Episode 123: Eating NAFTA, with Alyshia Gálvez

My guest is Alyshia Gálvez. In her gripping new book, Eating NAFTA: Trade Food Policies, and the Destruction of Mexico, Alyshia Gálvez exposes how changes in policy following NAFTA have fundamentally altered one of the most basic elements of life in Mexico – sustenance. Mexicans are faced with a food system that favors food security over subsistence agriculture, development over sustainability, market participation over social welfare, and ideologies of self-care over public health. Trade agreements negotiated to improve lives have sometimes failed, resulting in unintended consequences for people’s everyday lives. Alyshia Gálvez is Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at Lehman College of the City University of New York. She is the author of Guadalupe in New York: Devotion and the Struggle for Citizenship Rights among Mexican Immigrants _and _Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers: Mexican Women, Public Prenatal Care, and the Birth-weight Paradox.