1 SERENITY
I didn’t go to Mexico to study the drug war. As an anthropologist, I had already spent years among families struggling with addiction problems in the United States. Families like my own. Mexico was my destination for vacations and roots trips, for sharpening Spanish-language skills and for romantic rendezvous. It’s where I took a culinary class to learn the art of making mole, and where I first encountered the erotic poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. I celebrated my honeymoon there, at an all-inclusive eco-resort located on a secret cove near Puerto Vallarta, accessible only by boat.
I selected that resort because of its remoteness. I had wanted to start life afresh, on a landscape so different from the New Mexican desert where I was raised. At the resort, I spent my mornings journaling in a hammock, surrounded by nesting parrots. And in the afternoons, I lounged on a towel-covered recliner while my new husband, Benjamin, sat beside me on his. Mountains behind us, we faced the Pacific, our heads buried in books.
I read Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, a 1947 novel set in a small Mexican town called Quauhnahuac, recognizable today as Cuernavaca, where Lowry lived during the disintegration of his first marriage. Two volcanic mountains—Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl—frame Quauhnahuac and its ruinous landscape. The towering volcanoes convey a sense of doom. In a letter to his publisher, Lowry described them as “getting closer throughout … a symbol of the approaching war.”
The entire novel unfolds over one day, November 2, 1939, the Day of the Dead, and follows the dissolution of British ex-consul Geoffrey Firmin. In the backdrop of the story is the rise of fascism in Europe, the Spanish Civil War, and the turbulence of post-revolution Mexico. In one scene, the consul voices a sense of resignation. “Read history,” he says.
Go back a thousand years. What is the use of interfering with its worthless stupid course? Like a barranca, a ravine, choked up with refuse, that winds through the ages, and peters out in a—What in God’s name has all the heroic resistance put up by poor little defenceless peoples all rendered defenceless in the first place for some well-calculated and criminal reason […] Countries, civilisations, empires, great hordes, perish for no reason at all, and their soul and meaning with them.
Despite his anguish, Lowry’s consul longs for some sort of personal redemption. But at the end of the book, he meets a violent death, his body plunging to the bottom of the barranca, a pariah dog thrown in after him.
I read Under the Volcano while Benjamin read a first edition of D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent, the twisted plot of which is also set in a small Mexican town. We read each other passages—laughing at Lawrence’s awful sex scenes, wowed by Lowry’s lyricism. And at night we drunkenly fucked and fought and threatened divorce. Benjamin was afraid of the scorpions that dropped from the thatched roof of our cabana, I of drowning in the Pacific.
Under the Volcano made a lasting impression on me, not only because of Lowry’s dizzying prose but also for his portrait of the Mexican landscape. The land itself reflects the cruelty and tragedy of the time in which the novel was written, and the characters’ inner lives are presented in vivid detail. In one passage, the volcanoes, “clear and magnificent,” are juxtaposed with “a thin blue scarf of illegal smoke, someone burning wood for carbon.” A local cinema’s flickering lights announce “No se puede vivir sin amar.” You can’t live without loving.
Fourteen years after my honeymoon, and after the demise of my marriage, I bought a copy of Bajo el volcán at a street-corner kiosk in Mexico City. The merchant placed it in a thin pink plastic bag and handed it to me with a serious look. He called it the greatest work about Mexico—more honest than Paz, more beautiful than Pacheco; a story about war. He told me to read it with great care.
* * *
Mexico City sits in the center of a valley seven thousand feet above sea level and is surrounded by mountains and volcanoes. Every year, one of the volcanoes erupts with fire, smoke, and ash. Popocatépetl, smoking mountain in the Nahuatl language, is Mexico’s largest active volcano and rises forty-five miles southeast of the capital. On clear days, El Popo can be seen from the city, and on days when it’s active and the wind is blowing toward Mexico City, ash descends on buildings and streets. The base of the volcano and Mexico City’s surrounding mountains have become clogged with poor towns, their neighborhoods crammed with self-built houses. The pueblos continually expand into these high-risk areas, where residents are vulnerable to natural disasters of all kinds—earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions. More recently, they have become vulnerable to unthinkable acts of criminal violence.
Two thousand years ago, the Xitle volcano erupted and molten lava poured into what is now Mexico City’s valley. The eruption buried Cuicuilco, one of the oldest cities in Mesoamerica. The only major remnant of the settlement is its partially excavated pyramid, a massive circular ruin. The deep lava field that covered the ancient city is now known as El Pedregal de San Ángel. For centuries the Pedregal was called malpaís: the badland.
In 1942, the Pedregal was chosen as the site for Ciudad Universitaria, University City in English, home to the prestigious National Autonomous University of Mexico. University City was a massive urban project, a utopian vision of what Mexico could be. Designed by the architects Mario Pani and Enrique del Moral, the campus combined modern functionalism with pre-Hispanic urbanism and included the use of volcanic stone. In its scale and ambition, the new home for the university crystallized the transformative political agenda of the time. With murals by David Alfaro Siqueiros and Juan O’Gorman, University City was meant to lead Mexico away from its repressive past and into a new, progressive future. According to project manager Carlos Lazo Barreiro, University City was “where the ultimate goals of the Revolution would be attained.”
I went to Mexico City in 2011 with Benjamin and our four-year-old twin daughters to study the Pedregal and a massive development plan called Ciudad Salud, Health City, which would be built there. Mexico has some of the most persistent wealth and health inequalities in the world, and Health City was supposed to narrow these gaps. I never believed that Health City would solve these problems, but studying the project was a way for me to engage my long-standing interest in architecture and health, and to safeguard myself from the pain that accompanied studying addiction and the impact of the war on drugs in New Mexico.
I was born and raised in New Mexico and returned there as a graduate student to study its heroin epidemic, one of the worst in the United States. Most of my anthropological research there took place in a drug recovery clinic, where I worked alone during the graveyard shift, tending to the needs of detoxing patients. The clinic was a rehabbed adobe house that had been abandoned for years, and the people who were court-appointed to it were young and poor, many related to each other by bonds of blood and friendship. Drugs and the pain of caring for someone using them were not new to me. I grew up in a family that suffered from addiction problems. During my three years of research, several of the people I knew and cared for were incarcerated or had overdosed and died. I fell into a deep depression. By the time I finished my book, I was done with New Mexico, done with drugs, and done caring for people addicted to them.
Health City was my antidote to New Mexico. The high-tech development would be built on a lava-covered landscape near University City. And like University City, it promised to uphold ideals of progress and equality. The entire project was infused with optimistic ideas about architecture’s capacity to improve people’s health and lives. But the backdrop of the project wasn’t just the volcanic landscape. It was Mexico’s national disaster.
* * *
In December 2006, four years before the unveiling of Health City, Mexico’s newly elected president Felipe Calderón declared “war” against drug cartels and deployed the military where intensive cartel activity was taking place. While the fight against drug traffickers and dealers was not an invention of the Calderón administration, it was Calderón who ushered in the military’s current role in Mexican anti-crime strategy. With money, arms, and aid from the United States, his administration broadcast a message that military force would be used against leaders of drug trafficking organizations. The resulting violence was unprecedented. By the end of Calderón’s six-year administration, there were more than 121,600 murders recorded by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography and 30,000 disappearances registered by the Secretariat of the Interior. Contrary to what the government repeatedly maintained—that the victims were “criminals”—many victims were civilians caught in the crossfire. The rhetoric of “collateral damage,” often used by Calderón, reduced official culpability while depriving the dead and disappeared of their humanity.
Calderón’s “kingpin” strategy—fighting cartels with high-profile arrests and by assassinating leaders—led to the fragmentation and expansion of criminal organizations. These organizations and smaller gangs started to sell drugs to a growing domestic drug market, not just to the United States. They also diversified into other criminal activities, including extortion, kidnapping, human trafficking, and resource extraction, to name a few. Journalists observed that the intensifying climate of violence and impunity allowed the torture and assassinations not only of suspected criminals but also of political opponents. These crimes were swept into a war that continues to provide cover for acts of violence against Mexico’s “disposable” populations—migrants in transit to the United States, indigenous communities, and the poor and marginalized. It is well documented that these crimes are committed by both state agents and criminal organizations, acting independently and in collusion.
The violence in Mexico is fueled by the estimated 200,000 firearms that enter the country illegally from the United States every year. Mexico has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the world, with only two gun stores in the entire country. But there are over 6,700 gun stores in the US Southwest alone, most within a few hours’ drive from the border. Between 70 and 90 percent of guns recovered at crime scenes in Mexico can be traced to the United States. In 2021, the Mexican government filed a federal lawsuit against ten US gun manufacturers, an unprecedented move that seeks to expand responsibility for gun violence. The lawsuit alleges US arms companies “design, market, distribute, and sell guns in ways they know routinely arm the drug cartels in Mexico.” Mexico wants financial compensation and an end to the harms caused by trafficked guns.
The trade in guns is linked to Americans’ demand for drugs. In the 1980s, Americans wanted cocaine; in the ’90s, marijuana. Today, it’s opioids. Mexico supplies the US with black tar heroin and black-market prescription opioids, including the synthetic opioid fentanyl, which is fifty times stronger than heroin. The consequences have been devastating. In 2021, more than 107,000 Americans died from drug overdoses, the vast majority caused by opioids. I witnessed the damage caused by opiod addiction in the United States: multiple relatives within one household addicted to heroin, young children schooled in overdose prevention, teenagers dying on their way to the ER, prisons overcrowded with heroin-addicted nonviolent offenders. Despite government antidrug strategies, the availability of drugs, and people’s addiction to them, continues unabated.
Mexico is, as the author Cristina Rivera Garza puts it, a wounded country, a country in pain. Citizens refer not to the “war on drugs” or even the “war on narcos” but to la violencia, the violence. By 2022, the violence in Mexico resulted in over 340,000 officially recorded deaths. At least 100,000 people have disappeared, and hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced, orphaned, and exiled. There are 40,000 unidentified bodies and more than 4,000 clandestine graves.
The contradictions between Health City’s rhetoric of improving lives and the growing reality of violence filled me with doubt. I questioned whether studying a utopian project during a profound social and political crisis had value. During the day, I studied Health City’s master plan, and, in the evening, I watched the news and learned of another massacre, mass kidnapping, or assassination. More and more, Health City came to seem like nothing more than a propagandist spectacle for a future that would never exist.
* * *
In 2011, my first summer of field research, I started dreaming about Pompeii, the ancient Roman city that stood in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. Almost two thousand years ago, the volcano erupted, smothering the city. In my dreams, Pompeii transformed into Cuicuilco and I saw its people unable to outrun the volcano’s fiery waves, forever confined beneath the lava’s ossified swirls and folds. I walked the rocky landscape, discovering people under the ash, their bodies locked in the very positions discovered during excavations of Pompeii: a mother and daughter killed side by side; an entire family huddled together; a young woman on her back with her left arm raised, reaching for help.
But the Pedregal wasn’t Pompeii. During my walks in the lava field, I took note of the bright green lichen that blanketed the dark stone and the delicate white flowers that grew in the rocky crevices. Sometimes I brought colored pencils to sketch the porous rock and the colorful life that sprang from it. The natural surroundings contrasted with the high-tech vision of Health City to such a degree that it was hard to conjure their coexistence.
Exclusive neighborhoods framed the lava field’s periphery. I strolled the streets, trying to be inconspicuous as I gawked at the modernist houses designed by Luis Barragán and his acolytes. Austere cubist structures configured to incorporate lava outcroppings and painted in palettes that matched the colors of stone. Today, some of Mexico’s richest families live in the Pedregal estates. Another half million people live on top of the rock, most of them in poor, densely packed, unplanned neighborhoods.
To my surprise, some of Health City’s architects and urban planners whom I talked to had never visited the Pedregal. Instead they worked from chic offices in London and Mexico City and relied on computer programs to reimagine and transform the volcanic landscape. “Aren’t you bothered by the lack of direct contact with the site?” I asked a planner who was working on the project. He answered without hesitation and insisted that maintaining distance from the site enabled design without nostalgia.
By the fall of 2011, the construction of Health City had come to a halt. There were mounting disputes about who owned the rocky land upon which it was to be built. A codex dated to 1532 named 1,799 co-owners. Other documents soon emerged that named dispossessed agrarian communities, real estate conglomerates, and private individuals as the rightful owners. Accusations of fraud ensued, as did demands for rent. The futuristic City of Health was mired in the past.
I still occupied my time with studying the Pedregal—everything from its vegetation to the architectural efforts to overcome the challenges the volcanic rock presented. My study provided a refuge from the violence that gripped Mexico, as well as the difficulties in my own life. My lingering depression, fraying marriage, and restless daughters were the surrounds of my life. The girls wanted to go home to Los Angeles, where they had a dog and a yard and could play unattended. Benjamin wanted to stay in Mexico City, where he had lived in his twenties and thirties among artists and musicians and with whom he still wanted to spend every evening. And I wanted to be alone on a surreal landscape of black rock, insulated from pain.
* * *
One afternoon, after another visit to the lava field, I called Manuel, a seasoned driver I sometimes hired for my excursions. Before Uber had taken over the city, Mexican friends urged me to hire a private driver, saying it was necessary to protect myself from being held up while stuck in the city’s relentless traffic. Manuel picked me up near the Health City site and started off toward my apartment in Colonia Roma, an artsy, tree-lined neighborhood filled with art deco mansions, hip restaurants, and boutiques. It was the rainy season and another thunderstorm was brewing in the low gray sky. Tired and grimy, I was relieved to settle into the back seat of Manuel’s roomy sedan. I gazed out the window, staring at the bumper-to-bumper traffic. Eventually I closed my eyes.
“What are you investigating?” Manuel asked. Manuel was a quiet man who avoided chitchat, so I was surprised by his question. I gathered my thoughts and told him about my research on Health City. He said he’d never heard of the place. “City of Knowledge? Biometropolis?” I asked, using the project’s other names. He shook his head no.
I told him the basics. Cutting-edge research and health care facilities, fancy apartments, and an ecological reserve. The master plan was complete, and the construction would begin soon, but legal problems were stalling things.
I waited for Manuel to offer comment, but he had nothing more to say. I didn’t want to leave our conversation there, partly because it all seemed so ridiculous, studying a place that wasn’t a place. So I told him I also studied families with drug addiction problems. He glanced at me in the rearview mirror, which I interpreted as an invitation to say more. I described my earlier research, which I admitted was much more than research because it took me back home. I didn’t tell him that home was a difficult place for me to be.
As I spoke about New Mexico’s heroin epidemic, I noticed that the traffic was thinning. We turned off Insurgentes, Mexico City’s longest avenue, and into an area unknown to me. In the distance, I could see buildings giving way to ramshackle houses. Paved linear streets transformed into a web of narrow roads. There were no street signs, and the buildings were unnumbered.
A few minutes passed before Manuel stopped driving. We sat in his car with its engine still running. Heart pounding, I waited for the car door to fly open and for narcos to drag me out and stuff me into the trunk of another car. No doubt my fear was inspired by ubiquitous images of narco violence circulated by the media-entertainment industry on both sides of the US-Mexico border. For decades, cultural productions of the drug war and narcoculture have invariably cast Mexico as lawless and chaotic, with little context about how the United States fuels the violence. But instead of disappearing me, Manuel opened my eyes to a world that would have otherwise been hidden from my view.
He pointed to a small building behind a metal gate and said the youngest of his three daughters was there. He called the place an anexo. At the time, I didn’t know what he was talking about. Una granja, a farm, he said, using its alternative name. I shook my head no, I still wasn’t familiar. Manuel explained that anexos, or farms as they’re sometimes called, are places for people with drug and alcohol problems. They are committed there by their families and stay until they are better. But sometimes they come out even worse.
It was his daughter Lili’s third time in an anexo. Manuel and his wife couldn’t deal with her on-and-off drug use anymore, but they didn’t want to lose her either. “We don’t want her to disappear,” he said.
That summer there had been constant reports of murders of young women around Lili’s age of seventeen. Most of these crimes took place in Ecatepec, a sprawling municipality northeast of Mexico City. Ecatepec has the highest rate of femicide in the country. Across Mexico, rates of femicide have increased 137 percent since 2018, four times the rate of increase in general homicide.
Ecatepec’s population largely consists of people who migrated closer to the nation’s capital in search of a better life and more economic opportunities. Many turned to work in maquiladoras, export-processing factories owned by foreign companies. First established in 1965 on Mexico’s northern border, maquiladoras employ low-paid Mexican workers, often women, to assemble US-produced parts into finished goods for sale on the US market. Their output and growth accelerated rapidly with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. Scholars have linked Mexico’s maquiladoras with femicide. Gender-based violence can be highly visible in Ecatepec, where women’s bodies are routinely found in streets and empty lots. Others disappear entirely.
Manuel admitted that the anexos he previously committed Lili to were too hard on her. After a few months inside she came home skinny and bruised. She’d mope around the house for a couple of weeks then start using again, staying out for days, sometimes longer. Manuel said he’d lock her away forever if that’s what it took to keep her safe. In the end, he’d committed Lili to this anexo for six months at a cost of about forty dollars a month—more expensive than the previous anexos, but manageable if he and his wife worked a few more hours a week. Manuel looked at me in the rearview mirror. “What else can we do?”
I looked at the metal gate and noticed a small hand-painted sign in the upper right corner. LA CLÍNICA DE LAS EMOCIONES. Coming into view on the street outside was a woman dressed in a gray work uniform. She yanked a scrawny teenager by the ear and the girl pulled against her grip, trying to free herself. The woman frantically pounded on the gate with her free hand. We’re here! We’re here! Open! Open! The gate opened just enough for the woman to slip inside, pulling the girl in behind her.
Manuel started to drive away. When we arrived at my apartment, he turned to me and said, “Health City will never happen. But anexos are everywhere.”
* * *
A few days after my drive with Manuel, I was back in the lava field. But Health City was far from my mind. I thought only about Lili—young, poor, addicted to drugs. Social scientists call girls like her “high-risk.” But Lili wasn’t high-risk; she was endangered. That’s why Manuel had walled her off.
Copyright © 2024 by Angela Garcia
