The University of Arizona Press
March 20, 2025
Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez’s latest work, The Rise of Necro/Narco Citizenship investigates the intricate and often harrowing dynamics that define the borderlands between the United States, Mexico, and beyond. This groundbreaking book provides a comprehensive cultural, economic, social, and political-ecological analysis, illustrating how various forms of violence and militarization have reshaped the daily lives and identities of the region’s inhabitants.
Today, Dr. Vélez-Ibáñez answers five questions.
This work has been described as “distressing but essential.” What compelled you to undertake this project at this time?
I have looked at many global and regional indications of this latest version of global capital at this late stage, and it is not serving the livelihoods of millions of communities. I characterize this as “Wars of Omission,” forcing some 80 million globally to try to relocate to more positive conditions only to meet with equivalent situations. Or worse, such Wars of Omission have created conditions in which psychotropic drugs are adopted as a means of dulling the stresses imposed by these processes, generating “Wars of Commission” in response. Both wars generate their attending necro/narco citizenships. The southwest American and northwest Mexican border region, which I refer to as the Southwest North America Region, is the central focus of this narrative. This region is larger than western Europe and Great Britain and is undergoing these process with greater and greater dependence on forced and voluntary migrations of families on both sides of the border bifurcation as well as those seeking to escape through the production, distribution, and consumption of drugs. I am most concerned about the impact on youth and following generations as the primary targeted population.
You have written many books and articles. What are three of the key threads that tie your work together across your long career?
First, finding answers to the question of how people survive economic and social frailties when they should not be able. Second, finding answers to the question of how people manage to excel when everything is stacked up against them. Third, how do following generations utilize and benefit from (or not) those survival and excelling strategies. And now, fourth, understanding how people manage to survive both Wars of Omission and Commission, both much beyond their influence or control.
The Rise of Necro/Narco Citizenship draws on the theorization of Necrocitizenship and takes it further, specifically deploying it for the U.S-Mexico Transborder Region. How do you explain this theory (briefly) to the lay reader?
The manner in which I use necrocitizenship and its companion narcocitizenship is to describe the unquestioning willingness to succumb for an empire, nation, region, or locality in its name. This willingness is commonly formed by highly ritualized practices as it is learned, transmitted, and operationalized. It eventually leads to service, injury, or the death of a participant. Its modern companion of narcocitizenship is its moving from necrocitizenship by offering fulfillment of omitted economic and social functions with alternative rewards, symbols, and rituals. These lead to equivalent service, injury, or certain death because of seeking to ensure the control, production, distribution, and consumption of drugs and range in acquisition from full-fledged membership to muted compliance.
An interview with you appeared in the PBS series American Historia in the second episode “Threads in the American Tapestry.” What was that like?
It afforded me a chance to reemphasize the short duration of the political barrier imposed by war between present populations since it is only two grandmothers old, which is usually referred to by some sort of innocent referent like annexation, integration, appropriation, or sequestration, instead of its simple reality of conquest. The same is true for the Spanish version of conquest three hundred years earlier. Both were unwanted impositions with long-lasting consequences for their original constituents and colonially created populations.
What is one thing you hope scholars in the future will take away from your work and then build on?
Pay attention on the ground to what populations are doing for survival and achievement and their costs and benefits to themselves and following generations. For the most part, there are not only just good guys or bad guys, though it may seem to be so simple. Staying focused on the ground provides the best differentiation and similarities.
Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez received a PhD in anthropology from the University of California, San Diego (1975). His intellectual interests are broadly comparative and applied, and his publications include thirteen books in English and Spanish, as well many articles and chapters. Three of his English-language books have been translated into Spanish. He held tenured professorships in anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Arizona, where, in 1982, he founded the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology. He is Regents’ Professor of the School of Transborder Studies and the School of School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the Motorola Presidential Professor of Neighborhood Revitalization at Arizona State University. He was elected as Corresponding Member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
