Arnold J. Bauer, professor of history at the University of California at Davis, received his Ph.D. in history from Berkeley in 1969. He has written on rural society in Latin America and more specifically in Chile; social and economic aspects of the Catholic Church in Latin America; and the material culture of Latin America. His works include Chilean rural society from the Spanish conquest to 1930 (Cambridge, 1975) as well as a number of articles and essays. He is currently at work on a synthetic text on the historical development of Spanish American material culture and an interpretive study of long-term transformations of rural economy and society. E-mail address: ajbauer@ucdavis.edu

Peri Fletcher received her Ph. D. in anthropology at The Johns Hopkins University a few weeks before this book was published. Her dissertation explores the dilemmas of social reproduction in a transnational migrant community that spans southern California and Michoacán, Mexico. Her previous anthropological field research, conducted in the Caribbean, focused on market women in Dominica and Guadeloupe. E-mail address: jetaylor@ucdavis.edu

Josiah McC. Heyman is associate professor of anthropology at Michigan Technological University. After receiving his Ph.D. in anthropology from City University of New York in 1989, he published Life and labor on the border: working people of northeastern Sonora, Mexico, 1886-1986. His continuing research on the border, focusing on the Immigration and Naturalization Service, has appeared in Current Anthropology and the Journal of Political Ecology, while his recent work on consumption features an article (with James Carrier) forthcoming in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. E-mail address: jmheyman@mtu.edu

Thomas Krüggeler is visiting professor of history at the Universidad Nacional San Antonio Abad del Cusco and associated researcher at the Centro de Estudios Regionales "Bartolomé de las Casas." He received an M.A. in history from the Universitat Bielefeld (Germany) in 1987 and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Illinois in 1993. Presently he is engaged in turning his dissertation "Unreliable Drunkards or Honorable Citizens? Artisans in Search of Their Place in the Cusco Society (1815-1930)" into a book manuscript. E-mail address: tkruggeler@compuserve.com or tkruegge@Geschichte.Uni-Bielefeld.de

Erick D. Langer received his Ph.D. in history from Stanford University in 1984. He is presently associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. His works include Economic change and rural resistance in southern Bolivia 1880-1930 (Stanford, 1989) and The new Latin American mission history (Lincoln, 1995), co-edited with Robert H. Jackson. He is presently working on an ethnohistory of the Franciscan missions among the Chiriguano Indians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. E-mail address: elanger@andrew.cmu.edu

Benjamin S. Orlove received his Ph. D. in anthropology from Berkeley in 1974. He is currently professor in the Division of Environmental Studies at the University of California at Davis. He has written several books and a number of articles on the environmental, economic and cultural anthropology and history of Latin America, with an emphasis on the Andean region. In addition, he has written a family memoir, In my father's study (Iowa City, 1995), published in Singular Lives: The Iowa Series in North American Autobiography. He is currently working on a book on the Lake Titicaca region. For more information about him, visit his home page. E-mail address: bsorlove@ucdavis.edu

Patricia Vega Jiménez received her M.S. in history from the Universidad de Costa Rica in 1990. She has published two books, El colegio de periodistas de Costa Rica: su historia (San José, Costa Rica, 1993) and De la imprenta al periódico: los inicios de la comunicación en Costa Rica 1821-1850 (San José, Costa Rica, 1995), as well as a number of articles in scholarly journals. She is the director of the School of Communication Sciences in the Universidad de Costa Rica. She is presently conducting a research project on consumption in Costa Rica in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. E-mail address: deliyore@sol.racsa.co.cr