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

In this exciting and engaging book, Gabriela Soto Laveaga presents the story of how Mexico—and in particular Mexican peasants—had a major role in the scientific development of synthetic hormones, including those responsible for the birth control pill in the twentieth century. The quest for diosgenin, the chemical precursor of synthetic hormones, drove international scientists to explore botanical sources; the cost of refining the substance from animal urine was prohibitively expensive for the mass market. The barbasco, a wild yam that grows in the countryside of Mexico, was found to provide the highest concentration of diosgenin. This discovery caused international pharmaceutical corporations to develop and exploit a barbasco economy, with peasants digging for the wild yams and selling them to exploitative middlemen and in turn to transnational pharmaceutical companies that sold the resulting drugs abroad at high prices. Jungle Laboratories not only recounts the Mexican role in the development of the pill and other hormone-based drugs that have long been obscured by narratives that highlight events in the United States but also demonstrates how the search for barbasco had profound effects on Mexico.

It is these profound effects that form the focus of the book and its principal contribution. Because barbasco proved difficult to grow elsewhere, the rush to procure diosgenin for the miracle drugs provided by synthetic hormones was centered on an impoverished rural region in southern Mexico. From the development and industrialization of a local pharmaceutical industry to the incorporation of subsistence peasants into the national economy, barbasco transformed the way of life for many in rural Mexico. Through extensive interviews—including several complete oral histories—with peasants and other Mexicans who depended on barbasco, material from the archives of the pharmaceutical companies involved, and other sources, Soto Laveaga presents a fine-grained account of how the science and industry of hormone production intersected with their everyday lives. Barbasco provided the people of the region with the first bits of economic empowerment: for tens of thousands, the money earned by digging out the root was their first reliable source of cash. And with the realization that the wild yams could contain differing levels of diosgenin—and so bring different prices—barbasco made many of the peasants into scientists who carefully observed the traits of the many varieties and actively experimented to maximize their hormone yield. As knowledge of being a crucial part of the scientific enterprise became more widespread, thanks in part to student activists, barbasco proved to provide some limited political empowerment as well. Spurred on by the peasants and rural unrest, the Mexican government made barbasco the centerpiece of its efforts to reconstruct the Mexican countryside and, in turn, of its populist project. The failure of this attempt, the ruling party's concomitant turn to neoliberal economic policy, and the collapse of production due to overharvesting and encroachment on the wild yam's habitat then virtually erased the entire decades-long experience of being central to the world production of synthetic hormones from the Mexican national memory.

The book is beautifully written. Soto Laveaga links the science of steroids to a narrative about peasant experiences and nation development in a way that will engage readers interested in both the history of science and medicine and the history of Mexico and Latin America. The account is full of action and the personal narratives provided by the careful teasing of information from a variety of sources weave the interconnectedness between the science, the peasant, the yam, the economy, and the political changes in twentieth-century Mexico.

Jungle Laboratories wonderfully spans traditional fields of historical inquiry, making important contributions to the study of both the history of science and that of Mexico and Latin America. Regional experts will appreciate its detailed account of the lives of once-isolated peasant communities, of how they became central to a...