Along the coast of northwestern Mexico the new global economy has imposed terrible burdens on many sectors of the population and once self-reliant, rural populations have been driven to wage and subsistence labor in order to survive. This book eloquently explains how contemporary rural communities in southern Sinaloa have responded to economic and ecological changes affecting the entire nation. Mara Luz Cruz-Torres evokes the rich and varied experiences of the people who live in the villages of Celaya and El Cerro, showing how they invent and utilize their own social capital to emerge as whole persons in the face of limited resources, poverty, illness, sudden death, and daily oppression. A sometimes tragic but ultimately vibrant story of human resistance, Lives of Dust and Water offers an important look at a little-studied but dynamically developing region of Mexico and contributes to a more precise understanding of how rural coastal communities in Mexico emerged and continue to develop and adjust to the uncertainties of the globalizing world.