When I Wear My Alligator Boots: Narco-Culture in the U.S. Mexico Borderlands (original) (raw)
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This essay describes the cultural effects of drug trafficking on a town in rural Mexico. A variety of ethnographic scenes reveal the rapidly changing social imagination as new forms of consumption create new opportunities for identity formation. However, because these new consumer forms are expensive, and therefore inaccessible to the majority of community members, a type of cultural exclusion is at work. In this ordinary town, there are extraordinary forms of consumption: large, lavish houses; high-stakes gambling at local cockfights; a new urban-oriented consumer culture; and new farmer entrepreneurs. All were underwritten by narco-activities. These new forms of consumption challenge and subvert older, stable forms of hierarchy and status. Individuals with access to these forms of consumption have new types of economic, cultural and social capital privilege, and such access legitimizes their status and power. The article closes by considering the implications of the rising levels of violence in Mexico's interior and the potential that we are seeing the initial stages of a civil war.
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This article proposes a type of cultural model of the self called a "cultural persona" that acts as a nexus between representation and practice, using evidence from ethnographic work in the U.S.-Mexico border region on popular interpretations of the narcotrafficker, particularly as represented via a popular song genre called the "narcocorrido," and listener interpretations. Narcocorridos, in the form of a traditional border song called the "corrido" that typically portrayed actions of populist heroes (e.g., Pancho Villa), are narratives about the character and exploits of narcotraffickers. The paper looks at both popular and media industry interpretations of the narcotrafficker persona, the articulation of mass media imperatives on the persona, examples of individuals drawing on that persona in their own self-presentation, and connections between corridos and the self.
The War on Drugs, launched by the United States in the 1970s and subsequently waged with the collaboration of governments throughout Latin America, has helped to consolidate the transnational drug trade, which according to official sources now earns more than US$400 billion in annual profits worldwide. By the 1980s, when the television series Miami Vice first brought a glossy and glamorized version of the drug war to the global public, Latin American drug traffickers had developed complex distribution routes and smuggling methods to satisfy the great demand for cocaine, marijuana, and heroin in the United States and Europe. Since the capitalist crisis of the 1980s and the implementation of neoliberal policies in the past two decades, drug trafficking has become the most important illegal global industry and a source of political corruption, judicial impunity, and violence throughout Latin America. Without denying the contested nature of the world of the narco and its impact, here we theorize narcoscapes as both real and fictional, true and "imagined." We attempt to go beyond the drug war to understand how real communities and individuals are rethinking the effect of drugs and the violence generated by the "war" in the context of globalization.
Criminals and Enemies? The Drug Trafficker in Mexico's Political Imaginary
Mexican Law Review, 2016
This article compares the official and the widely held discourses about drug traffickers in Mexico's current War against Drugs. The federal government has obliquely distorted the distinction between a criminal and an enemy, dehumanizing drug traffickers and, thus, opening up a spectrum of tolerance for the repressive actions carried out by the authorities against drug traffickers. Inadvertently, however, official discourse has also politicized and empowered drug traffickers, casting them as an enemy. In contrast, popular discourse surrounding drugs and drug trafficking seems to have resisted these disintegrating categories. Using narcocorridos-a popular musical subgenre-, I conclude that criminal and enemy categories when referring to drug traffickers do not merge in the popular imaginary. Nevertheless, younger musicians seem to pick up on the politization of the drug trafficker as the enemy, the risks and implications of which are indicated in this article.
Sensationalism of the Mexican Narco
In the state of Sinaloa, Mexico, Jesús Juárez Mazo, better known as Jesús Malverde or the green devil was a legendary social bandit who reportedly stole from the rich and gave to the poor during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. The haunting and the miracles around his gravesite have garnered much sensationalism surrounding this figure today. However, it is his association with narcotraffickers and his glorification in narcocorridos or drug ballads that have made this figure along with the drug smuggler both a topic of censorship as well as admiration. The narco criminal is a mythic persona either censored on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border as monstrous and innately barbaric or glamorized and representative of a modern-day social hero. This paper examines the dichotomy of such a persona as exposed by Mexico's contemporary cultural critic, Carlos Monsiváis who explores the media's fascination and repulsion with the most renowned of criminals in Mexico. In his analysis of Mexico's controversial criminal, Monsiváis teases out the sensational version of Mexico's deadliest bad guy to uncover the more rational if not mundane qualities of the narco 'monster'.
(2018) Narcoculture? Narco trafficking as a semiosphere of anticulture
2018
In this paper we approach a current issue related to the so-called concept of narcoculture. Several works in Latin America and the United States have addressed this matter and not only accept the term narcoculture, but also stress both the symbolic and aesthetic perspectives. In order to rethink the concept of narcoculture from different angles, we appeal to Juri Lotman and Boris Uspensky's proposals regarding the concepts of culture, non-culture and anticulture. Rather than accept and reproduce the concept of narcoculture, by means of linking Lotman and Uspensky's approach with the standpoint of complexity thinking and transdisciplinarity, we propose the treatment of drug trafficking as a semiosphere of anticulture. We emphasize the contradictions inherent in the actors dwelling in this semiosphere, incorporating reflections from chaotic and barbaric processes designed to wreak havoc in Mexican society. The common acceptance of the concept of narcoculture does not acknowledge the current devastation and bloodshed produced by narco-traffick-ers and others in cahoots with the Mexican government and its militarized drug war strategy. During the last few decades, drug trafficking has inspired organized crime and their actors, spurring the representation of everyday societal features such as music, fashion, architecture, or traffickers' social status.