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

The discovery of steroid hormones fundamentally altered both medicine and sexual behavior in the mid-twentieth century. Mexico found itself at the center of the race to locate raw material from which to mass-produce synthetic cortisone, and then as the source for the raw material from which to manufacture oral contraceptives. Gabriela Soto Laveaga’s superb Jungle Laboratories, based on her dissertation, tells the story of barbasco (Diosco-rea mexicana), a tuber that grows wild in the rugged jungles of southeastern Mexico. In 1940, U.S. scientist Russell Marker was one of many working in the United States and Europe to locate natural sources for the synthetic production of steroid hormones. Marker’s search led him to Mex-ico, where he identified barbasco as a useful source of diosgenin. Marker founded Syntex Laboratories in Mexico to process progesterone from bar-basco, and within a decade the world’s major pharmaceutical firms were competing for a piece of the Mexico-based supply and production market. Mexico had become the world’s premier supplier of material for synthetic hormones, furnishing 90 percent of the world’s steroid hormones. Soon after, Mexican chemist Ernesto Miramontes helped take the first scientific steps leading to the production of oral contraceptives.

By the 1960s, tens of thousands of rural Mexicans—mostly peasants (campesinos) eking out a living in the region—were engaged in collecting barbasco and delivering it to middlemen who in turn sold it to international pharmaceutical companies. But even this fascinating story hides more interesting tales of those who labored to gather barbasco in the jungles and those who sought to bring the scientific and economic benefits of steroid production to Mexico.

Although Soto Laveaga gives a clear account of the political economy of the barbasco-diosgenin-pharmaceutical commodity chain, from jungle to drugstore, she reserves her most vivid and carefully researched work for the lives of those campesinos whose muddy, backbreaking work brought the yams from jungle to rural crossroads. We get a vivid portrayal of rural society and labor conditions. She builds this part of her story from oral interviews with dozens of former pickers (she also conducted dozens more interviews with company workers, government officials, and Mexican scientists)—all building on a strong and creative foundation of archival documentation.

Soto Laveaga’s barbasco account adds to the long history of boom-and bust-stories in Latin America’s raw-material export trade—gold, silver, rubber, guano, henequen, and many others. In broad outlines, the histories differ little: discovery, rapidly rising production in response to global demand, extraction by poorly paid local workers while most value added happened abroad in the plants of foreign corporations.

Yet the barbasco story differs in several respects. In the wake of Mexico’s student movements of 1968 and their violent repression, successive presidential administrations returned to mid-century populist strands—a legacy of Mexico’s 1910 revolution—in an effort to rebuild popular support and legitimacy for the PRI, Mexico’s ruling party. The government of Luis Echeverria sought in the 1970s to build a domestic pharmaceutical industry on the back of a new state company that would “mexicanize” the scientific and technical capacity of processing barbasco into steroid hormones. Locating its laboratories and production facilities in the producing regions of Tuxtepec, Puebla, and Chiapas, the government company—Proquive-mex—successfully undertook the production of synthetic steroids, although it never proved able to compete against multinational pharmaceuticals without heavy government subsidy. Second, the government supported (under pressure) the creation of a National Union of Producers and Gatherers of Barbasco, bringing peasants into the state-mediated process that took barbasco from the jungle to the laboratory and processing plant.

This finely researched and clearly written book perhaps overreaches on a few counts. Soto Laveaga argues that the barbasco trade generally and labor organization and Proquivemex in particular enabled campesinos to achieve material benefits as well as...