Migration, Mujercitas, and Medicine Men Living in Urban Mexico [Paperback]

Valentina Napolitano explores issues of migration, medicine, religion, and gender in this incisive analysis of everyday practices of urban living in Guadalajara, Mexico. Drawing on fieldwork over a ten-year period, Napolitano paints a rich and vibrant picture of daily life in a low-income neighborhood of Guadalajara.Migration, Mujercitas, and Medicine Meninsightfully portrays the personal experiences of the neighborhood's residents while engaging with important questions about the nature of selfhood, subjectivity, and community identity as well as the tensions of modernity and its discontents in Mexican society.

Valentina Napolitanois a Research Officer at the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge, and a Research Fellow at Clare Hall College, University of Cambridge.

Standing on the shoulders of previous ethnographers of everyday life in different Mexicos, Napolitano sees yet farther into the interstices and intricacies of the quotidian, its social forms, and how it is experienced and expressed. Just as a glass prism refracts white light into a spectrum of gradated colors, so is this book a dazzling refraction of a wide spectrum of feelings, identities, and social forms in a neighborhood situated between tradition and modernity, between rural and urban, and between poverty and affluence. Michael Kearney, author ofReconceptualizing the Peasantry: Anthropology in Global Perspective

The ethnographic result of Napolitano's work is splendid-it gives one the fascinating sensation of zooming back and forth between intimate real time conversations with the people of Polanco and a wide angle view of the city and the region through recent history. Chris Kiefer, author ofHealth Work with the Poor

Throughout this theoretically adept ethnography, Valentina Napolitano explores the embodied experiences of women and men to highlight their humanity. Covering topics as diverse as ChrislS(