Nathaniel Morris

Historian and anthropologist whose work centers the subaltern strand of Mexican drug history: the thousands of independent serrano peasants who, without formal cartel affiliations, have for decades produced the raw materials of the opium and marijuana trades. His 2020 article “Serrano Communities and Subaltern Negotiation Strategies” argues that peasant growers have used drug production not as passive labor for traffickers but as a tool in their perennial struggle to protect their communities from the state, from capitalist development, and from the traffickers themselves.

Morris co-authored the 2019 “Last Harvest?” reporting on the collapse of Mexican opium prices under fentanyl substitution, based on interviews with growers in Guerrero and Nayarit. Alongside Benjamin Smith and Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, Morris is reshaping narco-history by adding the peasant community as an irreducible third term alongside trafficker and state.