Latin American and Caribbean Working Group

The Latin America and the Caribbean Working Group (LACWG) is pleased to invite you to its first 2024-2025 session this coming Thursday, February 20 in Building 50 (Department of Anthropology), Room 51A (Colloquium Room) at 6:15 pm. For this academic year, the LACWG will be a space for graduate students across the humanities and social science disciplines to share work-in-progress. Please feel free to reach out either to Victor (at marquezp [at] stanford.edu (marquezp[at]stanford[dot]edu)) or Zaith (at zlopez [at] stanford.edu (zlopez[at]stanford[dot]edu)) to propose a project to share with the LACWG.  

In the meantime, please email either Victor or Zaith to receive the reading for our next discussion with Zaith Lopez, a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology. He will workshop his piece, tentatively titled “No Rajarse”: The Therapeutic and Masculinity Assembling in Institutional Drug Recovery in Tijuana, Mexico.  

Abstract:  

Across Mexico, residential drug recovery centers, also known as “anexos,” have proliferated. In the border city of Tijuana, these residential, private recovery centers are run by Mexican citizens, Mexicans deportees, and Mexican American citizens. Most are influenced by the 12-step model of Narcotics Anonymous (NA). In this work-in-progress, the linguistic figure no rajarse (not cracking) is traced, as it circulates outside and inside recovery centers. Attending to its cultural production in music and everyday usage, the chapter shows how “no rajarse” continues to be a mode of performing masculinity in Mexico. Drawing from the institutions’ popular and contested therapeutic practice of “raja-tablas", a gendered interpretation to their modes of institutional healing is offered, suggesting masculinity’s role in shaping therapeutic practices and generally drug recovery. No rajarse shapes their conceptions of the male body and perceptions of selves, thus influencing why they want to “crack” male bodies, why they humiliate and reproduce violence in a context of mutual bonding.