In the villages and small towns of much of rural Latin America, cooperation among neighbours is essential for personal and community survival. It takes many forms from godparenting to sponsoring fiestas, holding civic offices or exchanging agricultural labour in Oaxaca, Mexico. This book examines ways in which the people of Santa Ana del Valle practice these traditional cooperative and recipricol relationships and also invent new relationships to respond to global forces of social and economic change at work within their community. The author seeks to offer rich ethnographic material to give a working definition of community created in and through cooperative relationships.
