Feeding Chilapa: The Birth, Life, and Death of a Mexican Region (review)
This book is a clear and interesting regional analysis of economic and political changes over time and place in the Atapa basin of Guerrero during the last 200 years. The book begins with a discussion of Mexican regions in which die author criticizes anthropologists for having abandoned regional analysis in the 1950s in favor of community studies. After a description of Mexican geographic diversity, Kyle discusses generally how Mexico's regions "met extinction by the close of the twentieth century" (p. 15), largely from industrialization and especially modern means of transportation. He then describes the region that is the subject of the book in terms of patterns of food production and distribution and how Chilapa, the urban community that was the region's center and the main focus of study, became an impoverished backwater as neoliberal policies were instituted by the Mexican government. Whereas most studies of the impact of neoliberalism stress the declining role of the state, Kyle argues that in the Atapa basin, the state's involvement in the region increased over time, first by its role in the construction of a highway. The highway facilitated neoliberal consequences since the 1980s: competition between the region's "preindustrial producers" and outsider producers and the abandonment of the autonomous household food production of those preindustrial producers. The next six chapters describe the region and the factors that led first to the persistence of subsistence production and then its rejection and the growth and decline of the city and the region.