Mexico has a distinguished revolutionary tradition, but is the land of Emiliano Zapata ready for the “delicious revolution” of Slow Food? The question may sound a bit facetious at first, but given the movement’s origins in the Italian Communist Party, a disquisition on class consciousness in a postmodern era seems appropriate. Of course, class has been virtually banished from postmodern academic discourse, perhaps from the sheer embarrassment of an intellectual vanguard discovering itself to be a petit bourgeoisie on the brink of proletarianization by the forces of global capital. In the script of contemporary revolution, only the villain—global capital—retains its traditional role. Slow Food speaks the lines of the reformist Social Democratic Party (SDP) to Jose Bove’s militant Bolshevism, the international proletariat is now politically suspect for its consumerist tendencies, and the peasantry has become the progressive motor of history. Although Slow Food offers an admirable program for personal life, it will never represent a genuine revolution until it confronts the dilemmas of class that have been complicated but not obviated by increasing globalization. Indeed, the Mexican case reveals the impossibility of drawing a clear dichotomy between slow and fast food in markets where global and local capital compete for the trade of middle-class tourists and equally cosmopolitan “peasants.”
The Slow Food snail mascot would no doubt bask contentedly in the shade of Emiliano Zapata’s sombrero, for the Mexican agrarian revolution of 1910 likewise sought to preserve traditional agrarian livelihoods. Emerging from the crisis of Italian leftist politics in the late 1980s, Slow Food exalted leisure and pleasure as an antidote to the blind pursuit of efficiency within the United States (Parasecoli 2003). The movement sought to revive artisanal production and to preserve vanishing biodiversity against the homogenizing influence of multinational agribusiness. Nevertheless, tensions remained between the elitism of the official manifesto—“preserve us from the contagion of the multitude” (Parasecoli 2003:xxiii)—and the democratizing ideal of affordable but tasty osterie (regional restaurants).
Recent work on the history of Italian cuisine demonstrates that the traditions Slow Food seeks to preserve are largely invented, a point acknowledged by the movement’s leaders (Hobsbawn 1983; Petrini 2003). Well into the twentieth century, peasants subsisted on monotonous porridges of maize, chestnuts, broad beans, or rice, depending on the region and the season (Camporesi 1993l Diner 2001; Helstosky 2004). Italy’s regional cuisines are not only modern inventions, they may even have been created in the Americas through the industrial production and canning of olive oil, tomato paste, and cheeses to satisfy migrant workers who could afford foods unavailable to peasants at home (Teti 1992; Gabaccia 2004). More research is needed on the nineteenth-century bourgeois diet, but it seems that contemporary Italian cuisine emerged largely from festival foods such as maccheroni, which became items of everyday consumption in the United States. The traditional osteria that Slow Food seeks to encourage likewise grew out of the cucina casalinga, meals served in urban homes to unattached male workers; they only became restaurants with the postwar growth of tourism. The Italian experience in turn provides a useful model for the emergence of Mexico’s regional cuisines.
There can be few foods slower than Mexican peasant cooking. For thousands of years, the preparation of the staple maize tortillas required hours of hard, physical labor each day. Women rose before dawn to grind corn (masa) on a basalt stone (metate), then patted out tortillas by hand and cooked them on an earthenware griddle (comal) —all this before men went out to the fields (Redfield 1929; Lewis 1951). Festivals multiplied the workload of women; in addition to preparing special tortillas and masa dumplings (tamales), they labored over the metate grinding chile sauces (moles) and cacao while men sat around drinking (Stephen 1991). The metate was so intrinsic to Mexican patriarchy that when mechanical mills capable of adequately grinding masa finally reached the countryside in the first half of the twentieth century, one villager described it as a “revolution of the women against the authority of the men” (Lewis 1951:108). As women transferred their labor from domestic reproduction to market production, tamales and moles were gentrified by restaurants catering to national and international tourists (Pilcher 2004).
Mexico has had two competing visions for the modernization of its cuisine. Attempts by local investors and engineers to industrialize tortilla production have culminated in the rise of Grupo Maseca, a multinational producer of masa harina (dehydrated tortilla flour), which can be reconstituted with water to save the trouble of making fresh masa, thus making them popular among migrant workers. Although connoisseurs can distinguish fresh from industrial corn tortillas, both are quite different from the wheat flour tortillas most common in the United States. Meanwhile, Taco Bell has led the way in applying North American fast food technology to Mexican cooking. Neither approach proved satisfactory to aficionados, leaving a space for Slow Food to catch on among middle-class Mexicans and foreign tourists. Yet attempts to save traditional Mexican cuisine have been plagued by the same contradictions of elitism, gender bias, and even a measure of imperial arrogance—treating Native Americans like southern Italians—that typified the movement at home.
Although the industrialization of Mexico was generally characterized by imported technology and capital, the modernization of the tortilla was a uniquely national enterprise. The complex skills involved in making tortillas were mechanized in three distinct stages at roughly fifty-year intervals around the beginning, middle, and end of the twentieth century. The arduous task of hand grinding maize at the metate was first replaced by forged steel mills. Next came the technology for automatically pressing out and cooking tortillas, which facilitated the spread of small-scale tortilla factories throughout the country. Finally, the industrial production of masa harina allowed the vertical integration of food processing under Grupo Maseca. Tortilla futurists envisioned these technologies as a complete package, but the three distinct processes could in fact be combined or separated according to circumstances, and each was tied into complex culinary, social, and political relationships. Ultimately, the fate of the tortilla resulted more from questions of political economy than of consumer choice.
Corn mills arrived in Mexican cities by the late nineteenth century but took decades to spread through the countryside, in part because of concern among women about their position within the family. The ability to make tortillas was long considered essential to a rural woman seeking marriage, and any who neglected the metate risked unfavorable gossip. Even the few centavos charged by the mills posed a significant cost in subsistence communities, but poor women often had the greatest incentive to grind corn mechanically because the time saved could be used to engage in artisanal crafts or petty trade. Wealthy families, by contrast, were among the last to give up the metate on a daily basis; this form of slow food offered a status symbol, in part because the rich could pay others to do the actual work. As the benefits of milling gained acceptance, women often organized cooperatives to purchase the machines. By midcentury, corn mills had arrived in virtually every community in Mexico, transforming social relationships and helping to incorporate rural dwellers into the monetary economy (Lewis 1951; Bauer 1990).
The mechanization of the tortilla and the development of masa harina posed more technological than social problems. Conveyer belt cookers were first introduced around 1900, but only at midcentury could they produce a tortilla that satisfied Mexican consumers. Once these machines were created, a cottage industry of tortilla factories quickly spread to all but the most remote rural communities. Although these shops generally sold tortillas by the kilo made from commercially purchased maize, they also ground corn for customers who wished to prepare their own tortillas at home. Both small-scale tortilla factories and their eventual corporate challenger developed under the aegis of a welfare program intended to subsidize food for poor urban consumers. The first masa harina factories were established in 1949 by Molinas Azteca, S.A. (Maseca) and a parastatal corporation, Maiz Industrializado, S.A. (Minsa). The two firms collaborated on research and development for more than a decade before arriving at a suitable formulation that could be transformed into tortilla masa with just the addition of water. By the 1970s, tortilla flour accounted for 5 percent of the maize consumed in Mexico. Sales grew steadily over the next two decades until Maseca alone held 27 percent of the national corn market. Neverthe-less, the subsidy on maize supplied to small-scale tortilla factories slowed the firm’s expansion.
The dismantling of the state food agency in the 1990s assured Maseca’s triumph. President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-994) first curtailed the corn subsidy while also selling Minsa to a consortium rivaling Maseca. For the fifty-one thousand small-scale tortilla factories, subsidized corn had been essential for their commercial viability. Led by a trade organization, the Association of Proprietors of Tortilla Factories, and Nixtamal Mills, they launched a vocal political campaign to retain the subsidy, citing scientific studies concluding that traditional tortillas were more nutritive than those made with Maseca, which they dubbed “MAsaSECA” (“dry masa”). They also accused Maseca of manipulating corn markets and attempting to monopolize supplies, thereby tapping popular memories of hunger that remain vivid in many sectors of Mexican society. But the proprietors found themselves on the wrong side of a neoliberal political avalanche, and the subsidy was eliminated in January 1999. The sudden change left tortilla factories unable to establish competitive sources of supply, and they were reduced to mere vendors for the multinational company, as masa harina quickly cornered an estimated 80 percent of the national tortilla market. Maseca, in turn, claimed nearly three quarters of these sales (Pilcher 1998; Ochoa 2000; Cebreros, n.d.).
The results of this change have been mixed. Proponents of modernization considered tortillas to be essentially tasteless, anyway, and found no difference in the new product. Journalist Alma Guillermoprieto (1999; 46) took a different view, claiming that “when the privatization program of Mexico’s notorious former President Carlos Salinas delivered the future of the tortilla into their hands... [the tortilla magnates] served up to the Mexican people the rounds of grilled cardboard that at present constitute the nation’s basic foodstuff.” Campesinos are quite sensitive to tortilla quality, and many have resisted Maseca (see, for example, Gonzalez 2001:173). Nevertheless, the exigencies of subsistence often require small farmers to sell their best produce to urban markets. Meanwhile, Mexican food faced a still more uncertain fate abroad.
Even as the tortilla market evolved under government protection at home, tacos slipped across the border into greater Los Angeles, where they fell into the hands of scientists and industrialists. While migrants labored in corporate agribusiness, their foods underwent a process of Taylorization to become more standardized and efficient. Neatly packaged under the trademark of Taco Bell, these brave new tacos subsequently traveled around the world, ultimately colonizing their native land. But despite their best efforts, the food formulators and advertising executives could not determine the global reception of the cyborgs they had created.
Sociologist George Ritzer (1993) has examined most comprehensively the threat of corporate fast food to local traditions, extending Max Weber’s theory of rationalization, the process whereby modern technology has made society more efficient, predictable, and controlled. One would, indeed, be hard pressed to find a better example of those values than the Big Mac. The result of this process has been, first, the standardization of food, replacing the endless variety of local cuisines with the artificial choice of numbered selections from a “value menu.” The creation of so-called McJobs has further alienated labor by requiring only minimally skilled workers who respond to the commands of machinery. By stifling the social inter-actions customarily associated with dining, fast food has supposedly dehumanized the process of eating.
The McDonaldized taco, like the hamburger, had its origins in southern California in the mid-1950s. Glen Bell, a telephone repairman from San Bernardino, was impressed by the original McDonald’s restaurant, but rather than compete head-on for the hamburger trade, he applied the new industrial techniques to a separate market segment, the Mexican American taco stand. As he described it: “If you wanted a dozen, you were in for a wait. They stuffed them first, quickly fried them and stuck them together with a toothpick. I thought they were delicious, but something had to be done about the method of preparation” (Taco Bell 2001). That something was to pre-fry the tortillas, anathema to any Mexican, but a blessing to Anglos who preferred to drive off with their food rather than eat at the stand while the other tacos were freshly cooked.
Corporate mythology attributing the North American taco to Glen Bell is questionable, but whatever the origins of the pre-fried taco, precursor to the industrial taco shell, it made possible the globalization of Mexican food by freeing it from its ethnic roots. No longer would restaurateurs or home cooks need a local supply of fresh corn tortillas to make tacos; the shells could henceforth be mass-produced and shipped around the world, albeit with some breakage. The extent to which the taco has been alienated from the Mexican community can be seen in the job description given by a Taco Bell employee in The New Yorker (2000): “My job is I, like, basically make the tacos! The meat comes in boxes that have bags inside, and those bags you boil to heat up the meat. That’s how you make tacos.”
By the mid-1990s, as the Tex-Mex fad spread worldwide, restaurants in Europe and East Asia abandoned even the pretense of serving Mexican food. Nevertheless, critics have questioned the homogenizing effects of the McDonaldization thesis by emphasizing the diverse ways in which people around the world experience restaurants. Although travelers may find the bland uniformity of the Golden Arches disturbing, locals embrace the new choices made possible by the arrival of fast food. The protests of burger-Luddite Jose Bove notwithstanding, French cuisine has little to fear from the spread of McDonalds, as sociologist Rick Fantasia (1995) has pointed out, because the fast food chains and upscale restaurants cater to quite different markets. The contributors to James Watson’s (1997) volume, Golden Arches East, found the experience of U.S. culture, rather than actual food, to be the chain’s biggest selling point in Asia. Customers were enthralled by the democratizing influence of waiting in line, the freedom from the social demands of competitive banqueting, and the novelty of clean public bathrooms.
The opening of Taco Bell’s first Mexican outlet in 1992 illustrates the divergent expectations of corporate executives and local consumers. The Tricon conglomerate already operated a number of fast food restaurants in the country, and it tested the market by offering a selection of tacos at a Kentucky Fried Chicken location in an upscale mall in the suburbs of Mexico City. Skeptics murmured about “coals to Newcastle,” but company spokesmen blithely applied the usual justification for fast food in the United States that “the one thing Mexico lacks is somewhere to get a clean, cheap, fast taco” (quoted in Guillermoprieto 1994;248). In fact, countless taquerias offered precisely that, although Guillermoprieto conceded that “no Mexican taco stand looks like a NASA food-preparation station.” Even the company acknowledged its doubts by obtaining a supply of fresh tortillas and offering the standard taqueria fare of the 1990s, pork carnitas and shredded beef. But middle-class customers responded with disappointment, for they could get Mexican tacos anywhere. One woman complained: “This doesn’t taste like the real thing, does it? What I wanted was those big taco shells stuffed with salad and Kraft cheese and all kinds of stuff, like what you get in Texas” (quoted in Guillermoprieto 1994).
Mexico thus replicates the global experience of fast food as a middle-class privilege, with its own versions of authenticity. The initial opening of Taco Bell in Mexico in 1992 failed due to the economic crisis of that year, but by the end of the decade the company had opened a number of successful outlets. Even in the United States, fast food need not entail the complete obliteration of local culture; witness the spread of “fresh Mex” restaurants such as Chipotle, a subsidiary of the McDonald’s corporation. Moreover, by introducing customers to an artificial version of Mexican food, chains may well have expanded opportunities for marketing the genuine article.
In its mission to preserve and advertise distinctive regional foods, Slow Food created an “Ark of Taste” along with awards for biodiversity to promote awareness of and support for ecologically beneficial practices around the world. Despite their relatively small size, organizations from developed nations wield disproportionate power in a country such as Mexico, and as a result, they slant local activist movements toward middle-class agendas with little relevance for the needs of common people. Moreover, the fascination with Mexico’s folkloric and Native American heritage diverts attention from the mestizo (mixed-race) majority, who do not speak an indigenous language but still suffer economic and political marginalization.
Mexico has done very well through the Slow Food movement, although it is unclear how much of this attention is due to its rich culinary heritage and how much to the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas. The indigenous uprising gained international acclaim almost from the first shots fired on January 1, 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect. While brandishing an AK-47, the charismatic Subcomandante Marcos shunned terrorist bombings and instead waged his campaign with anti-globalization pronunciamientos fired across the World Wide Web. Stylish, balaclava-clad guerrillas held particular fascination for the Italian left.
Regardless of the inspiration, Mexicans have topped the list of Slow Food’s Award for the Defense of Biodiversity. The jury consists of about five hundred food writers and other culinary authorities from around the world, although the United States and Italy provide the largest number. In the first four years, Mexicans received five out of fifty nominations, worth 3,500 each, and three out of twenty jury prizes, providing an additional 7,500. The United States, by comparison, received four nominations but no jury prize winners. The first Mexican jury prize, in 2000, went to Raul Manuel Antonio, from Rancho Grande, Oaxaca, for establishing an indigenous vanilla-growing cooperative to supplement the incomes of small coffee producers. The following year, Dona Sebastiana Juarez Broca, known in her Tabasco community as Tia Tana, won a prize for reviving traditional cacao production techniques as an alternative to an official marketing organization that had impoverished farmers. Finally, in 2003, the jury honored historian Jose Iturriaga de la Fuente for organizing a fifty-four-volume series documenting Mexico’s regional and indigenous cuisines (Slow Food n.d.).
Just as Slow Food began in Italy with a 1986 protest against the opening of a McDonald’s restaurant below the historic Spanish Steps in Rome, Mexico has had its own showdown with McDonald’s on the main square in Oaxaca City, the mecca of indigenous gastronomy. The company had already had one restaurant in a middle-class shopping mall on the outskirts of the city, like hundreds of others from Cancun to Tijuana, but when the local franchise holder sought permission for an outlet on the Zocalo in the summer of 2002, the intelligentsia mobilized its opposition. The campaign, led by renowned Oaxacan artist Francisco Toledo, asserted that burgers and fries were simply too different from the indigenous version of fast food, chapulines, fried grasshoppers sold from baskets and eaten with tortillas and guacamole. Bowing to the complaints of such high-profile figures, the government withdrew the permit, but the controversy had little importance, either culturally or economically, for ordinary Oaxacans who could not afford a Big Mac (Weiner 2002).
A similar protest had already played out in Mexico City against Maseca. As masa harina became ubiquitous in tortilla factories throughout the capital, the local branch of Greenpeace began issuing warnings about the use of GM-maize. In September 2001, self-styled ecological guerrillas changed the slogan on a giant bill-board depicting flute-shaped crispy tacos from “Flautas with Maseca are tastier,” to “Flautas with Maseca are genetically modified.” Hector Magallon explained the action by pointing out that in a recent survey, 88 percent of Mexicans indicated that they wanted GM-food to be labeled as such, and as a significant importer of maize from the United States, Maseca made an obvious target (Greenpeace 2001). While the desire for accurate labeling is certainly understandable, the protest movement has traveled a long way from the struggles of family-owned tortilla shops against a multinational giant.
For most poor Mexicans, surviving the shock of neoliberal reforms meant increased labor migration. Oaxacans were relative latecomers to the United States, but by the 1970s, Zapotecs and Mixtecs had become an important source of seasonal labor for California agriculture, and many lived year-round in Los Angeles. Despite difficult working conditions and vulnerability due to their undocumented status, migrants generally succeeded in improving their economic position and their remittances were vital for the survival of their families in Mexico. Over time, patterns of migration changed, from predominantly single males to include women and children as well, creating complicated transnational family networks. Higher incomes and tastes for consumer goods have caused significant cultural changes among migrants, especially those who settle permanently in the United States, but ties to home communities often remain strong nevertheless (Kearney 1996; Cohen 1999).
Migrant remittances form only one part of broader family survival strategies based on precarious subsistence agriculture in rural Oaxaca, as elsewhere. Farming has always been difficult in this region, but population growth and revenue from migrant labor has fostered urbanization, placing even greater pressure on cultivable land (Cohen 1999). Even successful artisans catering to the tourist trade spend much of their time in agriculture and depend on local food production (Chibnik 2003). Although often unlettered, these peasant farmers possess an extraordinary empirical understanding of their land and crops (Gonzalez 2001J. Nevertheless, such local knowledge may count for little if the economic necessities of competing with agribusiness cause a downward spiral of ecologically devastating practices, a sort of Gresham’s Law of farming (Raikes 1988:62).
In seeking to encourage sustainable agriculture, Slow Food recognized a crucial problem for poor commodity-producing nations, the failure of branding. Mexico exports high-quality pork and vegetables but gains relatively little value from them because of the lack of global cachet associated with, for example, prosciutto ham or Tuscan olive oil. The case of cacao is symptomatic; once the drink of Maya lords, it is now a commodity subject to cutthroat international competition. Small farmers in Mexico suffered further exploitation, having just two options for marketing their harvest, a corrupt monopoly union or multinational buyers, both of which paid desperately low prices. With the assistance of two Mexican biologists and the Dutch organic certifying organization NOVIB, Sebastiana Juarez Broca parlayed her indigenous origins into a valuable brand name, Tia Tana Chocolate. But the adoption of capitalist advertising techniques conferred de facto property rights to a single individual rather than a village cooperative. As the Slow Food citation reads, Tia Tana “produces chocolate using traditional methods employing village women and encouraging the expansion of biological and economically compatible cultivation” (Slow Food n.d.). Yet the picturesque image of local production for tourists can conceal exploitative class relations within indigenous communities. Nestor Garcia Canclini (1993) has observed that profits from craft sales to foreigners generally end up in the hands of local merchants and intermediaries.
Corporate control of international marketing further complicates the prospects for such ecological initiatives. Warren Belasco (1993) has shown the skill with which the food industry has co-opted counterculture movements and created its own forms of ersatz authenticity. Cookbook publishers likewise shared in the bonanza, offering up picturesque images of peasant cuisine to affluent readers (Pilcher 2004). The complicated recipes for traditional festival dishes may even be prepared occasionally by the leisured elite, but slow food offers little to single parents working overtime to support a family in the collapsing ruins of the U.S. welfare state.
The United States’ campaign to spread GM food represents only the latest version of the “white man’s burden” to uplift backward peoples through modern agricultural technology, although in practice the so-called Green Revolution has succeeded in promoting capitalist farming, rural unemployment, and urban shantytowns. Yet the Slow Food program likewise bears more than a passing resemblance to the mission civilisatrice of nineteenth-century imperialism. While more benign than military intervention, the missionary approach still conceals uneven power relationships that limit the opportunities available to the Mexican people. Moreover, the movement’s goal of reducing agricultural overproduction resonates clearly with the dilemmas of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy, with its mountains of surplus foods. International commodity markets can have complex implications for developing countries (see Raikes 1988), but the agricultural trade wars between Europe and the United States have caused tremendous harm to poor farmers around the world. One of the latest victims of this imperial struggle has been famine-ridden Zambia, the subject of widespread criticism for rejecting U.S. food aid out of fear that GM grain would contaminate domestic crops and forfeit European sales (Annear 2004). Viewed at this level, Sebastiana Juarez Broca appears as simply a colorful indigenous brand to sell Mexican chocolate to upscale consumers.
From the global struggles of industrial food retailers, Grupo Maseca has emerged as an unlikely champion of authentic Mexican cuisine. Mechanization has been essential to the survival of tortillas as the daily bread of Mexican wage laborers, who cannot afford the luxury of slow food on an everyday basis. In foreign markets, the company has launched ambitious expansion plans, and United States and Europe make up nearly 50 percent of total sales (Vega 2003). Occupying foreign territory has meant using local knowledge of fresh corn tortillas to challenge taco shell stereotypes. Although condemned at home as the antithesis of traditional cooking, bags of masa harina have become essential care packages for migrants and aficionados in exile from Aztlan.
With multinational corporations increasingly determining the availability and even the authenticity of food, class-based issues of market power become ever more crucial. While in many European countries restaurant service is an honorable trade paying a living wage, in Mexico it is often the last resort of the most impoverished people. Self-exploitation ultimately makes possible the Slow Food ideal of “good regional cuisine at moderate prices” (Petrini 2003; 15). Moreover, Michael Kearney (1996:107) has offered a cautionary note about the conservative embrace of ecological projects generally: “one need not be cynical to see in official support of sustainable development and appropriate technology a de facto recognition that rural poverty in the Third World is not going to be developed out of existence. All peoples will not be brought up to the comfort level of the affluent classes and must therefore adapt to conditions of persistent poverty in ways that are not ecologically, economically, or politically disruptive.” He concludes that “the de facto project of such right romantics is to sustain existing relations of inequality.” Historically minded observers will note also that much of the program and even the slogan of “alimentary sovereignty” adopted by Jose Bove was promoted earlier by the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini (Parasecoli 2003; 37; Helstosky n.d.). Slow Food has likewise replaced the developmental ideal of Prometheus with the more defensive symbol of Noah. As Petrini (2003:86) explains: “Faced with the excesses of modernization, we are not trying to change the world anymore, just to save it.” Yet Oaxacan migrant workers, who must cross a militarized frontier in order to save their own communities, may ask themselves: will they find a place on the Ark?
This is not to deny that Slow Food offers hope for the survival of peasant cuisines. Indeed, the contemporary situation in Mexico parallels that of Italy a century ago. Just as half of all Italian labor migrants ultimately returned home, with new attitudes and more money but still part of their old communities, so do Mexican sojourners continue to follow their circular routes, notwithstanding hysterical media accounts of “a border out of control.” Of course, it would be absurd to think that NAFTA will ever lead to income redistribution programs comparable to those of the European Union. Nevertheless, attempts to improve conditions in Oaxaca, like those in the Mezzo-giorno, must adopt a continental vision. The indigenous political revival, with roots in both southern California and southern Mexico, offers a model for revalorizing ethnic communities (Kearney 1996). Those who sympathize can help most by allowing transnational families to flourish in their own neighborhoods rather than by indulging in exotic tourism to distant lands. The true foundation of sustainable agriculture in Mexico is outside labor paying decent wages—as it is for any American family farm.
Acknowledgments. This essay was inspired by Martin Gonzalez de la Vara and greatly improved by the suggestions of Richard Wilk, Donna Gabaccia, William Beezley, Sterling Evans, Glen Kuecker, and the anthropologists of SEA, who graciously welcomed an imposter in their midst.
* Originally published 2001
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