“I've never told anyone that before …”

Abstract

I met Juan in the summer of 2019 at the Clínica de Comunidad Sinaí, a men's drug and alcohol rehabilitation center in Sinaloa, Mexico. His ongoing struggle with methamphetamine addiction formed the prelude to his time at Sinaí, and he had, his mother informed me, gotten carried away with the malos recursos offered by the cartels. Juan's story was certainly one about the kinds of spectacular violence often linked to the cartels. But it had far less to do with the groups than nearly any other story of armed violence that was shared with me during the three months that I spent in the clinic. Nevertheless, the threads that wove their way into the fabric of his life manifested and permuted the epistemes of violence that privilege violence-as-currency in the masculinized neoliberal order in which he lived (Valencia, 2010).My first interview with Juan was just over three hours long and took place about halfway through my time living in the center with the 33 "patients," rotating attending medical staff, counselors, security officers, and a priest. Juan and I sat in the air-conditioned meeting room that served as my workstation while I was there and passed the first 30 minutes in relaxed conversation. He spoke with ease about his childhood experiences-even when the physical violence of his parents marked his remembering of those experiences as they had so long ago marked his body. When he began to talk about his wife of seven years, however, the nature of the interaction decisively changed. He looked at me and started to cough and choke so much that I walked over to the fountain to get him a glass of water. "It was so difficult," he mustered through his repeated throat clearing. He worked to make enough money to support the household, but she wanted to work as well. She had said it was to bring more money in, but . . . I began to suspect other things.He continued to cough, and the conversation paused. I offered to end the conversation, but he waved me off.It's the air conditioning.. . . which would have made sense but for the fact that he had spent the last 30 minutes with no issues at all and only the narratives of his wife's infidelity were those punctuated with coughs and strained airflow.With few exceptions, the next 45 minutes of the interview appeared to be nothing short of excruciating for Juan as he recounted his wife's multiple affairs and his shame as knowledge of them spread throughout his town. The sheer force of physical will that he exerted to get the words out of his mouth was evident in the massive inhalations and exhalations that preceded each increment of his narrative journey. He often paused. For a very. Long. Time. So strange how silence can sound like weight, having a density that attracts in the way that matter does: everything, something, anything but more silence. I acutely experienced my own struggle to not fill those eternal silences with sound. Both in the original interview, and listening again to the recording, it was so clear exactly which kind of pause preceded confessional content.The nak...