This book explores the current human rights crisis created by the War on Drugs in Mexico. It focuses on three vulnerable communities that have felt the impacts of this war firsthand: undocumented Central American migrants in transit to the United States, journalists who report on violence in highly dangerous regions, and the mourning relatives of victims of severe crimes, who take collective action by participating in human rights investigations and searching for their missing loved ones. Analyzing contemporary novels, journalistic chronicles, testimonial works, and documentaries, the book reveals the political potential of these communities’ vulnerability and victimization portrayed in these fictional and non-fictional representations. Violence against migrants, journalists, and activists reveals an array of human rights violations affecting the right to safe transit across borders, freedom of expression, the right to information, and the right to truth and justice.

One of the most surprising developments in Mexico's transition to democracy is the outbreak of criminal wars and large-scale criminal violence. Why did Mexican drug cartels go to war as the country transitioned away from one-party rule? And why have criminal wars proliferated as democracy has consolidated and elections have become more competitive subnationally? In Votes, Drugs, and Violence, Guillermo Trejo and Sandra Ley develop a political theory of criminal violence in weak democracies that elucidates how democratic politics and the fragmentation of power fundamentally shape cartels' incentives for war and peace. Drawing on in-depth case studies and statistical analysis spanning more than two decades and multiple levels of government, Trejo and Ley show that electoral competition and partisan conflict were key drivers of the outbreak of Mexico's crime wars, the intensification of violence, and the expansion of war and violence to the spheres of local politics and civil society.

A gripping portrait of the relentless women taking missing persons, kidnapping, and extortion cases into their own hands—and building a movement for one another. In this riveting exploration of the lives of mothers whose children are among the 100,000 disappeared in Mexico’s war on drugs, Shaylih Muehlmann shows how families have mobilized on the ground to get answers and justice. It is often mothers who confront government corruption, indifference, and incompetence by taking on the responsibilities of searching for missing persons and dealing with kidnapping and extortion cases. In bringing the voices of these women to the fore, Muehlmann demonstrates how the war on drugs affects everyday life in Mexico and how these activists have become detectives, forensic specialists, and even negotiators with drug traffickers. Call the Mothers provides a unique look at a grassroots movement that draws from the symbolic power of motherhood to build a network of collectives that redefine traditional gender roles and challenge injustice and impunity.

Victim Activists in Mexico: Social and Political Mobilization amid Extreme Violence and Disappearances examines the collective action of the courageous family members of the disappeared in the midst of Mexico’s ongoing humanitarian crisis over the last decades. Yael Siman and Matthew Hone analyze this grassroots mobilization and argue that the activists have created rutinary, contentious, and innovative types of resistance through building local and trans-local links of support and solidarity that reinforce their struggle. This mobilization from below has contributed to constructing transitional justice including laws, public apologies, and memorials. The combination of internal and external factors impacting the collectives and their environment has enabled significant changes in the institutions, state responses, and the victimhood narratives in the country. This book adds to the scholarship on the collective action of grieving families by focusing on both the social and political aspects of mobilization.

This book undertakes a psychotropic analysis of texts that deal with the violence of drug trafficking and interdiction, especially in Mexico. While most critics of so-called narcoculture have either focused on an aesthetic “sobriety” in these works or discounted them altogether as exploitative and unworthy of serious attention, Drugs, Violence, and Latin America illuminates how such work may reflect and intervene in global networks of intoxication. Theorizing a “dialectics of intoxication” that illustrates how psychotropy may either solidify or destabilize the self and its relationship to the other, it proposes that these tendencies influence human behavior in distinct ways and are leveraged for social control within both licit and illicit economies. A consideration of a countercultural genealogy in Latin America provides a contrastive psychotropic context for contemporary novels that exposes links between narcoviolence and consumerism, challenging our addictions of thought and feeling about ourselves and our relationships to drugs and narco-violence.

Based on over a decade of research, a powerful, moving work of narrative nonfiction that illuminates the little-known world of the anexos of Mexico City, the informal addiction treatment centers where mothers send their children to escape the violence of the drug war. The Way That Leads Among the Lost reveals a hidden place where care and violence are impossible to separate: the anexos of Mexico City. The prizewinning anthropologist Angela Garcia takes us deep into the world of these small rooms, informal treatment centers for alcoholism, addiction, and mental illness, spread across Mexico City’s tenements and reaching into the United States. Run and inhabited by Mexico’s most marginalized populations, they are controversial for their illegality and their use of coercion. Yet for many Mexican families desperate to keep their loved ones safe, these rooms offer something of a refuge from what lies beyond them—the intensifying violence surrounding the drug war. This is the first book ever written on the anexos. Garcia, who spent a decade conducting anthropological fieldwork in Mexico City, draws readers into their many dimensions, casting light on the mothers and their children who are entangled in this hidden world. Following the stories of its denizens, she asks what these places are, why they exist, and what they reflect about Mexico and the wider world. With extraordinary empathy and a sharp eye for detail, Garcia attends to the lives that the anexos both sustain and erode, wrestling with the question of why mothers turn to them as a site of refuge even as they reproduce violence. Woven into these portraits is Garcia’s own powerful story of family, childhood, homelessness, and drugs—a blend of ethnography and memoir converging on a set of fundamental questions about the many forms and meanings that violence, love, care, family, and hope may take. Infused with profound ethnographic richness and moral urgency, The Way That Leads Among the Lost is a stunning work of narrative nonfiction, a book that will leave a deep mark on readers.

Robo Sacer engages the digital humanities, critical race theory, border studies, biopolitical theory, and necropolitical theory to interrogate how technology has been used to oppress people of Mexican descent—both within Mexico and in the United States—since the advent of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. As the book argues, robo-sacer identity emerges as transnational flows of bodies, capital, and technology become an institutionalized state of exception that relegates people from marginalized communities to the periphery. And yet the same technology can be utilized by the oppressed in the service of resistance. The texts studied here represent speculative stories about this technological empowerment. These texts theorize different means of techno-resistance to key realities that have emerged within Mexican and Chicano/a/x communities under the rise and reign of neoliberalism. The first three chapters deal with dehumanization, the trafficking of death, and unbalanced access to technology. The final two chapters deal with the major forms of violence—feminicide and drug-related violence—that have grown exponentially in Mexico with the rise of neoliberalism. These stories theorize the role of technology both in oppressing and in providing the subaltern with necessary tools for resistance. Robo Sacer builds on the previous studies of Sayak Valencia, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Guy Emerson, Achille Mbembe, and of course Giorgio Agamben, but it differentiates itself from them through its theorization on how technology—and particularly cyborg subjectivity—can amend the reigning biopolitical and necropolitical structures of power in potentially liberatory ways. Robo Sacer shows how the cyborg can denaturalize constructs of zoē by providing an outlet through which the oppressed can tell their stories, thus imbuing the oppressed with the power to combat imperialist forces.

A ground-level chronicle of the violent drug war in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico—with accounts from both traffickers and law enforcement, and “astute analysis” (The Americas). Thousands die in drug-related violence every year in Mexico. Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, adjacent to El Paso, Texas, has become the most violent city in the drug war. Much of the cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamine consumed in the United States is imported across the Mexican border, making El Paso/Juárez one of the major drug-trafficking venues in the world. In this anthropological study of drug trafficking and anti-drug law enforcement efforts on the US–Mexico border, Howard Campbell uses an ethnographic perspective to chronicle the recent Mexican drug war, focusing especially on people and events in the El Paso/Juárez area. It is the first social science study of the violent drug war that is tearing Mexico apart. Based on deep access to the drug-smuggling world, this study presents the drug war through the words of direct participants. Half of the book consists of oral histories from drug traffickers, and the other half from law enforcement officials. There is much journalistic coverage of the drug war, but very seldom are the lived experiences of traffickers and “narcs” presented in such vivid detail. In addition to providing an up-close, personal view of this world, Campbell explains and analyzes the functioning of cartels, the corruption that facilitates trafficking, the strategies of smugglers and anti-narcotics officials, and the perilous culture of drug trafficking that Campbell refers to as the “Drug War Zone.” “This collection of oral histories of drug traffickers and counter-drug officials examines the border narco-world through the eyes of first-hand participants . . . An invaluable resource for anyone seeking a greater sociological understanding.” —Journal of Latin American Studies

When I Wear My Alligator Boots examines how the lives of dispossessed men and women are affected by the rise of narcotrafficking along the U.S.-Mexico border. In particular, the book explores a crucial tension at the heart of the "war on drugs": despite the violence and suffering brought on by drug cartels, for the rural poor in Mexico’s north, narcotrafficking offers one of the few paths to upward mobility and is a powerful source of cultural meanings and local prestige. In the borderlands, traces of the drug trade are everywhere: from gang violence in cities to drug addiction in rural villages, from the vibrant folklore popularized in the narco-corridos of Norteña music to the icon of Jesús Malverde, the "patron saint" of narcos, tucked beneath the shirts of local people. In When I Wear My Alligator Boots, the author explores the everyday reality of the drug trade by living alongside its low-level workers, who live at the edges of the violence generated by the militarization of the war on drugs. Rather than telling the story of the powerful cartel leaders, the book focuses on the women who occasionally make their sandwiches, the low-level businessmen who launder their money, the addicts who consume their products, the mules who carry their money and drugs across borders, and the men and women who serve out prison sentences when their bosses' operations go awry.

2020 — Ruth Benedict Prize – Association for Queer Anthropology, American Anthropological Association 2020 — Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize – National Women’s Studies Association 2020 — Honorable Mention, Sara A. Whaley Book Prize 2021 — Best Book in Social Sciences – Mexico Section, Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Sex, drugs, religion, and love are potent combinations in la zona, a regulated prostitution zone in the city of Reynosa, across the border from Hidalgo, Texas. During the years 2008 and 2009, a time of intense drug violence, Sarah Luna met and built relationships with two kinds of migrants, women who moved from rural Mexico to Reynosa to become sex workers and American missionaries who moved from the United States to forge a fellowship with those workers. Luna examines the entanglements, both intimate and financial, that define their lives. Using the concept of obligar, she delves into the connections that tie sex workers to their families, their clients, their pimps, the missionaries, and the drug dealers—and to the guilt, power, and comfort of faith. Love in the Drug War scrutinizes not only la zona and the people who work to survive there, but also Reynosa itself—including the influences of the United States—adding nuance and new understanding to the current Mexico-US border crisis.