Books like Zapotec Women — picked by fans

This book is a classic of Latin American women’s history, telling the story of how Andean women’s relative gender equity (what the author calls “gender parallelism,” a concept that applies to gender structures in many Latin American societies, especially the Aztecs—known as Nahuas—about whom I’ve also written) became transformed first by the Inca, then by the Spanish.

Written with feeling about forms of both complementarity and exploitation, Silverblatt shows women of the past, non-elite and noble, to have been productive, creative, and responsive to the social and economic conditions around them.

Like Silverblatt’s book on native women in prehispanic and colonial Peru, this edited volume on early Mexico was and remains a gamer changer in bringing to light women’s work, including ways women accumulated and distributed wealth, their varieties of social and political identities they held, and their power and influence.

With chapters by experts in Aztec/Nahua women’s, social, and cultural history, the chapters represent a variety of approaches and methodologies to women’s and gender history even in areas where the documentation on women is sparser than in central Mesoamerica, especially for northern Mexico and Maya women further south.

This superb book is a culturally and indigenous-language-focused study of women in four central Mesoamerican native societies—Aztecs (Nahuas), Mixtec, Zapotec, and Mixe.

In addition to a deep dive into texts dealing with all facets of women’s lives, Sousa uses visual evidence to great effect, showing how images contain much information about women’s and gender history, a history in which women struggled over centuries to maintain agency and authority despite efforts by a newly imposed colonial state to erode their power and status and exploit their labor.

Cacicas were women who held high status, positions of political authority, and/or communally-significant economic or other responsibilities in colonial Spanish American native societies.

This book offers compelling portraits of how colonial women strategized to maneuver around patriarchal limitations of Spanish law, especially because they could not hold formal offices in the colonial governing hierarchy (though sometimes they actually did).

The individually-authored essays in this collection provide insightful portraits of individual women in a variety of circumstances across a wide range of geographic locations and types of communities across the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, and Central and South American societies.

The reader will feel she or he learns something about these women as people defending themselves, their families, and peoples.

Roman slavery existed for a thousand years. We usually think that it was simply the result of empire, which saw millions of prisoners-of-war enslaved by their Roman conquerors. But slavery continued to play a core role in Roman society long after the empire had stopped expanding. Harper's detailed book shows how pervasive savery was to Roman culture, so much so that Christians thought it was normal too.

The 27 interviews in The Corpse Walker are selected from the 60 interviews in Liao Yiwu’s book, originally titled Interviews with People from the Bottom Rung of Society in Chinese. Liao gives voices to social outcasts: a human trafficker, corpse walkers, a leper, a peasant emperor, an abbot, a mortician, a Tiananmen father, artists and shamans, crooks, even cannibals. Ironically, every one of them speaks more honestly than Chinese official media, which causes the book to be banned in mainland China. These are the stories of unsung heroes and epic tragedies, but to me, most importantly, the work that people performed, the families they raised, many lost to famines, political purges, and massacres, and the persecutors they forgave, the conscience they wrestled with, their past, present, and future—these are the remarkable stories of ordinary Chinese people from 1949 to present in their raw, unvarnished form.

For thousands of years, right down to the present, textiles and weaving in the Andes has been some of the most exquisite and sophisticated in the world. It has been linked to the amazing cultural creativity of people in the Andes and the rise and fall of successive empires because controlling textile production is controlling power and wealth.

This book shows us something entirely new: how the weavers who made these amazing textiles experienced and often resisted that power and the exploitation of their labor. Even though this book is not explicitly about Afro-Andean people, they were an integral part of the Andean labor force, and they figure in histories of resistance and rebellion in the Andes.

This book is many things: A wonderful ethnography, a tribute to the Mexican and foreign ethnographers who preceded Re Cruz’s in the area, a call to ethnographers for writing creativity, and, glowingly, a show of respect for local people, their agency, and their understandings of the world.

Chan Kom, as Re Cruz reminds us, has been an ethnographic laboratory since the first decades of the 20th century. Re Cruz chose to structure her book following the script of a local play performed by high school students. For anthropology students this is a good example of an engaging ethnography.

For historians of the recent past this is a record of the cultural impact that the emergence of Cancun had on Yucatecan rural life.

Readers are spoiled for choice when it comes to investigative journalism and narrative non-fiction about contemporary India, but Siddhartha Deb’s collection of essays (titled after F. Scott Fitzgerald) stands out in a crowded field. Though a decade old, it has not lost any of its relevance or punch. Deb profiles a series of unforgettable figures, from a controversial upstart businessman to emigrant engineers, peasant revolutionaries, informal industrial workers, and a waitress who serves the rich and powerful. The book moves seamlessly from the city to the countryside, exposing both the aspirations and the frustrations of capitalism as it is really lived and felt by a wide cross-section of people across India. 

Frank is, in my view, one of the most engaging writers on inequality. 

He has developed interesting insights like the “winner takes-all society”: the idea that we live in a world in which a small group of people reaps most of the benefits in all markets from sports to music or academia. 

In Falling Behind, Frank shows how inequality does not only harm the poor but the middle class as well.

I like how he combines economic data with many examples to show how consumption patterns among the wealthy lead to an “expenditure cascades” that force the middle class to borrow too much money and consume more than it should. 

The book is a reminder that inequality must be explored from many dimensions and its solution will require a lot of creativity.