Narco Wives vs. . . . Regular Wives?

Gulf News recently published a story on Mexican narco wives (check out the picture). ¨Narco-¨ is a prefix that continues to gain currency in international news about Mexico, but the recent outburst of reporting around narco wives is particularly interesting in terms of how women are portrayed in relation to el narcotráfico. Certainly, there has been reporting around Mexican women and drug trafficking, but the Gulf News story offers a particularly egregious (not to mention garish) depiction of Mexican women. After describing the ascension of Sinaloan beauty pageant winners into the highest levels of narco life, the article ends curiously saying that ¨these women become untouchable.¨ What, exactly, is it about these women that makes them untouchable? Who determines what can and cannot be touched? The article is about, well, women, right? It says so in the title. However, no women´s voices are recounted in the story, and their supposed choice to enter narcodom is the only piece of information that hints at an agentic existence. In fact, the article reduces the wives to silenced beauties or narco arm charms, at best.  Still, the last word lingers uneasily: untouchable. If they cannot be touched, what does it mean to be touched?

Amidst these women´s secluded yet treacherous lives, Mexico, which was recently named a potential failed state, ¨is fighting for its survival against narco-terrorism”. As organized crime dominants headlines about Mexico, los narcotraficantes are not the only ones making money in Mexico; the empires of Carlos Slim, who controls most of Mexico´s telecommunications and is the second richest man in the world, and Walmart, which owns multiple supermarkets and cheap restaurants in Mexico, continue to boom. While international news would have us think that Mexico is full of narcos running wild, women, especially those in urban and suburban areas, perform the quotidian chores required to maintain their households and take care of their families. Filing through grocery stores with their children, middle, lower, and working class women finger through cilantro, t-shirts, packages of Wonder tortillas, bottles of Ajax. When the women return home, either they or domestic workers, who are overwhelmingly underpaid women, sort through and wash carefully selected produce and clean the house. Indeed, the Mexican household hardly goes a day without encountering in some way the effects of the decisions of Slim, Walmart, narcotraficantes, and México-U.S. policies.

From narco nails to the price of tortillas, Mexican women continue to navigate shifting geographies of consumerism, security, and survival that shape the contours of the global household.

(Photo Credit: Women’s UN Report Network)