FOR RELEASE
March 3, 1999

          Captain Jeffrey M. Pilcher, an assistant professor of history at The Citadel, was awarded the prestigious Thomas F. McGann Memorial Prize by the Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies on February 21 in Colorado Springs for his recent book !Que vivan los tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity.

          The Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies is a regional association of Latin American scholars. Past winners of the Thomas F. McGann Memorial Prize include Karen Powers, "Andean Journeys: Migration, Ethnogenesis, and the State in Colonial Quito," and Paul Vanderwood, "The Power of God Against the Guns of Government: Religious Upheaval in Mexico at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century."

          Pilcher, who earned his Ph.D. in history from Texas Christian Academy in 1993, has been on faculty at The Citadel since 1994. His field is Mexican history. !Que vivan los tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity, published by the University of New Mexico Press in 1998, stemmed from Pilcher's dissertation on the history of Mexican cuisine.