Taking Risks: Feminist Activism and Research in the Americas ed. by Julie Shayne (review)

Book Reviews resulted in greater regulation and the number of cooperatives, which made peasant action more visible and vulnerable to caciquismo. The second section traces successive leaders’ efforts to “industrialize ” the forest in the name of economic “modernization.” This entailed both mechanizing production processes and—through the promotion of sawmills, resin distilleries, and paper plants—converting woodland ecosystems into raw materials for commercial operations. Accordingly, leaders passed new forestry codes that suppressed cooperatives in favor of private companies, many of which received exclusive access to timberlands in exchange for pledges to manage resources sustainably and improve social services and transportation infrastructure. Refusing to keep these companies at their word, the ruling party “essentially became an environmental kleptocracy” (167). In the face of popular unrest, Luis Echeverrı́a responded by instituting a regime of “state forestry,” a bureaucratic network of publicly owned institutions meant to ease access to land, equipment, and credit. In practice, state forestry furthered bureaucratic forms of dominance by rendering natural resources bargaining chips to ameliorate rural demands. State forestry’s greatest failure, according to Boyer, derived from its insistence on “subordinat[ing] the material needs and social aspirations of rural people to a model of development that treated economic growth as an end unto itself and privileged the nation ’s most influential commercial and political interests” (251). The only saving grace Boyer finds is that Mexico’s rate of deforestation, the highest in the Americas in the 1990s, in the past decade has slowed, the result more of migration and viable alternatives to clandestine logging than of direct policy initiatives. Boyer’s notion of “political landscapes” may sound familiar to those concerned with ecology and commodity production. Nonetheless, Boyer’s books represents a signal achievement by persuasively documenting the ways forests in Mexico were shaped less by market forces, management policies, or population pressures than by the effects of political negotiation among the people and institutions that vied to determine how and for whose benefit they would be used. This book should be required reading for anyone interested in postrevolutionary Mexico and is ideal for use in upper-division undergraduate classes. Steven J. Bachelor Institute of Latina/o, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies University of Connecticut TAKING RISKS: FEMINIST ACTIVISM AND RESEARCH IN THE AMERICAS. By Julie Shayne (ed.) Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014, p. 383, $27.95. Taking Risks: Feminist Activism and Research in the Americas, edited by Julie Shayne, profiles recent scholarship on feminist activism in the 303 The Latin Americanist, June 2016 Americas, interrogating important questions about how researchers engage in feminist activist research methodology. The contributors closely examine the lives and histories of women activists taking risks in the hemisphere to demand social, political, and cultural change. The volume also considers the career-related risks that feminist scholars take in engaging in non-traditional research methodologies. At its heart, this is a volume concerned with feminist methodology. Through example, the contributors create a vision for transnational feminist activist scholarship in the Americas. A project that came out of an interdisciplinary conference, Julie Shayne brings together a collection of essays written by seasoned scholars such as herself, as well as by undergraduate and graduate students. In the introduction to the text, Shayne states, “regardless of the preferred label, the commonality in activist scholarship lies in the starting point that methodology , activism, theoretical insights, and reflection are inseparable”(xix). All of the authors featured in this volume offer self-reflection on their research processes, seeking an answer to the question of what it means to be an anti-oppressive researcher. In their self-reflection, authors explore their own personal relationships to both the research process and to the individuals with whom they work, revealing the personal and political commitments to their research. By engaging in participant observation and conducting interviews, the contributors to Taking Risks highlight the voices of Latin American and Latina activists involved in contemporary feminist movements. Incorporating the activists into the research process, many of the researchers sought feedback from their interviewees before publishing their work. Some of the authors also created video and radio archives to preserve these interviews. The book is divided into three sections. Part 1...