Alyshia Gálvez

author and educator

new book:

Eating NAFTA: Trade and Food Policies and the Destruction of Mexico

Now available on University of California Press 

BOOKS

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.

 

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

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Chronic Disaster: Reimagining Noncommunicable Chronic Disease

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Vital Topics Forum edited by Alyshia Gálvez, Megan Carney, and Emily Yates-Doerr and the Nutrire CoLab
 
Chronic metabolic conditions disproportionately cohere along lines of race, gender, class, and citizenship. Despite overwhelming evidence that racism, gendered violence, so-cial and economic disparities, trade regulations, lack of food sovereignty, and land and livelihood dispossession play the biggest roles in chronic disease, the biomedical explanations given for why people become sick are often firmly rooted in personal behavior or “lifestyle.”
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Human Centered Trade:

Still Possible?

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In early May 2019, U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to impose tariffs on Mexican tomatoes, pushed at least in part by Florida tomato farmers who couldn’t compete with Mexican growers. The current North American tomato market is a product of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), in which Mexico turned toward large-scale industrialized fruit and vegetable export agriculture and free trade was imagined to level the playing field. Why would tariffs, the antithesis of free trade, be proposed as a solution to a free trade produced problem? First, we have to see what NAFTA intended to do and what it has actually done...Read more...
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In Central Park, white privilege has been weaponized before

On Memorial Day, a few blocks from where I live, a white woman illegally walking her dog off-leash called the police on a black man birdwatching. She screeched, her hands trembling as she dialed 911 and concocted a story directly contradicted by video evidence tweeted by the man’s sister. Even though she soon apologized, many on Twitter found it empty, and accused the white woman of weaponizing her white privilege.
She did not do so in a neutral place. Read more...
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"Efficiency"

Efficiency: this concept, perhaps more than any other, provides an underlying logic to social, political, and economic formations in North America. But it is what I argue to be the term’s misuse, rather than its true definition, that drives the current neoliberal policy landscape, especially the key arrangement linking the economies of the continent’s three countries: the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), or, the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), as it was recently rebranded. Read more...
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Teaching and learning with intimidating texts: How we came to love a difficult book

Article co-authored with Lizbeth Bravo, Edith Carrasco; Kathryn Chuber; Daisy Flores and published in Teaching and Learning Anthropology .
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In this article we argue for a slow, methodical, and collaborative approach to difficult texts. This article is the story of how, thanks to the efforts of the students and professor, a book that rewards diligent effort, and some creative pedagogical strategies borne of desperation, the experience of reading Alex E. Chávez’s Sounds of Crossing became a highlight of our college experience. 
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Unafraid and Unapologetic, Still

with Melissa Escano, Marlen Fernandez and Luis Saavedra
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NACLA Report on the Americas
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Blog

Twitter Feed

 
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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.

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

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

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Past Speaking Engagements

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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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.

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Upcoming Speaking Engagements

BIO

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.  She 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 currently seeking agent representation for two new book projects. 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, winner of the 2012 ALLA Book Award from the Association of Latino and Latin American Anthropologists) 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.

 
 

CONTACT

For inquiries, email: info@alyshiagalvez.com

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If you are a current or former student, requesting a letter of recommendation, click here.

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© 2020 by Alyshia & Elias Gálvez; and María Hernández