Over the last decade, there has been a sharp increase in drug addiction in Mexico, especially among the urban poor. During the same period, unregulated residential treatment centers for addiction, known as anexos, have proliferated throughout the country. These centers are utilized and run by marginalized populations and are widely known to engage in physical violence. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Mexico City, this article describes why anexos emerged, how they work, and what their prevalence and practices reveal about the nature of recovery in a context where poverty, drugs, and violence are existential realities. Drawing attention to the dynamic relationship between violence and recovery, pain, and healing, it complicates categories of violence and care that are presumed to have exclusive meaning, illuminating the divergent meanings of, and opportunities for, recovery, and how these are socially configured and sustained.

In biomedical and public health discourses, “chronicity” has emerged as the prevailing model to understanding drug addiction and addictive experience. This approach is predicated on constructing and responding to addictive experience in ways that underscore its presumed lifelong nature. In this essay, I examine the phenomenon of heroin addiction and heroin overdose in northern New Mexico's Española Valley, which suffers the highest rate of heroin‐induced death in the United States, and explore how the logic of chronicity is dangerously reworked through the Hispano ethos of endless suffering. Focusing on the narrative of Alma, a Hispana heroin addict who died of an overdose after many previous overdoses, I evoke a sense of the physical, historical, and institutional refrains in which she felt herself caught. By tracing Alma's death back to these refrains, I describe the complex of entanglements in which her addiction took form and show how the discourse of chronicity provided a structure for her suffering and, ultimately, her death.

Moral engagement in the setting of drug addiction is often at odds with prevailing moral discourse and is treated in punitive terms. In this article, I explore how one moral gesture-a promise between a heroin-using mother and daughter-embodies the difficulty and ambiguity of moral experience in the context of addiction and offers insight into how it is profoundly shaped by social processes. By offering a close description of the promise over time, I show how morality is lived through sentiments and practices of care and commitment, which are vulnerable to isolation, punishment, and wounding. The story of the promise thus offers a way to reflect upon morality as the blurring of these different intensities. [morality, ethics, care, incarceration, addiction] In my work on addiction and family life, I have encountered experiences that blur the boundaries of vice and virtue, alienation and connection, injury and care (Garcia 2010(Garcia , 2008. In describing these tensions, I have tried to dismantle the symbolic order that excludes ethical engagement in discourses of the illicit and have emphasized the "ordinary virtues" of sentiments and practices that are typically at odds with normative claims of morality (Todorov 1996; see also Lambek 2010). 1 Conceiving the moral and the illicit not as opposites but as processes coexisting in the life of drug users, I have emphasized the concrete moral concerns and commitments of subjects living in dense, local worlds. This requires a focus not only on "the sheer difficulty of actual human deliberation," but also on the historical context in which it unfolds (Nussbaum 1986:13). This context is absolutely critical to understanding what constitutes life lived virtuously and well and how processes at once political and intersubjective shape moral experience (Desjarlais 1997;Kleinman 1998; Walker 1998).Approaching the moral as a mode of inhabiting the world, I have been interested in the ethical dimensions of addictive experience and how these gain or lose shape in relation to intimate and institutional pressures. What is at stake for me is ethnographically attending to the ways that addicted kin absorb, share, lessen and ignore each others' pain and how these responses fluctuate in relation to life conditions. My hope is that such work has the potential to recuperate the marginalized subject (the drug addicted) within and beyond Western moral discourse, while also "contributing to collective memory that sustains political community" through the process of remembering, documenting, and reimagining moral experience (Shari Stone-Mediatore cited in Code 2002:165; see also Cixous 1981).

This article is an ethnographic account of an archive of prison letters written by three generations of female kin. Based on long‐term ethnographic research in rural New Mexico, it describes the context in which the letters were written, as well as the desires, preoccupations, and practices that transformed them into an archive. I have placed a particular focus on how dislocation and connection manifest in the letters and shape the kinds of narratives the archive tells. Themes of isolation, loss, and memory are explored within the wider context of colonial history and the acceleration of the carceral state. This article seeks to integrate these registers analytically, while elucidating the role of archiving for a subject's present life.

Informal, coercive residential centers for the treatment of addiction are widespread and growing throughout Latin America. In Mexico these centers are called “anexos” and they are run and utilized by low-income individuals and families with problems related to drugs and alcohol. This article draws on findings from a 3-year anthropological study of anexos in Mexico City. Participant observation and in-depth interviews were used to describe and analyze anexos, their therapeutic practices, and residents’ own accounts of addiction and recovery. Our findings indicate that poverty, addiction, and drug-related violence have fueled the proliferation of anexos. They also suggest that anexos offer valuable health, social, and practical support, but risk exacerbating the suffering of residents through coercive rehabilitation techniques. Emphasizing this tension, this article considers the complex relationship between coercion and care, and poses fundamental questions about what drug recovery consists of in settings of poverty and violence.