Feeding Mexico: The Political Uses of Food since 1910 (review)
excluded from full citizenship, it is difficult to sustain Buffington’s view that “the opposition of criminal and citizen . . . became the fundamental dichotomy within modern Mexican society” (p. 4). Many other groups, such as children, women, and, at various times, illiterates, servants, and vagrants were also denied full civic rights. Their exclusion was not always cloaked “behind a veil of criminality” (p. 8), as Buffington claims. Indeed, it is unclear what he means by the term “citizen.” He ignores suffrage laws that might have some bearing on the definition of citizenship. He asserts that by constructing the Indian as “the Other,” anthropologists helped keep Indians from actively participating in the nation—even though the anthropologists he studies wrote precisely around the time when Indians gained new civic rights, as the Revolutionary state awarded suffrage to all men and incorporated peasants into the body politic through the corporate party of the PRM.