The Rainy Season: Toward a Cinematic Ethnography of Crisis and Endurance in Mexico City

Based on ethnographic research and critical reflection on Carlos Reygadas’s film Post Tenebras Lux, this article explores the texture and temporality of crisis and endurance in Mexico. Specifically, it traces the transformation of one of Mexico City’s ubiquitous anexos (annexes), which names coercive drug treatment centers run by and for the informal working poor. In putting the ethnography of an anexo in dialogue with Reygadas’s film, this article develops a picture of precarious sociality in contemporary Mexico, one shaped by neoliberal reform and drug-related violence. Finally, it contemplates how the film and the anexo’s resonant “difficulty” upset sense and meaning, thereby suggesting new ways of attending to life within broader durations of politics and history.