Immigration scholars, Latin American and otherwise, have challenged conceptions of what constitutes the geographic and cultural boundaries of Latin America. The flows of people, especially transnational migrants, have contributed much to that reframing. W. Warner Wood's monograph, Made in Mexico: Zapotec Weavers and the Global Ethnic Art Market, likewise illustrates the flexible boundaries of Latin America, as constituted by the triple flow of people, goods and ideas. Zapotec weavers and merchants occupy multiple geographic, social and economic spaces that are not limited to Oaxaca, Mexico. In telling a traditional tale about Zapotecs in the town of Teotitlán del Valle, Wood explores the broader parameters of what is Zapotec culture and, especially, what are Zapotec textiles, in a transnational context.

In Made in Mexico, Wood does not merely situate his study in Zapotec weaving and selling practices in Oaxaca. Rather, he studies the complex ways that Zapotec textiles and culture come to be and are mutually constituted in multiple localities (the Oaxaca Valley, the US south-west and urban Los Angeles), through local, national and transnational discourses, and by acts of learning, weaving and selling. What is Zapotec and what is a Zapotec textile do not come to be in isolation but through a process that includes Mexican and international tourists' conceptualisations of what is Mexicanness, and even anthropological studies about Zapotecs themselves. Certainly, Wood contributes to tourism studies and identity research, even though the latter topic is not one that he calls special attention to. It is significant that although the subjects of study – textiles, Zapotec weavers and merchants, tourists and anthropologists, among others – occupy multiple geographic, economic and social spaces, Wood shows how these together construct multiple authenticities and critiques of just what Zapotec textiles are. Despite the varying discourses about textiles critiquing and competing with each other, Wood describes the ‘limits of the social spaces where their “authenticity” is agreed upon’ (p. 110). Indeed, the stories told by tourists, in guidebooks, on web pages, in Santa Fe art galleries, in Los Angles restaurants and in Oaxacan weaving workshops and marketplaces circulate, are consumed and are shared by tourists, textile collectors, anthropologists and Zapotecs, ultimately, as Wood frames it, ‘work[ing] on the lives and weaving practices of the Zapotec’.

The book is divided into two sections; the first is entitled ‘Constructing and Consuming the Zapotec’. Largely, the three chapters that comprise this section look at the discourses about Zapotec culture and the social and economic spaces in which it matters. Here, Wood takes the reader to a rug collector's lecture in an Oaxaca City gallery, through cyberspace to visit websites owned by the Mexican government, US entrepreneurs and Zapotecs, and into Zapotec textile workshops themselves. Wood also introduces the reader to gallery owners in the US south-west, and textile buyers and collectors living in the United States and Mexico, to learn how the market for Zapotec textiles developed, as well as how it is contested and expanded through debates about authenticity and copying of Navajo motifs. Throughout these chapters, Wood integrates into his monograph the contested histories of Mexican handicraft production within the dual contexts of nation and international tourism. He shows how the textiles are sold to diverse buyers whose interests are piqued by romantic tales of exotic places and people that are believed to be embodied in the Zapotec rugs themselves.

In the second part of the book, ‘Crafting Textiles and Weavers’, Wood focuses on broader production processes and on weaving, specifically the cognitive processes of the act itself, in three chapters. By examining production in an industry that is Oaxacan, Mexican and transnational, Wood demonstrates the flexibility of Zapotec households and workshops as places of rug making, even arguing that they operate much like flexible maquiladora factory production. Here, the ethnographic vistas Wood portrays are the places were weavers learn and practice their craft, discuss and plan designs, and think about the very different clients they sell to. Whereas the first section of the book is an ethnographic account of transnational flows – Zapotecs, buyers, tourists, rugs and ideas – that can serve to de-centre conceptualisations of Zapotec, Oaxaca and what constitutes Mexico or even Latin America, the second section is more intimate. Rather than presenting what could have easily been traditional descriptions of Zapotec life and weaving, however, Wood describes the larger economic contexts of Zapotec weaving, in which weavers have to consider the tastes of tour groups visiting local stores, markets and workshops as well as wholesalers and international collectors. This is not the isolated, stuck-in-time Oaxaca that tourism operators, tourists themselves, travel writers, textile collectors and others describe, but one of savvy entrepreneurs and skilled artisans who are aware of those who tell the story of traditional Oaxaca and try to weave rugs that appeal to them.

Although Wood divides the book between consumption and production for descriptive and analytical purposes, neither is far from the other in the monograph. The movement from consumption to production poses a challenge to typical thinking about economic processes. Wood shows first how the story of what is Zapotec is told, why the textiles are desirable and sought after, and how Zapotecs, collectors, scholars, tour operators and tourists critique those textiles.

Some, especially some academics and collectors, may be bothered by Wood not saying definitively what the qualities of an authentic Zapotec textile are. Others may challenge Wood's conceptual framing, especially the dichotomy of consumption versus production. However, this would miss his point that neither is separate from the other and that both are inextricably tied to learning, something that is clearer in this framing than in one that begins with production. One of Wood's most important contributions is placing learning processes in relation to theories of economic practice. He shows that the way in which Zapotecs learn and transmit that learning is dialectically related to place, ethnicity and economy, adding a new dimension to the many ethnographies of Latin American handicrafts and marketing.