ABSTRACT
To better understand this moment, the drug war, how drugs and violence came to Kristina, a young woman growing up in Calexico, and to my family, it is helpful to consider that the surge of violence she faces, we face, exists far before and after "the event." In particular, the dual strategy of drug criminalization and migration criminalization, and their corresponding policing regimes, created a new way to regulate indigeneity and Mexicanidad and contesting subjects in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In 1914, the Harrison Narcotic Act was an early step in the criminalization of drugs (heroin, opium, and cocaine). But after World War II the intensification of the criminalization of drug use and trade grew into becoming a top strategy of the state, alongside the criminalization of migration. Feminicide is another effect; the lives claimed in both Juarez, and even higher per capita murders in Nayarit, reflect an escalation of feminicide as the drug trade intensifies in that region.
