from its origins more than two thousand years ago to the present. Arthur Murphy and Alex Stepick examine Oaxaca, Mexico, where they have been doing research regularly for the last twenty years. Paying particular attention to neighborhoods, families, and economic activities, they focus on issues of poverty and inequality. Oaxaca is a city marked by socioeconomic inequality that has felt the alternating trends of integration into and isolation from the broader world. It is a city in which tens of thousands of households resolutely try to adapt, to survive and pass on something of themselves to their children. With rich ethnographic material and historical research, Murphy and Stepick describe gender roles, the dynamic nature of households, the importance of compadrazgo (co-godparenthood) as a social institution, class-based political struggles and strikes, and the role of children in redeeming their parents from poverty. Individual life histories emerge from their research, each representing diverse class, familial, and economic structures within Oaxacan society. "Murphy and Stepick catch Oaxaca at a special time in its history. When the illustrious works of theory in the academic disciplines have faded, when Foucault is a footnote and deconstruction derided, books like this one will still be valuable. A portrait of a city during the most difficult period of its country's recent economic history." --Henry A. Selby (from the Foreword)

Since the Revolution of 1910, Mexican society has undergone a profound transformation, characterized by the disempowerment of the landed aristocracy and the rise of a new ruling class of plutocrats and politicians; the development of a middle class of white-collar professionals; and the upward mobility of formerly disenfranchised Indians who have become urban, working-class Mestizos. Indeed, Mexico's class system today increasingly resembles that of Western industrialized nations, proving that, while further democratic reforms are needed, the Revolution initiated an ongoing process of change that has created a more egalitarian society in Mexico with greater opportunities for social advancement.

This authoritative ethnography examines the transformation of social classes in the Córdoba-Orizaba region during the latter half of the twentieth century to create a model of provincial social stratification in Mexico. Hugo Nutini focuses on the increased social mobility that has affected all classes of society, especially the rural Indians who have taken advantage of education, job opportunities, and contact with the wider world to achieve Mestizo status. He also traces the transfer of power that followed the demise of the hacienda system, as well as the growing importance of the middle class. This description and analysis of the provincial social stratification system complements the work Nutini has done on the national class system, centered in Mexico City, to offer a comprehensive picture of social stratification and mobility in Mexico today.

In Aztec and colonial Central Mexico, every individual was destined for lifelong placement in a legally defined social stratum or estate. Social mobility became possible after independence from Spain in 1821 and increased after the 1910–1920 Revolution. By 2000, the landed aristocracy that was for long Mexico's ruling class had been replaced by a plutocracy whose wealth derives from manufacturing, commerce, and finance—but rapid growth of the urban lower classes reveals the failure of the Mexican Revolution and subsequent agrarian reform to produce a middle-class majority. These evolutionary changes in Mexico's class system form the subject of Social Stratification in Central Mexico, 1500–2000, the first long-term, comprehensive overview of social stratification from the eve of the Spanish Conquest to the end of the twentieth century.

The book is divided into two parts. Part One concerns the period from the Spanish Conquest of 1521 to the Revolution of 1910. The authors depict the main features of the estate system that existed both before and after the Spanish Conquest, the nature of stratification on the haciendas that dominated the countryside for roughly four centuries, and the importance of race and ethnicity in both the estate system and the class structures that accompanied and followed it. Part Two portrays the class structure of the post-revolutionary period (1920 onward), emphasizing the demise of the landed aristocracy, the formation of new upper and middle classes, the explosive growth of the urban lower classes, and the final phase of the Indian-mestizo transition in the countryside.

Since pre-Columbian times, soldiering has been a traditional life experience for innumerable women in Mexico. Yet the many names given these women warriors—heroines, camp followers, Amazons, coronelas, soldadas, soldaderas, and Adelitas—indicate their ambivalent position within Mexican society. In this original study, Elizabeth Salas explores the changing role of the soldadera, both in reality and as a cultural symbol, from pre-Columbian times up to the present day.

Drawing on military archival data, anthropological studies, and oral history interviews, Salas first explores the real roles played by Mexican women in armed conflicts. She finds that most of the functions performed by women easily equate to those performed by revolutionaries and male soldiers in the quartermaster corps and regular ranks. She then turns her attention to the soldadera as a continuing symbol in Mexican and Chicano culture, examining the image of the soldadera in literature, corridos, art, music, and film.

Challenging many traditional stereotypes, Salas finds that the fundamental realities of war link all Mexican women, regardless of time period, social class, or nom de guerre.

The Mexican Revolution gave rise to the Mexican nation-state as we know it today. Rural revolutionaries took up arms against the Díaz dictatorship in support of agrarian reform, in defense of their political autonomy, or inspired by a nationalist desire to forge a new Mexico. However, in the Gran Nayar, a rugged expanse of mountains and canyons, the story was more complex, as the region’s four Indigenous peoples fought both for and against the revolution and the radical changes it bought to their homeland.

To make sense of this complex history, Nathaniel Morris offers the first systematic understanding of the participation of the Náayari, Wixárika, O’dam, and Mexicanero peoples in the Mexican Revolution. They are known for being among the least “assimilated” of all Mexico’s Indigenous peoples. It’s often been assumed that they were stuck up in their mountain homeland—“the Gran Nayar”—with no knowledge of the uprisings, civil wars, military coups, and political upheaval that convulsed the rest of Mexico between 1910 and 1940.

Based on extensive archival research and years of fieldwork in the rugged and remote Gran Nayar, Morris shows that the Náayari, Wixárika, O’dam, and Mexicanero peoples were actively involved in the armed phase of the revolution. This participation led to serious clashes between an expansionist, “rationalist” revolutionary state and the highly autonomous communities and heterodox cultural and religious practices of the Gran Nayar’s inhabitants. Morris documents confrontations between practitioners of subsistence agriculture and promoters of capitalist development, between rival Indian generations and political factions, and between opposing visions of the world, of religion, and of daily life. These clashes produced some of the most severe defeats that the government’s state-building programs suffered during the entire revolutionary era, with significant and often counterintuitive consequences both for local people and for the Mexican nation as a whole.

Winner of the Marcia Herndon Prize (Gender and Sexualities Studies Section), Society for Ethnomusicology, 2024

In Sonic Strategies, author Christina Baker highlights the tactics employed by contemporary performance artists in Mexico in response to the violence surrounding the nation’s War on Drugs. The introduction opens with a description of the 2007 reenactment of the Grito, or “cry,” of independence, a moment fraught with sonic sparring, setting the stage for how each subsequent chapter focuses on themes related to war and violence. Each chapter focuses on the works of one or more performance artist, and taken together, the case studies illuminate how critiques of the nation’s rising death tolls, governmental corruption, and gendered violence very literally sound, whether in Música de balas, a post-dramatic piece by Hugo Salcedo; the lamentations of the nation’s Antigones in works by Violeta Luna and Lukas Avendaño; satirical revisions of Mexican Golden Age film in the cabaret piece Nosotras las proles; or the story of transfeminicide in César Enríquez’s La Prietty Guoman by way of US pop music.

Written in an accessible style grounded in theater studies but interdisciplinary by design, Sonic Strategies will appeal to literary critics, students, musicologists, and theater and performance scholars alike. By paying close attention to planned and spontaneous sounds within live and textual experiences, Sonic Strategies contends that conscientious listening reveals dynamic practices that reside beyond the linguistic and embodied gesture.

Approaching sorcery as highly rational and rooted in significant social and cultural values, Sorcery in Mesoamerica examines and reconstructs the original indigenous logic behind it, analyzing manifestations from the Classic Maya to the ethnographic present. While the topic of sorcery and witchcraft in anthropology is well developed in other areas of the world, it has received little academic attention in Mexico and Central America until now.
 
In each chapter, preeminent scholars of ritual and belief ask very different questions about what exactly sorcery is in Mesoamerica. Contributors consider linguistic and visual aspects of sorcery and witchcraft, such as the terminology in Aztec semantics and dictionaries of the Kaqchiquel and K’iche’ Maya. Others explore the practice of sorcery and witchcraft, including the incorporation by indigenous sorcerers in the Mexican highlands of European perspectives and practices into their belief system. Contributors also examine specific deities, entities, and phenomena, such as the pantheistic Nahua spirit entities called forth to assist healers and rain makers, the categorization of Classic Maya Wahy (“co-essence”) beings, the cult of the Aztec goddess Cihuacoatl, and the recurring relationship between female genitalia and the magical conjuring of a centipede throughout Mesoamerica.
 
Placing the Mesoamerican people in a human context—as engaged in a rational and logical system of behavior—Sorcery inMesoamerica is the first comprehensive study of the subject and an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Mesoamerican culture and religion.
 
 
Contributors:
Lilián González Chévez, John F. Chuchiak IV, Jeremy D. Coltman, Roberto Martínez González, Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos, Cecelia F. Klein, Timothy J. Knab, John Monaghan, Jesper Nielsen, John M. D. Pohl, Alan R. Sandstrom, Pamela Effrein Sandstrom, David Stuart

Over the past fifteen years in Mexico, more than 450,000 people have been murdered and 110,000 more have been disappeared. In Sovereignty and Extortion, Claudio Lomnitz examines the Mexican state in relation to this extreme violence, uncovering a reality that challenges the familiar narratives of “a war on drugs” or a “failed state.” Tracing how neoliberal reforms, free trade agreements, and a burgeoning drug economy have shaped Mexico’s sociopolitical landscape, Lomnitz shows that the current crisis does not represent a tear in the social fabric. Rather, it reveals a fundamental shift in the relationship between the state and the economy in which traditional systems of policing, governance, and the rule of law have eroded. Lomnitz finds that power is now concentrated in the presidency and enforced through militarization, which has left the state estranged from itself and incapable of administering justice or regaining control over violence. Through this critical examination, Lomnitz offers a new theory of the state, its forms of sovereignty, and its shifting relation to capital and militarization.

This volume explores the intersection between theories of the modern spectaclefrom Jose Antonio Maravall's conceptualization of the spectacular culture of the baroque to the Frankfurt School's theorization of mass culture, to Baudrillard's notion of the simulacrum, to Guy Debord's understanding of the society of the spectacleand the findings of the emerging fields of urban studies, landscape studies, and, generally speaking, studies of space.