Mediations of War
Mediations of War: Statehood, Criminality, and the Politics of Knowledge in Mexico explores the highly mediated ways in which Mexicans engage with the “war on drug trafficking.” It draws on over 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in and around Mexico City, a site where discourse takes on a self-consciously “national” dimension. It analyzes how, given its persistent murkiness, Mexico’s drug war is largely apprehended in partial and oblique ways—through propaganda, fiction, conspiracy theory, rumor, and spectacle. The book project thus reframes the drug war from a military confrontation between the state and criminal organizations to a conceptual struggle around the relation between these two entities.
Through ethnographic engagements with journalists, media makers, bureaucrats, and protesters, the book theorizes how public knowledge produced on the drug war illuminates its key internal contradictions, including the state’s simultaneous indistinction from drug traffickers, through collusion and lethal violence against its citizens, and its incapacity to subjugate the drug world’s charisma. As it traces public discourses, forms of enjoyment, and other collective responses to these conditions, it sheds light on the drug war’s political and psychosocial effects. Such effects bring new dimensions of criminality to the fore, particularly its mass-cultural and affective force as a fundamental threat to political authority, rearranging the relation between the state and publics in contemporary Mexico.
Gendered Politics of Visibility
My second book project,Femininity and the Drug War in Mexico: The Wounded Body and the Gendered Politics of Visibility,which examines how feminist activists mobilize the relationship between gendered violence and its representation as part of their struggle for justice. This project is situated in the persistent increase in gendered violence nationwide after a decade and a half of drug-related violence. By exploring their pedagogical practices, street-level protests, forms of Latin American regional solidarity, and debates, this project studies how Mexican feminists engage in practices that include transforming the dead feminine body from a weapon of terror into a tool of resistance. In light of recent attacks to feminist political agendas in the US, this project proposes to illuminate the distinct ways in which the legacy of Latin American—and specifically, Mexican—feminism articulates to confront misogynistic violence.
Other Projects
I have coauthored several pieces on Mexico’s ongoing process of militarization, which has expanded significantly despite the controversial role of the Armed Forces in the drug war. These works explore how such a process relies on the performative power of infrastructure and public art, as well as the mobilization of longstanding populist imaginaries of the military.
I am preparing another article that examines the connection between the “Fourth Transformation”—Mexican President López Obrador’s branding of his presidential regime—and the revolutionary dreams of the political struggles of the 1970s (marked by leftist guerrilla movements and counterinsurgent repression). It analyzes the political horizon that those activists delineated half a century ago and how they see it materializing—or being discursively coopted—in the present.
I am also working on an article exploring the forensic knowledge produced in trials of Mexican kingpins at the Court of the Northern District of Illinois. It focuses on the forms of truth produced in these extraterritorial extension of US jurisdiction in Mexico and its effects in the drug war’s unfolding.