The confessional community

Abstract

In the past two decades, drug‐treatment centers called anexos (annexes) have proliferated throughout Mexico. Run and attended by the working poor, anexos’ therapeutic practices blend criminal violence and religious ritual, and they are widely condemned as abusive and unethical. Based on several years of ethnographic research in Mexico City, this article situates anexos within a larger historical frame and examines how they conjure and rework contemporary forms of affliction through a novel form of confessional practice. It shows how confession simultaneously reproduces pervasive images of violence while also disclosing projects of communitarian survival that are ethically affirmative. In doing so, this article demonstrates that anexos’ confessional practices constitute an aesthetics and politics of recovery that calls for a rethinking of criminal, religious, and therapeutic domains.