Affective Atmospheres of Terror on the Mexico–U.S. Border: Rumors of Violence in Reynosa’s Prostitution Zone

Abstract

This article examines the effects of rumors within the Mexican and U.S. governments’ militarized war on drugs. Focusing on a period during which Mexican drug organizations were strengthened and violence increased, the article follows the lives of Mexican sex workers and their clients, as well as American missionaries living in a prostitution zone in Reynosa, Tamaulipas. Borders between narco-controlled and state-controlled territory were shifted in and through the bodies of Reynosa’s residents as a contagion of performative rumors came to occupy la zona. As residents told or listened to stories about torture and murder at the hands of narcos, their perceived vulnerability increased and fear came to predominate. In this article I theorize how rumors of violence shaped affective atmospheres of terror and altered spatial practices in a drug-war zone. Feelings of bodily risk first affected vulnerable populations and later spread to people who had previously felt secure in border zones. These narco-stories not only circulated terror but also allowed people to achieve intimacy and maintain social bonds through the shared experience of terror.

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

“…Cooper () foregrounded the language of “unruly affects” in her examination of homeless individuals in San Francisco who elude US criminal court control, despite legal efforts to contain and render them fixed. As O'Neill and Dua (, 8) argue, “people want out, and they want it now.” Sometimes the unruly or bumptious (Haraway ) is a matter of improvisation and bricolage in relation to divine agency (Bjork‐James ; Elisha ; Friedner ; O'Neill ; Scherz ) or in the face of global capitalism or neoliberalism (Degani ; Gershon ; Hoag ; Ofstehage ; Taylor ; Zhu ), while other times the unruly is a matter of life and death, terror and madness (Burraway ; Luna ). Some of this work used the language of the unruly to point to the contagious spilling over of affect in an attempt to take seriously a range of ways of being in the world.…”

“…Burraway (, 478), like Cooper, worked among homeless drug addicts in London, analyzing their efforts to escape via addiction and blackouts. He suggests that the blackout is a form of temporal play that allows vulnerable lumpen to use their bodies, the only tool at their disposal, as a “transformative and ritualizable medium unto itself,” using bodily technique as “simultaneously escape routes and prisons.” Luna (, 59) considered the unruliness of affect by showing how in “atmospheres of terror” such as in the overlapping prostitution zone of narco‐ and state‐controlled territory on the US–Mexico border, rumors of violence have “contagious performativity.” These rumors condition embodied responses that intensify feelings of fear, intimacy, and vulnerability. Attending to affect across this body of work draws our attention to the subjective, phenomenological dimension through which people are contained or not, specifically in relation to violence and precarity.…”

“…In a necessary dialectic, much work considered seepage or failures of containment through analytics of freedom (Furani ), the unruly (Cooper ; J. Fisher ; Scherz , 108; Stoetzer , 302), zaniness (Degani ), play (Rea ), transgression (Muir and Gupta ), porousness (Bjork‐James ), madness (Nuhrat ), rupture or breaking open (Kunreuther ; Kyriakides ; Ofstehage ; Saleh ), queering (Heywood ; Shirinian ), invasion (Sherouse ), excess (Gershon ), or contagion (Kivland ; Luna ; Rubin ; Rubinstein et al. ).…”

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Catching the White Fish: gossip and cocaine on Colombia's Northern Pacific coast

“…Similarly in Krohn‐Hansen's anthropology of violence, he argues that the ‘endless rumours, elusive gossip and silent pauses’ help sustain what he calls a ‘cosmos of doubt’ in which actors construct their realities in indeterminate forms (1994: 375). Furthermore, Luna (2018), building on Taussig (1984) and working in the context of narco‐violence in Mexico, shows that rumour's ‘epistemic murk’ adds power to fear, with effects upon people (i.e. subjugation, terror) that cross‐cut through racial, class, and citizenship privileges.…”