Ethelia Ruíz Medrano

Ethelia Ruiz Medrano is a researcher at the Dirección de Estudios Históricos, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico and a visiting professor at the Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. She is also the author of three books with the University Press of Colorado. Her research interests at present focus on the Indian communities lying in a mountainous region known as the Mixteca Alta, in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The project she has underway aims at breaking new ground by using approaches and concepts from two disciplines—history and ethnography—to probe and understand the relationship between these communities and state power, in different realms of life, over both the colonial and national periods. Her future research interests, to the extent that they are already charted, point in the same general direction and also involve the use of both historical and ethnographic methodologies.