"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 of Health 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 Christian Base Communities and alternative medicine, migration, and growing up female in Guadalajara, Migration, Mujercitas, and Medicine Men provides insights and analysis sure to provoke discussion in medical anthropology and Latin American studies."--Matthew C. Gutmann, author of The Romance of Democracy: Compliant Defiance in Contemporary Mexico.
"By providing rich detail on an 'ordinary' rather than an 'exotic' community in suburban Guadalajara, Napolitano offers a telling analysis of the transformative impact of urbanization, internal and international migration, social movement mobilization, and Liberation Theology on the formation of women's identity at different life stages."--Judith Adler Hellman, author of Mexican Lives
"Richly textured, enlivened, and analytically elegant, Napolitano's ethnography of the cultural politics of belonging in Guadalajara weaves a nuanced portrait of vernacular modernities out of migrant routes rather than essentialist roots. Focusing on cultural practices that are at once ensouled and embodied, she fuses phenomenology and political economy to map the materiality of affect shaping daily lives. Napolitano offers resources of hope--both for an analytics of emergence enacted through critical ethnography and for the situated struggles of subalterns whose structures of feeling she so vividly renders."--Donald S. Moore, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley