RAI Research Webinar 

A VIRTUAL SEMINAR SERIES BY THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE

Thursday 29 October 2020 at 3pm (BST)  

Necro/Narco State Dynamics:
The Transformation and Mirroring of the U.S and Mexican Nations of the Southwest North American Region.

Prof Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez (Arizona State University)

This is an online event and you can register here!  

Abstract

Since the conquest of Mexico by the United States in the 19th century to the present, the Southwest North American Region has been characterized by a complex and often unequal system of integrated transborder economic modalities of labor, agriculture, mining, construction, and trade and migration from Mexico to the United States. This often-tenuous relationship is exacerbated by economic downturns and this unequalness is characteristically expressed especially by authorized and unauthorized migration of Mexican labor to the United States. In response to the latter, periodic expulsions, draconian labor laws, racist rationales and tropes often are visited on Mexican origin communities.

But especially since 9/11, "security" concerns have actualized large scale "low intensity conflict" measures ostensibly focused on "homeland security" and drug trafficking but has created a parallel political and operational structure of a "necrostate" in reality focused on Mexican transborder labor. Mirroring, these developments are the rise of drug cartels especially focused on the U.S. market that have penetrated, given shape to, and strongly influence the quotidian lives of Mexicans from cartel violence, their command and control, and their impunity of action and cartel influence of many parts of the political and security structure of the Mexican state. It is becoming in many ways a resemblance to a "narcostate" in which all branches of government are to different degrees heavily penetrated by drug money and influence creating a parallel and too often indistinguishable operational process. Thus, in the present the region has been turning into mirrors of a necro/narco structure of relations and actions.
 

Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez is a Regents Professor and the Motorola Presidential Professor of Neighborhood Revitalization in the School of Transborder Studies and a Regents Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. His numerous honors include the 2004 Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology, the 2003 Bronislaw Malinowski Medal and most recently, the 2020 Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service to Anthropology.