Narrating Narcos: Culiacán and Medellín (Illuminations) - Softcover

Polit Dueñas, Gabriela

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822962578 ISBN 13: 9780822962571

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013

Synopsis

"Narrating Narcos" presents a probing examination of the prominent role of narcotics trafficking in contemporary Latin American cultural production. In her study, Gabriela Polit Duenas juxtaposes two infamous narco regions, Culiacan, Mexico, and Medellin, Colombia, to demonstrate the powerful forces of violence, corruption, and avarice and their influence over locally based cultural texts. Polit Duenas provides a theoretical basis for her methods, citing the work of Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, and other cultural analysts. She supplements this with extensive ethnographic fieldwork, interviewing artists and writers, their confidants, relatives, and others, and documents their responses to the portrayal of narco culture. Polit Duenas offers close readings of the characters, language, and milieu of popular works of literature and the visual arts and relates their ethical and thematic undercurrents to real life experiences. In both regions, there are few individuals who have not been personally affected by the narcotics trade. Each region has witnessed corrupt state, police, and paramilitary actors in league with drug capos. Both have a legacy of murder. Polit Duenas documents how narco culture developed at different times historically in the two regions. In Mexico, drugs have been cultivated and trafficked for over a century, while in Colombia the cocaine trade is a relatively recent development. In Culiacan, characters in narco narratives are often modeled after the serrano (highlander), a romanticized historic figure and sometime thief who nobly defied a corrupt state and its laws. In Medellin, the oft-portrayed sicario (assassin) is a recent creation, an individual recruited by drug lords from poverty stricken shantytowns who would have little economic opportunity otherwise. As Polit Duenas shows, each character occupies a different place in the psyche of the local populace. "Narrating Narcos" offers a unique melding of archival and ground-level research combin

About this title

Review:

"Polit's work is an important contribution to our understanding of narcotrafficking in the Americas. It is well argued and elegantly put together, an excellent piece of pedagogical material for teaching about the cultural economies of illegality in Latin America, and it will be useful to a wide range of scholars, from historians to literary critics and from sociologists to anthropologists. Her comparative method deserves special praise, since it invites readers to think outside the box of confining national discourses."
--Hispanic American Historical Review

"Narrating Narcos is devoted to exploring writers and artists as social actors and people trying to make representational and ethical sense out od the onslaught of pain and bloodshed that accompanies trafficking and state violence."
--Journal of Latin American Studies

"Narrating Narcos succeeds admirably in explaining the origins of the 'narco novels, ' as well as in offering trenchant close readings of works by Elmer Mendoza, Fernando Vallejo, and Héctor Abad Faciolince, and placing these fictions in a broader cultural and artistic context that includes painting, music, and film. It's a must-read book about an urgently important phenomenon."
--Aníbal González-Pérez, Yale University
"As Polit Dueñas posits, the phenomenon of narco trafficking expresses an overwhelming challenge of representation. In this sense the author has successfully met the challenge head on. The text brings a fresh interdisciplinary mix of archival work and ethnographic involvement that fruitfully explores the conundrums of Latin American narco culture. As such it is a genuine contribution for understanding the troubled historical narco legacies of our time."
--Oswaldo Benavides, Fordham University

About the Author:

Gabriela Polit Dueñas is associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. She is the author of Cosas de hombres: Escritores y caudillos en la literatura latinoamericana del siglo XX and the coeditor of Meanings of Violence in Contemporary Latin America.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0822962578
• ISBN 13: 9780822962571
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240