On the Violence of Poverty, War and Recovery in Mexico City

• In Event: Invited Session - Life at the Limits: Affliction, Healing, and Urban Poverty

Abstract

Compulsory detention centers for the treatment of drug addiction are widespread and growing throughout Latin America. In Mexico, these centers are called anexos (annexes) and they are run and utilized by the poor and informal working classes. Anexos detain drug users against their will and utilize physical and psychological violence to treat addiction. Based on three years of anthropological research of anexos in and around Mexico City, this paper moves beyond conventional reasoning that understands anexos as purely punitive or criminal institutions, and argues that anexos are integral to relations of globalized power, and a local expression that holds tremendous ethical and epistemic force. Specifically, it seeks to understand how “recovery” is being reshaped in locations where politico-economic marginality and drug-related violence are existential realities. Ethnographically focused, it reveals how one anexo on the periphery of Mexico City provides a physical and ethical space in which to endure, and possibly subvert, the pressures of poverty and war without ever existing outside of them. More broadly, this paper reflects on the potential of violence as a mode of survival in the context of deteriorating life conditions, and poses the question of what recovery requires and consists of in the contemporary Mexican context.

Author

• Angela Garcia, Stanford University