"In her gripping new book, Alyshia Gálvez exposes how changes in policy following NAFTA have fundamentally altered one of the most basic elements of life in Mexico – sustenance. Mexicans are faced with a food system that favors food security over subsistence agriculture, development over sustainability, market participation over social welfare, and ideologies of self-care over public health. Trade agreements negotiated to improve lives have sometimes failed, resulting in unintended consequences for people’s everyday lives."

"This book takes us from inside the halls of a busy metropolitan hospital’s public prenatal clinic to the Oaxaca and Puebla states in Mexico to look at the ways Mexican women manage their pregnancies. The mystery of the paradox lies perhaps not in the recipes Mexican-born women have for good perinatal health, but in the prenatal encounter in the United States. Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers is a migration story and a look at the ways that immigrants are received by our medical institutions and by our society."

"Through rich ethnographic research that illuminates Catholicism as practiced by Mexicans in New York, Gálvez shows that it is through Guadalupan devotion that many undocumented immigrants are finding the will and vocabulary to demand rights, immigration reform, and respect. She also reveals how such devotion supports and emboldens immigrants in their struggle to provide for their families and create their lives in the city with dignity."

• Nutrire Podcast "Decolonizing Food Systems"

• Yumlish Podcast

• Rights Talk Podcast

• Heritage Radio Network, Meant to be Eaten: Paqueteros and Paqueteras: Humanizing a Dehumanized Food System

• CBS Sunday Morning: A Crossroad For Race Relations

• The Latest Food

• Interview with Wren Awry, at Bone & All

• Latino USA

• Bon Appetit

• Daily Yonder

• Harvest Public Media

• St Louis Public Radio

• Linea Abierta radio

• Food Policy, book mention

• Civil Eats

• New Book Network

• Majority Report with Sam Seder

• Fronteras with Rodrigo Cervantes of KJZZ

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2022

• 2022 Workshop, "¿Cómo están conectados los tratados de libre comercio con nuestra salud?, Campbell Foundation, January 27, 2022

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2021:

• 2021    Keynote, Campbell Foundation, Oct. 2021.

• 2021    Panelist, Children in All Policies, CAP-2030’, “Are we selling children & adolescents a lifetime of ill-health?” July 7, 2021.

• 2021    Panelist, The Social Determinants of Mental Health: Implications for Clinical Practice, NYU, June 23, 2021.

• 2021    Roundtable discussant, “Roundtable: Diet and Displacement: A Critical Roundtable on the Migration-Food Security Nexus,” and “El Susto,” Just Food Conference of the Association for the Study of Food and Society, June 9-15, 2021.

• 2021    Workshop leader, “Exploring Inductive Approaches for Delivery of Service: 

• Building Meaningful Collaborations with Families” with Cesar Zuniga, Parent Child + Conference, May 20, 2021.

• 2021    Panelist, “Worlds in Contention,” Ohio State University, May 7-8, 2021.

• 2021    Moderator, Panel, Teaching with Transformative Texts, Lehman College, April 12, 2021.

• 2021    Guest lecture, Lehman College, Bertrade Banoum, instructor, (virtual) April 26, 2021.

• 2021    “Food sovereignty and cultural agency: how a human-scaled trade and food policy would benefit us all.” Grain School, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, April 1, 2021.

2020:

• 2/5/20     Chicago, IL, Guest Lecture, University of Chicago, Chad Broughton, instructor

• 2/17/20   University of Arizona, Megan Carney, instructor

• 2/24/20  Burlington, VT - Guest Lecture, University of Vermont, Teresa Mares, instructor

• 3/1/20    Mexico- Frutas y Verduras México. Virtual webinar. More info.

• 3/5/20    Bronxville, NY-  Panel, Immigration Politics, Sarah LawrenceCollege, organized by Drs. Luisa Heredia and Deanna Barenboim

• 3/17/20    Mesilla Park, New Mexico - Panel, Economic Justice and Migration at Justice & Peace Conference 

• 4/6/20    New York, NY - Guest Lecture, The New School, Rachel Heiman, instructor

• 4/22/20    New York, NY - Guest Lecture, The New School, Raúl Rubio, instructor

• 9/11/20 El Susto Premiere, Harlem Film Festival. (online) Tickets here.

• 9/16/20 "What are you reading?" A presentation on citational politics, Women's Studies Speaker Series, Lehman College. (online).

• 9/17/20 Eating NAFTA at Museum of Food and Drink (online). Tickets here.

• 10/1/20 Guest Lecture on Eating NAFTA at Boston University.

• 10/29/20    Guest Lecture, on Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers, at Yale University.

• 10/30/20    EEUU, México y América Latina: Sistemas Alimentarios, Ethos, Mexico City.

• 10/30/20    Brown Bag discussion, CUNY Graduate Center Dept. of Anthropology.

• 11/6/20    Congreso Fonadi, Mexico City.

• 11/13/20    Seminario sobre industrias culturales y creativas (SEMICC) en el Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte (CISAN), en la UNAM, Mexico City.

• 11/18/20    Guest Lecture, MALS Program, Lehman College.

• 11/23/20    "Cultura, identidad y paisajes alimentario", en Diálogos hacia la construcción de la seguridad y soberanía alimentaria, UNAM, Mexico City. 

• 2/5.2021    "Our Immigrant City:  A Panel Conversation on Immigration in New York City," Columbia University, Migration Working Group. Zoom link.

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2019:

• 9/8-9     New York, NY -  Corn Symposium, The New School, September 8-9, 2019. Read what Bon Appetit said about the Corn Symposium here.

• 9/10       New York, NY - The Chasers, Book talk by Renato Rosaldo, Commentary by Alyshia Gálvez NYU CLACS Faculty Working Group on Racisms in Comparative Perspective, September 10, 2019, 6:00 PM

• 9/16        Brooklyn, NY - The Chasers, Book talk by Renato Rosaldo, Commentary by Alyshia Gálvez, Greenlight Bookstore, September 16, 2019, 7:30 PM

• 9/20        New York, NY- Premiere of ¡Salud! Myths and Realities of Mexican Immigrant Health, CUNY Graduate Center, Sept. 20, 2019

• 9/18          Montclair, NJ  -  Food Studies Research Colloquium, Montclair State University Wed. Sept. 18, 2019

• 10/8          Charleston, SC- Lecture, Eating Nafta: Trade, Food Policies and the Destruction of Mexico, College of Charleston, October 8, 2019

• 10/22.       New Brunswick, NJ-- Keynote, Eating Nafta: Trade, Food Policies and the Destruction of Mexico

• 10/26-30  Mexico City, Mexico - Panel presentation, Food Justice and Sovereignty in the Americas October 26-31, 2019

• 11/1-2         New York, NY - Food Tank: Highlighting stories of hope and success in the food system, Skirball Center, New York University. ​

• 11/4-5       Tlaxcala, Mexico - Presentación de libro, Eating Nafta: Trade, Food Policies and the Destruction of Mexico, November 4, 2019, y Conferencia Magistral: "El efecto del Tratado de libre comercio en la salud e integridad de las familias mexicanas: Salud, trauma, y movilidad,” Universidad Autónoma de Tlaxcala, November 5 2019

• 11/9           Honolulu, Hawai’i - Panel Presentation Ethnography Caucus: Fieldwork Dilemmas: Ethnographic Research in American Culture, Sat, November 9, 10:00 to 11:45am, Hawai'i Convention Center, Mtg Rm 325 A,  American Studies Association Annual Meeting Panel.

• 11/22        Washington, DC - Panel Presentation, “Religion in Mexican Politics, Migration, and Mexican American Communities,” Mexican Cultural Institute/Georgetown University, Friday, November 22, 2019

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¿Cómo están conectados los tratados de libre comercio con nuestra salud?

Speaking Engagements

Alyshia Gálvez is a cultural and medical anthropologist. She is professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at Lehman College and of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  Most of her work is at the intersection of migration, health and conceptualizations of citizenship. She is currently conducting new research on epistemologies of food, health, and nutrition, as well as, in a separate project, the colonial assumptions underlying higher education pedagogies, technologies and bureaucracies. She is also engaged in a personal writing project about her natal family’s efforts alternately to grapple with and deny its own relationship to settler colonialism, tentatively entitled “White Nonsense.” The title is a nod to what Miles Davis reportedly told Prince, that he “believed in only two categories of thinking: the truth and white bullshit.” 

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Gálvez is the author of Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies and the Destruction of Mexico (UC Press, 2018) on changing food policies, systems and practices in Mexico and Mexican communities in the United States, including the ways they are impacted by trade and economic policy, and their public health implications. She is the author of two previous books on Mexican migration, Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers Mexican Women, Public Prenatal Care and the Birth Weight Paradox (Rutgers University Press, Oct. 2011) and Guadalupe in New York: Devotion and the Struggle for Citizenship Rights among Mexican Immigrants (NYU Press, Dec. 2009).  Click here for a complete CV.