Hidden in the Blood explores the daily lives of staff and patients at a clinic where three-quarters of HIV-positive people in the region are treated. Readers will come to know these patients, who come from a soberingly wide range of social and economic backgrounds—middle-aged fathers, married couples, transvestites, truck drivers, folklore dancers, a young woman infected by a blood transfusion during plastic surgery. In readable, lucid prose, Wilson recounts the heroic efforts of the clinic staff—doctors such as Alejandro Guerrero and Russell Rodriguez and nurses like José Manuel Polanco—as they struggle to treat their SIDA patients…. Through the stories of these brave, caring staff members, readers will find evidence to dispel the common notion that third-World medicine is a chamber of horrors.
"Wilson offers an engaging, fact-based portrait of individual Mexicans facing the consequences of AIDS in a clinic in the Yucatàn; at the same time he explores the problems and potential consequences faces by medical personnel attempting to treat the disease.A well-informed portrait of sexual mores and homosexuality in provincial Mexico." --Library Journal
"For those who hanker for voices, Carter Wilson's Hidden in the Blood: A Personal Investigation of AIDS in the Yucatan offers just the nostrum: this humane little memoir is a polished and revelatory gem. Wilson, a novelist, embarks on an investigation of AIDS and sexuality in a part of Mexico that is beginning to see its first cases of HIV disease. He has anthropological training, and it shows: the book is ethnographically rich but unburdened by the jargon of our field. Wilson offers a compelling and textured portrait of an AIDS clinic serving Merida, the large but conservative capital of the Mayan lowlands."
—Paul Farmer
"A fine and important book about a topic we should all know more of."
—Samuel R. Delany
"What Carter Wilson has done in this book is very important. To my knowledge it is the first time anyone has systematically investigated and written about AIDS and HIV infection in Mexico from the perspective of caring medical providers, those who are HIV positive, and the families of those who are HIV positive. Wilson's focus on AIDS and HIV infection in the Yucatán, rather than the more well-known AIDS epidemics in Mexico City, Guadalajara, or Tijuana, increases our understanding of how the epidemic may progress in small urban areas in Mexico where very little is known.
—Joseph M. Carrier
