My research falls into two general areas. The first is the anthropological political economy of the Mexico-US borderlands. For the past ten years I have studied the ways in which water, land and labor have been organized to produce commodities in areas marked by aridity, especially northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. This work took the form of a socioeconomic and cultural history of irrigated cotton agriculture in the borderlands, and in particular, northeastern Mexico. The book that resulted, Building the Borderlands, tells this story of cotton, water, colonization and migration. The other major thrust of my research concerns the history of anthropological thought. I am particularly interested in perspectives that have developed outside of Europe and North America, and have dedicated a good deal of energy to tracing the histories of different traditions within Latin American Anthropology, and the ways in which anthropological thought has been applied to development.