Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes the linguistic figure “rajarse” (cracking) as it circulates in Mexican society to trace its articulation in Mexican cultural productions and therapeutics. I show how “rajarse” assembles with healing, masculinity, and bodily practice in drug recovery centers in Tijuana, Mexico.

Paper long abstract

Drug addicts in Mexico have established mutual-aid, residential drug recovery centers otherwise known as “anexos.” Influenced by 12-step philosophy, these institutions are highly popular and a response to the absence of large-scale public health initiatives. In this paper, I examine therapeutic processes (Csordas 1997) as gendered, specifically how in three male-only drug recovery centers in Tijuana, Mexico, masculinity mediates their therapeutic practices. Specifically, I ethnographically explore what I am calling the therapeutic ritual of “raja-tablas” to link the semantic and performative resonances with an archive of “rajarse” and everyday speech. I analyze how an archive of cultural productions from the Mexican Golden Age Cinema to intellectual texts like Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) produce a sociohistorical body (Butler 1988) associated with “rajarse”. This archive grounds how a body is presupposed in Mexican contexts that articulates (Hall 1996) or assembles (Zigon 2015) with therapeutics, wherein rajarse, as it circulates outside and inside healing spaces, frames or orients addicts towards others in confrontative, sometimes, violent ways to heal. I show how masculinity as a sociohistorical force and an archive is shaping the self, the body, and healing practices or “therapeutic violence” (Garcia 2024).