Cheran, situated in west-central Mexico, was one of the most isolated mountain towns until about 1940, when a paved highway connected it with a highway serving Guadalajara and Mexico City. With Cheran poised for rapid modernization, Beals and other anthropologists arrived in 1940 to begin an intensive study of the Tarascan community and its five thousand inhabitants before their lives were inextricably altered by modern life.

After two years of gathering data about Cheran geography, agriculture, manufacturing, food use, government, religious ceremonies, fiestas, and general lifeways, Beals published their findings as Publication No. 2 of the Smithsonian Institution's Institute of Social Anthropology.

Cheran is a valuable resource for today's anthropologists, providing a solid, empirical foundation for comparison to similar communities and for tests of acculturative theories. This paperback edition contains a follow-up introduction the author wrote in 1973 and a new foreword by George M. Foster that discusses the impact of Beals's groundbreaking work on further studies of Cheran and similar communities.