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Serenity: Violence, Inequality, and Recovery on the Edge of Mexico City
Author(s) -
Garcia Angela
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
medical anthropology quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.855
H-Index - 55
eISSN - 1548-1387
pISSN - 0745-5194
DOI - 10.1111/maq.12208
Subject(s) - addiction , poverty , existentialism , urban poverty , structural violence , meaning (existential) , ethnography , context (archaeology) , inequality , sociology , criminology , psychology , political science , economic growth , geography , psychotherapist , psychiatry , economics , politics , anthropology , mathematical analysis , mathematics , archaeology , law
Over the last decade, there has been a sharp increase in drug addiction in Mexico, especially among the urban poor. During the same period, unregulated residential treatment centers for addiction, known as anexos , have proliferated throughout the country. These centers are utilized and run by marginalized populations and are widely known to engage in physical violence. Based on long‐term ethnographic research in Mexico City, this article describes why anexos emerged, how they work, and what their prevalence and practices reveal about the nature of recovery in a context where poverty, drugs, and violence are existential realities. Drawing attention to the dynamic relationship between violence and recovery, pain, and healing, it complicates categories of violence and care that are presumed to have exclusive meaning, illuminating the divergent meanings of, and opportunities for, recovery, and how these are socially configured and sustained.