Life has always been difficult, Maria del Rosario told me, but she coped. That was before all the sickness. When her mother’s kidneys began to fail, she felt traumatised, utterly overwhelmed. No matter what she or anyone else did to help, it was no good. Their lives simply fell apart.[i]
Maria, a single mother of two, lived in Balcones …
© Elizabeth F. S. RobertsThese are pots and dishes. They transmit food and love. They transmit lead. They transmit class. They transmit enduring inequality and new forms of environmental degradation. These transmissions are conveyed through food, love, and chemical leaching. These pots are for sale in working class neighborhoods in Mexico City. They are passed around in families. They …
I am a cultural anthropologist who conducts research with deaf children and their families in Mexico City. Echarle ganas is a Mexican colloquial expression that roughly translates to “you have to give it your all.” “Échale ganas!” or “work at it!” is often heard as a rallying cry when things are not going as desired. This saying is …
…“Are cultural anthropologists ready to shed their habit of using society and culture? (…) No, I don’t feel so. (…) It seems to me that many anthropologists wish to keep the human (…). There is a tricky problem here: concentrating around the human could mean either maintaining this character apart from other entities — the former beings of ‘nature’ defining
This article first appeared on Anthropology News.
I have had the honor many times to present together with Triqui Mexican migrant farmworkers who have shaped my thinking and writing. These presentations have been planned collaboratively. Sometimes they involved my presenting a formal paper followed by a response from farmworkers. Other times they took the form of a conversation during …
Domesticating Organ Transplant: Familial Sacrifice and National Aspiration in Mexico
Duke University Press, 2016, 336 pages
In Domesticating Organ Transplant: Familial Sacrifice and National Aspiration in Mexico, Megan Crowley-Matoka carefully grapples with the symbols and everyday practices of organ transplantation in Guadalajara, Mexico. Her research focuses on transplantations that take place in two resource poor yet key …