Howard Campbell, Downtown Juárez: Underworlds of Violence and Abuse.  Austin, University of Texas Press, 2021.  ISBN 1477323899.  $35 paper. 

Howard Campbell knows Ciudad Juárez.  For over thirty years he has talked to residents while exploring streets, neighborhoods, bars and businesses.  As meticulously presented in Downtown Juárez, Campbell’s ethnographic labor has yielded insightful perspectives different than other, more generalized and/or sensationalized accounts. 

With a population of approximately 1.5 million, more wealthy sections of Juárez can be found in the part of town where urban development appears much like comparable southwestern U.S. cities.  To the west lay a vast landscape of working class, crowded colonias populares with improvised access to infrastructure, basic amenities and green space.  East and southeastern Juárez is similar with only basic provision for city services while at the same time home to several corporate maquiladoras.  It is within this notorious landscape that savage killers have enacted the abuse and murder of thousands of women over the past three decades.  

Amidst many differing scholarly approaches and interpretations of the border metropolis, Campbell specifically seeks to identify the “conditions that lead to violence in central Juárez” (1).   His methodology is largely qualitative, pursuing what he terms a “wandering approach to fieldwork” (17).  From this, Downtown Juárez features seventeen chapters which detail the history and present environment of the central city–especially its main streets, key bars and particular hotels in which prostitution and drug dealing takes place.  From this, the author’s intrepid work features detailed ethnographic discussion of human smugglers, dope peddlers and sex workers.  Through it all, Campbell maintains that “multiple interconnected forces of synergistic violence…afflict [these largely] poor people in central Juárez to the point at which they become “normalized” and are reproduced in the abuse of others” (18).

Campbell stakes his claim “in some of Juárez’s darkest corners” and, like many, finds neoliberalism, criminality, corruption, misogyny, U.S. failed immigration policy, the War on Drugs and maquiladora economic development responsible, in part, for “everyday violence” in Juárez.”  Yet he goes further in asserting that “common people” are also to blame for “the madness…not just as mere victims but as perpetrators (22)” Echoing Primo Levi, Campbell writes that “the people guilty of committing vile and sustaining a criminal order are often ‘just poor devils like ourselves’” (22).  Elsewhere, Levi is again referenced—this time regarding his concept of the “Gray Zone” where a “dialectical relationship” between those who are both victims and victimizers is often known to exist (116). 

Tracing the complex origins of violence and criminality, Campbell proclaims, “I cast the net of responsibility more widely than most scholars and observers of Juárez, while examining the specific social forces, cultural milieus, and circumstances that connect perpetrators and victims” (29).  Like many, he also finds that borderland “moral breakdown and normalized violence i