Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill

by Gabriela Soto Laveaga

In the 1940s chemists discovered that barbasco , a wild yam indigenous to Mexico, could be used to mass-produce synthetic steroid hormones. Barbasco spurred the development of new drugs, including cortisone and the first viable oral contraceptives, and positioned Mexico as a major player in the global pharmaceutical industry. Yet few people today are aware of Mexico’s role in achieving these advances in modern medicine. In Jungle Laboratories , Gabriela Soto Laveaga reconstructs the story of how rural yam pickers, international pharmaceutical companies, and the Mexican state collaborated and collided over the barbasco. By so doing, she sheds important light on a crucial period in Mexican history and challenges us to reconsider who can produce science. Soto Laveaga traces the political, economic, and scientific development of the global barbasco industry from its emergence in the 1940s, through its appropriation by a populist Mexican state in 1970, to its obsolescence in the mid-1990s. She focuses primarily on the rural southern region of Tuxtepec, Oaxaca, where the yam grew most freely and where scientists relied on local, indigenous knowledge to cultivate and harvest the plant. Rural Mexicans, at first unaware of the pharmaceutical and financial value of barbasco, later acquired and deployed scientific knowledge to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies, lobby the Mexican government, and ultimately transform how urban Mexicans perceived them. By illuminating how the yam made its way from the jungles of Mexico, to domestic and foreign scientific laboratories where it was transformed into pills, to the medicine cabinets of millions of women across the globe, Jungle Laboratories urges us to recognize the ways that Mexican peasants attained social and political legitimacy in the twentieth century, and positions Latin America as a major producer of scientific knowledge.

Genres: History, Health, Latin American History, Medicine, Nonfiction

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Lashonda Slaughter Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Without going into a long description of this book, I can honestly say now I know a great deal more about barbasco root than I ever thought I would.
Also...who knew that a medication I take every day for my RA was first made on a mass level from a wild root that only grew in certain parts of rural Mexico.
It does have some great insight into how a government nationalizes a project to organize a people. Laveaga did a great job.

[FL · Rating 4 out of 5]

Birth-control pills are a classic way to link scientific/medical developments to social change. But usually we'd think about the consumers of the medicine, not about how it's made. This book flips that around, showing how the hormonal capacity of a large yam caused American science to reach places in Mexico that were generally ignored by those in power: a very different sort of implication from a medical development than one would usually expect.

[Marla McMackin · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Jungle Laboratories, Soto Laveaga reopens what she calls a forgotten chapter in Mexican history, which in the 1940s through 1980s became a player in the global search for medicinal plants. The author not only explores the relationships that develop among the transnational pharmaceutical industry, the Mexican government and rural citizens, but also the resulting social, local and international consequences of barbasco, a wild yam used to produce synthetic steroid hormones, most notably for cortisone and oral contraceptive.

The first chapter, “The Papaloapan, Poverty, and a Wild Yam,” puts the barbasco-rich Region Tuxtepec – specifically the area of Chinantla in Oaxaca’s Papaloapan region – into historical context as an underutilized stereotype of monoculture despite politicians’ hopes to harness its potential for progress. Chapter two, “Mexican Peasants, a Foreign Chemist, and the Mexican Father of the Pill,” dispels the common assertion that American chemist Russell Marker had no help in Mexico while creating his laboratory, Syntex, and conducing research on barbasco that would lead to the oral contraceptive. Chapter three, “Discovering and Gathering the New ‘Green Gold,’” describes how locals became aware of the barbasco trade and how they learned to track and harvest the hormone rich yam.

Chapter four, “Patents, Compounds, and Steroid-Making Peasants,” discusses ways the Mexican government attempted to retain control of barbasco and how the yam became politically important after Mexican ecologists redefined the role the government should play in the steroid hormone industry. Chapter five, “A Yam, Students, and a Populist Project,” “explores the varied social and political reasons that made barbasco an important symbolic and material tool for the nation. It explains the events and factors that made the story of barbasco a crucial part of the populist ideals of (then president Luis Echeverria’s) administration” (p. 114). Chapter six, “The State Takes Control of Barbasco,” explores how the populist rhetoric of the 1970s infiltrated the goals of Proquivemex, the state-owned company created to manufacture medications from barbasco and radicalized it beyond the intended goals of the administration.

Chapter seven, “Proquivemex and Transnational Steroid Laboratories,” briefly discusses the problems the state owned company encountered when it attempted to push its populist agenda on pharmaceutical companies. Chapter eight, “Barbasqueros into Mexicans,” explores the emergence of a collective identity centered on the barbasco trade and “provides a context within which to examine how identification with a medicinal plant of interest to the government played out in the 1970s peasant organizations in the Mexican countryside” (p. 169). And finally, chapter nine, “Root of Discord,” explores the brief rise and eventual disappearance of the peasant-controlled barbasco trade in the countryside.

Claudia Agostoni of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico wrote a glowing review of Jungle Laboratories for The American Historical Review. Agostoni called it a thoroughly researched and rewarding interdisciplinary book that successfully traces the histories of the numerous actors involved in the creation of an extremely lucrative steroid hormone industry, provides a novel angle from which to view the history of rural Mexico, the history of science and the production of knowledge. Fernando Armstrong-Fumero of Smith College also wrote a positive review for the American Journal of Sociology, calling the book a compelling and well-documented study. Armstrong-Fumero adds that the work offers a thoroughly convincing argument of how ideas of nationalizing science and technical expertise became a part of the political imaginary of rural people whom the global economy had relegated to a far less prestigious side of the hormone industry.

While Soto Laveaga presents a sometimes overwhelming array of ideas in this work, the most poignant point is that a number of rural peasants were so empowered by barbasco – which before this time had no value, and was even a nuisance to farmers – they were able to prove they were more than simple campesinos. “All of those interviewed insisted at some point that ‘before barbasco we had nothing,’” and “they used the barbasco trade to carve out new positions for themselves in the countryside or all together leave their place of origin” (p. 226). The extensive interview materials Soto Laveaga uses to reach this conclusion appear as vignettes throughout the book, adding a refreshing human element to the science and politics of the period.

[hb · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is how history of science and technology should be written. Clear, concise, and engaging.