Featured prominently in the Netflix series Narcos, Badiraguato is known as the birthplace of Mexico's most notorious criminals, from Caro Quintero to "El Chapo." But in this rural community in the Sinaloa sierra, what is the daily life of those invisible in the criminal fresco, who live in this jobless region, grow a tiny patch of poppies, run a grocery store, or hold a position in the local government? Who are the poppy farmers, caught between military repression and exploitation by those who buy their crops? What does it mean to be a woman in a place where men’s violence looms? How can people make sense of the killings that punctuate daily life? This sensitive ethnography lifts the veil on a marginalized territory that is the downside of our globalized economy; an ethnography that confronts us with the uncertainty that reigns when, once again, "Dawn rose on a dead body."
Adèle Blazquez is CNRS Research Associate Professor in Anthropology at the Laboratory of Political Anthropology (LAP-EHESS) in Paris. Her research focuses on the everyday experiences of violence and power in Mexico.
"This is an extraordinary ethnography of violence—especially gendered violence—in the remote rural village synonymous with ‘El Chapo,’ Mexico’s largest drug don. A beautifully written, brilliant theoretical work that leaps off the page."—Philippe Bourgois, author of In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio
"Adèle Blazquez’s is perhaps the finest existing ethnography of any one of Mexico’s illicit economies. Elegantly written and impeccably argued, this study of daily life among Badiraguato’s poppy-growing peasants, ranchers, and town-dwellers offers something that is exceptionally rare: genuine understanding."—Claudio Lomnitz, author of Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism
"Blazquez does something powerful by illuminating real and complicated people who are trying to live within violent circumstances not of their making. This is the type of book that will stay with you."—Alexander Avina, author of Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside
328 pp.6 x 9Illus: 7 b/w illustrations, 4 maps
9780520405257$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Mar 2025