Jose Carlos G. Aguiar Anthropologist, he has a doctorate in social sciences from the University of Amsterdam (2007). He works as a tenured professor at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, and is a National Researcher (level 1) in the National System of Researchers, National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT). His fields of expertise include the anthropology of crime, legitimacy, popular culture, street economies, intellectual property, global networks, and borders. Aguiar has been a member of the executive board of the Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology Association, section of the American Anthropology Association, and visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin (2012, 2013) and Colegio de México (2015). Aguiar also writes the column “A line followed” for Aristegui Noticias.

Realidades socioculturales

Who are the narcos asking? Emancipation and justice in drug culture in Mexico

  • Jose Carlos G. Aguiar

DInce the 1990s, drug culture in Mexico has been studied as the symbolic repertoire of the “criminal town” that portrays the daily life of drug traffickers. Their expressions are understood as a reliable record of the traffickers' lives, with a transgressive aesthetic that presents excess and ostentation as forms of domination. In this article, forms of spiritual protection among drug traffickers are studied in order to debate the narcoculture. The ethnographic material was collected between 2014 and 2017 in the states of Hidalgo and Michoacán, through participant observations and in-depth interviews. The protection of popular saints such as Santa Muerte, Angelito Negro and San Nazario, allows us to understand how narcoculture is a resource for social emancipation, legitimizing the definitions of justice and sovereignty of organized crime.