Stanford Humanities Center
Paul Ramírez is associate professor of history and religious studies at Northwestern University, where he has directed the interdisciplinary Science in Human Culture Program. A specialist in the history of Mexico with interests in devotion, health, technology, and the lives of peasants, the is the author of Enlightened Immunity: Mexico’s Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason (Stanford University Press, 2018). He is currently writing a history of salt and spiritual geographies in Mexico, with support from the Newberry Library, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Studies.
SHC Project
Salt of the Santos: A History of Devoted Work
Salt of the Santos is a multi-sited archival study of salt’s production, trade, and consumption in Mexico, from the Spanish empire through the liberal Republic and into the twentieth century. The project scrutinizes salt, a Mesoamerican commodity with applications in silver refining and cattle ranching, to recover the colonial legacies that have been ignored as a result of the emphasis on industry, development, and global circulation. Ramírez aims to feature the perspectives of Mexican producers and consumers, reconnect ordinary people to the early modern industries and trade networks they helped build and sustain, and recast the market frameworks that predominate within commodity studies to account for religious practices and Mesoamerican worldviews.
