For the last few decades, a strong consensus has held that Latin America is not only the most economically unequal region in the world, but also one where inequality has become structurally entrenched. Even in countries where income levels are relatively high by global standards, a small elite continues to control a disproportionate share of national wealth. This consensus reflects a broader shift in the development community and public arenas.

Zelia Maria Magdalena Nuttall was famous in her time, well-known as an archaeologist, an Americanist, an antiquarian, an ethnologist, a folklorist and “a lady scientist”; she was a woman “making it” in a man’s world from the 1880s to the 1930s. Deeply engaged in research about ancient civilizations in Mexico, she led a remarkable life as a pioneer in the evolution of anthropology as a field of study.

Asked to write about inequality in Latin America, an evolutionary biologist would naturally think first of human history. Systemic inequalities among groups of people has taken many forms over the centuries, since long before the colonial era. For at least as long as there have been cities, there have been inequalities in access to resources, in the form of housing, employment, education and even food and freedom itself. These historic and continuing injustices are widely-recognized. What I wish to write about is the much less visible, but more pervasive, impact of a source of inequalities—the stress of experiencing discrimination—on health that is, perhaps surprisingly, an ancillary consequence of an even older human history of exposure to stress challenges in both our physical and our social environments.