INTRODUCTION THE RESILIENCE IMPERATIVE On January 31, 2007, the long, narrow alleys and wide boulevards of Mexico City were filled with typical early morning sounds: children running through open doors; families preparing for the day; and street vendors cooking up tortillas, one of Mexico’s main food staples. Yet this was to be no ordinary day. On this day, the price of corn—the main ingredient in tortillas—would hit an all-time high of 35 cents a pound , a price that would have been unfathomable just a year before. Corn was suddenly 400 percent more expensive than it had been just three months earlier . With half of all Mexicans living below the poverty line, a sudden increase of this magnitude was not just a nuisance, it was a potential humanitarian and political crisis. As the sun lifted higher in the sky, the voices of tens of thousands of citizens, farmers, and union activists could be heard gathering in one of the city’s central squares. Above their heads, they raised not weapons, but ears of corn. The tortilla riots, as they came to be called, echoed throughout the day, taking over one of the main downtown streets and challenging the new government of President Felipe Calderón. Well into the evening, protestors chanted, “Tortillas sí, pan no!”— a pun on Calderón’s National Action Party, the PAN, which also means “bread” in Spanish—and barked out their suspicions about just who was behind t