In episode 81 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast, I interview cultural and medical anthropologist Alyshia Gálvez about how NAFTA has changed the food practices and health outcomes for Mexican and Mexican American populations, advice for scholars seeking to translate their research into documentary films and other formats, why we all need to be public-facing scholars these days, and why dreaming big and bringing her full self to her work is how Alyshia imagines otherwise.
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You can also read the transcript and show notes on the Ideas on Fire website, which have links to Alyshia’s work and all the concepts, people, and events we discuss on the show (great for teaching!).
Guest: Alyshia Gálvez
Alyshia Gálvez is a cultural and medical anthropologist and professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at Lehman College of the City University of New York.
She is the author of the book Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies and the Destruction of Mexico (University of California 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.
Alyshia was the founding director of the Jaime Lucero Mexican Studies Institute at CUNY and 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, 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, 2009).
Key quote
“I think we need to dream really obstinately optimistic and utopian things because if we think incrementally, we’re not going to achieve anything like equality. We’re not going to achieve anything like healing from trauma and the aftereffects of colonization and white supremacist thinking in this country and in this world that are still rippling around. So I think if we want to dream of a world that is equal, we need to dream big and we need to settle for nothing less.”
– Alyshia Gálvez on episode 81 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast
