Serrano Communities and Subaltern Negotiation Strategies: The Local Politics of Opium Production in Mexico, 1940 to the Present

Morris’s most influential article, arguing that the serrano peasant communities of Mexico’s opium-producing highlands are neither lackeys of the cartels nor victims of the state but historical agents in their own right, who have used drug production as a tool in their perennial struggle to defend their communities from outside threats — the state, capitalist development, and the traffickers themselves. The article adds a third term to the standard trafficker-versus-state binary and is the methodological template for a growing body of subaltern narco-history.