Jungle Laboratories

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.

“[T]his is an interesting and important book. For Mexicanists, it makes amuch-needed contribution to studies of post-1940 rural Mexico and of Echeverría’s era in particular. It will earn attention from regional scholars interested in the history of science and the history of state formation, political organization, and transnational business, in addition to a commodity studies audience. Finally, historians, anthropologists, and geographers interested in the ebb and flow of local knowledge will also find much use in this careful study.” - Emily Wakild, Hispanic American Historical Review, “Based on archival sources and more than fifty interviews with former barbasco pickers, processing plant owners and state officials, Jungle Laboratories yields fascinating insights into the social, political and economic consequences of the global search for medicinal plants at a local level within the rural regions of southeast and southwestMexico. . . . Soto Laveaga’s book is a powerful reminder of the complex local and international relationships involved in the production of medicinal drugs and the intricate social, economic and political impact this can have on individuals’ lives.” - Lara Marks, Medical History, “Soto Laveaga has produced an important work on the political economy ofbarbasco that brings to the fore a little-known chapter in the creation of the contraceptive pill and analyses the way in which scientific issues go beyond metropolitan academic scientific communities and filter down to apparently remote pockets of rural societies engaged in the exportation of primary products. This splendid work suggests that social Latin American historians can make a significant contribution to understanding the recent political development of medicinal plants and human reproductive programmes. “ - Marcos Cueto, Journal of Latin American Studies, In this thoroughly researched and rewarding interdisciplinary book, Gabriela Soto Laveaga examines the social, local, and international consequences of the global search for medicinal plants between the 1940s and the late 1980s. . . . This work is an important contribution to the history of science, state formation, post-1940s Mexico, and to the study of Echevarría’s presidency.” - CLAUDIA AGOSTONI, American Historical Review, “[A]nyone would be moved by the campesiño stories Soto Laveaga ably sows through her book and harvests at its conclusion. . . . Soto Laveaga’s sympathetic but entirely unpatronizing inclusion of campesiño voices validates her claim that battles over the knowledge of barbasco briefly transformed some worker identities, though many today are still unsure why anyone wanted what to them was little more than a weed.” - Andrew Benedict-Nelson, Times Literary Supplement

Gabriela Soto Laveaga is Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University.