Readers familiar with Laura Lewis’s acclaimed Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico (2003) may be surprised to find that her new book is not another foray into colonial Mexican history but an anthropological, ethnographic study of a present-day Mexican community. This should not really be surprising, as Lewis is an anthropologist by training and academic appointment, and indeed this monograph is based on her doctoral dissertation. It is based on it but is far more than a mere revision of it, being rather the product of over a decade of fieldwork and two decades of study and labor: Lewis’s first fieldwork stay in the community upon which she focuses was in 1992.
That community is San Nicolás, one of the larger of the dozens of “African-descent communities” in the Costa Chica, on Mexico’s Pacific coast (p. 2), and Lewis’s subjects are the San Nicoladenses, who “self-identify...
