On conducting ethnography in twenty-first century Mexico

The municipality of Badiraguato, in the state of Sinaloa (northern Mexico), is known for being home to some of the leading figures of the infamous Sinaloa Cartel, known locally as pesados.It has also become part of the social imaginary as a place where the state does not reach, governed by criminals that have become familiar to wide audiences through the media, TV shows and even academic texts.Adle Blazquez's Dawn Rose on a Dead Body: Armed Violence and Poppy Farming in Mexico avoids retelling these narratives and instead brings us quite a different and complex picture.Written in a prose that evokes narrative fiction, Blazquez's ethnographic account uses thick description of her travels, the local geography, her informants, and the regional history.Through the text we learn of the everyday lives of Badiraguato residents, and what it is like to live on the less fortunate side of uneven regional development.The municipality is isolated from the state capital and the coastal region by its steep and rugged terrain.The coastal region benefited from infrastructure projects and investment in agribusiness for exports to the US in the twentieth century.It was this isolation which allowed the poppy production economy to flourish, along with the agrarian counter-reform of 1991 discussed in chapter four.Blazquez is a keen ethnographer who was able to build relationships of trust with a handful of subjects, ranging from her neighbors and poppy growers from various hamlets, to shop keepers, civil servants, and women of her age, her senior and her junior.She managed to move around to reach the many hamlets and the main town.Blazquez provides illuminating descriptions of the everyday information-gathering techniques her informants use (see chapters two, five and six), from the various uses of radios to how to participate in short conversations and give brief statements without being "too nosy", as one of her informants advised her.These are the same