Subaltern, Indigenous, and Gender Perspectives in Mexican Drug-War History

The problem with the standard story

Most Mexican drug-war history is told through cartels and states: who killed whom, which institution captured whom, which US agency pressured which Mexican agency. That framing systematically excludes three constituencies that have been central to the actual history: subaltern peasant communities, indigenous communities, and women. A historiography worth having needs all three.

The peasant as agent

Nathaniel Morris’s 2020 article “Serrano Communities and Subaltern Negotiation Strategies” is the methodological template. The serrano peasants of Mexico’s opium-producing highlands are neither the lackeys of cartels nor the passive victims of the state: they are historical actors who have used drug production, for decades, as a tool in their perennial struggle to defend their communities from all outside threats — state enforcement, capitalist development, and the traffickers themselves. Morris’s key move is to add a third term to the standard trafficker-versus-state binary. Once you accept it, the whole history reorganizes around negotiations at the community scale.

The indigenous term

The Zapatista uprising of January 1, 1994 and the Cherán uprising of April 15, 2011 are the two pole-stars of contemporary indigenous politics in Mexico. Both explicitly read the combination of neoliberal land policy and criminal-extractivist pressure as threats to community survival. Zapatista women’s organizing — beginning in the grassroots peasant and Catholic networks of 1970s Chiapas and culminating in the Women’s Revolutionary Law the EZLN proclaimed on the day of the uprising — produced a distinctive indigenous feminism that remains influential. (The feminist-historical literature also notes honestly that even the Zapatistas’ internal gender practice has lagged their rhetoric, and the gap itself is an object of scholarly attention.)

Cherán is the indigenous mirror of the 2013 Michoacán autodefensas: a Purépecha community expelled not only loggers affiliated with La Familia but the police, the political parties, and the municipal government itself, and reconstituted governance under usos y costumbres with judicial recognition.

The gender term

Elaine Carey’s Women Drug Traffickers is the foundational work on gender and the drug trade. Her archival recovery of figures like Lola la Chata (Mexico City) and La Nacha (Juárez) dismantles the assumption that women in the mid-century drug economy were confined to mules, addicts, or victims — they were bosses, launderers, and network architects. US Customs agents in 1920s Mexicali–Calexico estimated women were responsible for 60% of cross-border drug flow.

The contemporary intersection is narco-femicide. Femicide in Ciudad Juárez predates the Calderón drug war by more than a decade — activists began documenting the pattern in 1993 — and cannot be reduced to cartel conflict. Melissa Wright’s necropolitics framework treats femicide, maquiladora capitalism, and narco-violence as mutually constitutive rather than parallel: the same biopolitical logic that tolerates women’s disposability also structures the state’s war on cartels. By 2020, roughly 60% of Mexican femicides were attributed to organized crime; 110,000+ people are officially missing; women’s disappearances have tripled in six years and are concentrated in a small number of municipalities, all already under Gender Violence Alerts.

Where the gender/land question is underdeveloped

Torres-Mazuera’s finding that roughly 25% of ejido parcel rights are now held by women is a striking data point waiting for its historian. It sits at the intersection of land reform, inheritance, gendered migration patterns, and the shifting political economy of rural Mexico, and it does not map cleanly onto any of the existing frameworks. It is probably the most important under-studied opening in the current historiography.