This introduction opens with a haunting ethnographic story of a German mother donating a kidney to her Mexican-born son, a story that crystallizes some of the central issues of familial sacrifice, medical salvation, and national aspiration that animate organ transplantation in Mexico and this book itself. Encountered time and again in the field, the recurrent, emblematic nature of this story also introduces the notion that transplant operates as a kind of icon, made to condense and capture a core set of meanings about biomedicine, about national identity, and even about anthropological theory. Attending to processes of both symbolization and materialization provides an analytic strategy for exploring how transplant gets caught up in particular ways of imagining and enacting both individual and national selves—and how such imaginings, in turn, materialize transplantation in locally specific ways. Transplant has come to matter in Mexico largely through reliance on familial living donors, in stark contrast with other settings around the world where both the clinical practices and the biopolitics of organ donation skew toward obtaining organs either from the market or from the brain dead. This distinctive form of dependence renders Mexico an intriguing analytic site, as this chapter further elaborates by exploring some of the key iconic figurings of gender, of race, and of the State that prove consequential for the making of transplantation in Mexico. Finally, the chapter grounds the analysis in terms of ethnographic field sites and methods, and offers a road map of the chapters to come.