Narcomedia

Exploring representations of Latinx people from Scarface to Narcos, this book examines how pop culture has framed Latin America as the villain in America’s long and ineffectual War on Drugs. If there is an enemy in the War on Drugs, it is people of color. That is the lesson of forty years of cultural production in the United States. Popular culture, from Scarface and Miami Vice to Narcos and Better Call Saul, has continually positioned Latinos as an alien people who threaten the US body politic with drugs. Jason Ruiz explores the creation and endurance of this trope, its effects on Latin Americans and Latinx people, and its role in the cultural politics of the War on Drugs. Even as the focus of drug anxiety has shifted over the years from cocaine to crack and from methamphetamines to opioids, and even as significant strides have been made in representational politics in many areas of pop culture, Latinx people remain an unshakeable fixture in stories narrating the production, distribution, and sale of narcotics. Narcomedia argues that such representations of Latinx people, regardless of the intentions of their creators, are best understood as a cultural front in the War on Drugs. Latinos and Latin Americans are not actually America’s drug problem, yet many Americans think otherwise—and that is in no small part because popular culture has largely refused to imagine the drug trade any other way.

Exploring representations of Latinx people from Scarface to Narcos, this book examines how pop culture has framed Latin America as the villain in America’s long and ineffectual War on Drugs. If there is an enemy in the War on Drugs, it is people of color. That is the lesson of forty years of cultural production in the United States. Popular culture, from Scarface and Miami Vice to Narcos and Better Call Saul, has continually positioned Latinos as an alien people who threaten the US body politic with drugs. Jason Ruiz explores the creation and endurance of this trope, its effects on Latin Americans and Latinx people, and its role in the cultural politics of the War on Drugs. Even as the focus of drug anxiety has shifted over the years from cocaine to crack and from methamphetamines to opioids, and even as significant strides have been made in representational politics in many areas of pop culture, Latinx people remain an unshakeable fixture in stories narrating the production, distribution, and sale of narcotics. Narcomedia argues that such representations of Latinx people, regardless of the intentions of their creators, are best understood as a cultural front in the War on Drugs. Latinos and Latin Americans are not actually America’s drug problem, yet many Americans think otherwise—and that is in no small part because popular culture has largely refused to imagine the drug trade any other way.

Southwest Book Awards, Border Regional Library Association (BRLA) Uses key words and striking images to explore violence and everyday life in Juárez, Mexico. Juárez, Mexico, is known for violence. The femicides of the 1990s, and the cartel mayhem that followed, made it one of the world's most dangerous cities. Along with the violence came a new lexicon that traveled from person to person, across rivers and borders—wherever it was needed to explain the horrors taking place. From personal interviews, media accounts, and conversations on the street, Julián Cardona and Alice Leora Briggs have collected the words and slang that make up the brutal language of Juárez, creating a glossary that serves as a linguistic portrait of the city and its violence. Organized alphabetically, the entries consist of Spanish and Spanglish, accompanied by short English definitions. Some also feature a longer narrative drawn from interviews—stories that put the terms in context and provide a personal counterpoint to media reports of the same events. Letters, and many of the entries, are supplemented with Briggs’s evocative illustrations, which are reminiscent of Hans Holbein’s famous Alphabet of Death. Together, the words, drawings, and descriptions in ABCedario de Juárez both document and interpret the everyday violence of this vital border city.

Since the 2000 elections toppled the PRI, over 150 Mexican journalists have been murdered. Failed assassinations and threats have silenced thousands more. Such high levels of violence and corruption question one of the fundamental assumptions of modern societies, that democracy and press freedom are inextricably intertwined. In this collection historians, media experts, political scientists, cartoonists, and journalists reconsider censorship, state-press relations, news coverage, and readership to retell the history of Mexico's press.

‘War’ is no exaggeration in discussing the bloodshed that has terrorized Mexico in the past decades. As rival cartels battle for control of a billion-dollar drug trade, the body count - 23,000 dead in five years - and sheer horror beggar the imagination of journalistic witnesses. Cartel gunmen have attacked schools and rehabilitation centers, and murdered the entire families of those who defy them. Reformers and law enforcement officials have been gunned down within hours of taking office. Headless corpses are dumped on streets to intimidate rivals, and severed heads are rolled onto dancefloors as messages to would-be opponents. And the war is creeping northward, towards the United States. El Narco is the story of the ultraviolent criminal organizations that have turned huge areas of Mexico into a combat zone. It is a piercing portrait of a drug trade that turns ordinary men into mass murderers, as well as a diagnosis of what drives the cartels and what gives them such power. Veteran Mexico correspondent Ioan Grillo traces the gangs from their origins as smugglers to their present status as criminal empires. The narco cartels are a threat to the Mexican government - and their violence has now reached as far as North Carolina. El Narco is required reading for anyone concerned about one of the most important news stories of the decade.

"This book examines travel to Mexico during the Porfiriato (the long dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz 1876-1911), focusing especially on the role of travelers in shaping ideas of Mexico as a logical place for Americans to extend their economic and cultural influence in the hemisphere. Overland travel between the United States and Mexico became instantly faster, smoother, and cheaper when workers connected the two countries' rail lines in 1884, creating intense curiosity in the United States about Mexico, its people, and its opportunities for business and pleasure. As a result, so many Americans began to travel south of the border during the Porfiriato that observers from both sides of the border began to quip that the visiting hordes of tourists and business speculators constituted a "foreign invasion," a phrase laced with irony given that it appeared at the height of public debate in the United States about the nation's imperial future. These travelers created a rich and varied record of their journeys, constructing Mexico as a nation at the cusp of modernity but requiring foreign intervention to reach its full potential"--

In Mexico, during the presidency of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) and as a direct result of his 'war' on drugs, at least 60,000 people were killed, tens of thousands were 'disappeared' and countless more were subjected to kidnapping and sexual violence. This book analyses how artists and filmmakers, alongside affected citizens, attempted to navigate, articulate and contend with this unparalleled escalation in brutality. In Mexico, during the presidency of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) and as a direct result of his 'war' on drugs, at least 60,000 people were killed, tens of thousands were 'disappeared' and countless more were subjected to kidnapping and sexual violence. This book analyses how artists and filmmakers, alongside affected citizens, attempted to navigate, articulate and contend with this unparalleled escalation in brutality. The texts studied here provide a critical visual archive of this first phase in the drug war and show how artists including Pedro Pardo, Fernando Brito, Mónica González and Natalia Almada attempted to challenge official narratives, foster emerging nodes of resistance and seek justice for citizens. Bringing together works of photography, photojournalism, documentary and short fiction cinema, the book argues for the vital role of cultural production in documenting institutional corruption, human rights abuses and narco-related violence in Mexican society and providing a space to grieve and remember the victims. As Mexico's socio-political landscape continues to deteriorate, the book shows how its visual cultural legacy provides a means of understanding and responding to the violence.

Amid the rise of neoliberalism, globalization, and movements for civil rights and global justice in the post–World War II era, Chicanxs in film, music, television, and art weaponized culture to combat often oppressive economic and political conditions. They envisioned utopias that, even if never fully realized, reimagined the world and linked seemingly disparate people and places. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Chicanx popular culture forged a politics of the possible and gave rise to utopian dreams that sprang from everyday experiences. In Chicanx Utopias, Luis Alvarez offers a broad study of these utopian visions from the 1950s to the 2000s. Probing the film Salt of the Earth, brown-eyed soul music, sitcoms, poster art, and borderlands reggae music, he examines how Chicanx pop culture, capable of both liberation and exploitation, fostered interracial and transnational identities, engaged social movements, and produced varied utopian visions with divergent possibilities and limits. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of Walter Benjamin, Stuart Hall, and the Zapatista movement, this book reveals how Chicanxs articulated pop cultural utopias to make sense of, challenge, and improve the worlds they inhabited.