Eating Grasshoppers: Chapulines and the Women Who Sell Them, Jeffrey H Cohen, 2025, University of Texas Press
The Chapulineros that represents Oaxaca on the football field may not be as nimble as their grasshopper namesakes as they languish in the third division of Mexico’s league, but they symbolise the pride locals take in a distinctive foodstuff.
Chapulines are powerful motifs and mascots associated with businesses both locally within Oaxaca, but also nationally in Mexico and into the diaspora within the United States.
They have become a cultural icon, with the celebrated alebrijes, brightly painted wooden carvings of fantastic creatures that are sold throughout Mexico and often produced in Oaxacan towns, frequently depicting chapulines.
Eaten as part of the everyday diet of Oaxacans as well as a fulfilling snack, this foodstuff high in protein and with a history as a commodity stretching back to pre-Columbian times is ubiquitous in the state.
Jeffrey Cohen has studied the product and trade extensively and his anthropological research offers fascinating insights into what the humble grasshopper can tell social scientists about a range of themes—from foodways to economic relations.
In particular, he notes, “chapulines today are not the chapulines of the deep past; they are part of a dynamic market system that contradicts local assumptions about labour and the work of rural and Indigenous women”.
It is a story in which women are the main protagonists but also one that challenges our ideas about the contemporary meaning of “Indigenous” and how the term is so often invoked by outsiders to conjur a sense of an exotic Other.
As the author points out tour guides and restauranteurs interpret pre-Columbian history and pair the consumption of chapulines with fantastic stories of Oaxaca’s Indigenous peoples to create a direct connection between past and present.
He writes: “Chapulines are one of the foods—along with tortillas, mole, and a few other regional specialties—used to tell the story of a place that exists outside the forces of capitalism, alien to the surrounding nation and remaining unchanged through both colonial and contemporary times. Identified as Indigenous, such stories create a world that is scrubbed of controversy, lacks structural inequalities, and is uncontaminated, pure, and bucolic.”
In recent decades chapulines have been transformed from an overlooked and unimportant food consumed by the rural, urban and Indigenous poor, into a delicacy that visitors to Oaxaca must try—an elevation to haute cuisine simultaneously presented by local authorities as an Indigenous heritage and a symbol of authenticity.
Cohen follows the chapulin through both time the marketplace to argue that the women who dominate the local trade, chapulineras, are inventing a new kind of entrepreneurism.
One of the most surprising outcomes of this work, he suggests, is what it can tell us about development: while out-migration remains a serious challenge in Oaxaca, chapulineras generally are not migrants and their children and extended families mostly stay put.
Rarely off their mobile phones, these women are skilled in managing production and sales, and adapt rapidly to market changes, whether that means catering to restaurateurs and tourists or embracing social media and the touchless economy to facilitate the movement of hundreds of kilograms of their product.
Cohen writes: “Anthropologists often characterise the Indigenous as victims of progress who are unable to adapt to the expanding global markets around them, unable to embrace new technologies, and incapable of adapting to a changing world.
“The argument often paints Indigenous communities as facing certain trouble, destined to become part of the rural poor or the lumpen proletariat, and doomed to lose the very traditions that made them unique in the past. Nothing could be further from reality for the women who sell chapulines in Oaxaca.”
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Categories: Mexico, North America