The narcoeconomy and small-town, rural Mexico

Little ethnographic research has been conducted on how the illegal drug trade has affected and transformed rural communities in Mexico and the rest of Mesoamerica. It is a topic that is difficult and potentially dangerous to explore, at least directly; thus it is not surprising that relatively few researchers have openly studied it. For those of us working on rural development problems, it means that our analyses are silent on a critical dimension of the local economy. This paper describes the effects of drug trafficking on a small, rural town in Mexico's central highlands in which a highly interpenetrated legal-illegal economy has emerged. A series of ethnographic vignettes provide the entry point for exploring how the narcoeconomy manifested itself both materially and in the imaginations of local people. An ordinary town, in fact, had extraordinary inequalities: opulent houses; the subversion of traditional forms of leisure; a new urban-oriented consumer culture; and new farmer entrepreneurs. All were underwritten by narco-activities. The paper closes by considering the broader implications of the narcoeconomy by expanding on themes of globalization and poverty, migration, gender, and violence that run through the descriptive vignettes.