By Eduardo Ruiz (session leader), Alberto Fonseca, Rebecca Janzen, and Carolina Castellanos Gonella
Detailed description of session
The growth of the drug trade over the last fifty years has brought about significant changes in Latin American national identities, fracturing unitary notions, and pushing national democracies to the breaking point. The pressures of globalization and neoliberalism continue a postcolonial dynamic where US financial and cultural interests join up with domestic power structures, yielding cultural products that veer away from nostalgia and evince a more critical perspective, one that responds to such challenges as increased state and paramilitary violence, drug wars, money laundering, impunity, and generalized corruption. Terry Eagleton explains this systemic, capitalistic rationale by pointing to the “criminal” roots of postmodern financial interests: Western businessmen turn out to be the “true gangsters,” the “robbers” “running the banks rather than raiding them” (Culture 155). Critics preoccupied with Latin American postmodern narrative representations in the context of violence, culture, and the war on drugs include, among many others, O. Hugo Benavides, Dave Boothroyd, Renée Craig-Odders et al., Enrique Desmond Arias, Sergio González Rodríguez, Josefina Ludmer, Carlos Monsiváis, Shaylih Muelhmann, Martin Priestman, Juan Carlos Ramírez-Pimienta, Fernando Fabio Sánchez, Sayak Valencia, and Juan Villoro. Paying heed to this scholarly work, this special session analyzes narrative techniques deployed by recent authors as they explore the tensions of the drug war on national identity: Historical memory in post-Pablo Escobar Colombia, the Mexico-Canada Mennonite connection in the TV series Pure, and the objectified representation of the female body in Mexican author Élmer Mendoza’s narratives.
Colombia’s notorious culture during drug lord Pablo Escobar’s life produced a number of fictional works that critiqued national identity in the context of an all-encompassing drug traffic, like Fernando Vallejo’s La virgen de los sicarios (1994), a new literary and film genre that has now crossed the border and succeeded in Hollywood (Sicario 2015, 2018). In post-Pablo Escobar Colombia, however, Juan Gabriel García Vásquez’s novel, El ruido de las cosas al caer (2011), and Ciro Guerra’s film, Pájaros de verano (2018) reach back to the past in order to re-assess the meaning of the nation. The visit to Pablo Escobar’s hacienda ruins, both psychoanalytic metaphor and nod to Walter Benjamin, is a search for historical memory, the knowledge of an initial trauma that will unearth the features of the present. Pájaros de verano, in turn, goes farther back, to the beginnings of the marihuana trade in the 1970s, where historical memory reveals indigenous and family-related factors that seemingly weigh more than direct connections to the illegal trade. Professor Alberto Fonseca’s analysis discovers that 21st-century cultural productions plumb Colombia’s past to find traces that explain people’s acceptance of narco culture and its continuing hold over a nation intent on a “search for truth.”
The Canadian TV series Pure, premiering in 2017, presents some of the cross-cultural, religious, and ethnic dimensions of the drug trade—specifically, the involvement of Mexican and Canadian Mennonite communities and the effort by some of their members to combat this problem. Outward appearance plays a fundamental role in establishing an individual’s cultural, religious, and national identity. And although Mennonites make a point not to belong to the mainstream national culture, and therefore follow a seemingly strict observance of ritual and dress, the pressures of globalized drug traffic has splintered their traditions, religious identity, and sense of community. Professor Rebecca Janzen concludes that Mexican Mennonites in Pure, given their cultural and geographic proximity to narco violence, do not enjoy the positive stereotyping that their Canadian brethren are granted, and she inscribes this phenomenon within critic Sayak Valencia’s rationale of Gore Capitalism (2010), an essay that explains violence and death as products /correlatives of neoliberal capitalism in the Third World, the logic of “necropolitics.”
The fate and representation of women have been fundamental components in drug culture and literature, owing perhaps to their unmitigated victimization, and titles like Fernando Vallejo’s La virgen de los sicarios (1994), Jorge Franco’s Rosario Tijeras (1999), and Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s La reina del sur (2002) attest to this phenomenon. Professor Carolina Castellanos Gonella turns to the analysis of the powerful drug lady/boss, the fictional Samantha Valdés in Mexican author Élmer Mendoza’s novels: Balas de plata (2008), La prueba del ácido (2010), Nombre de perro (2012), Besar al detective (2015), and Asesinato en el Parque Sinaloa (2017). By focusing on the representation of the female body, Castellanos Gonella argues that Mendoza’s narratives render Samantha’s role intelligible in the male-dominated society of the drug traffic, given that she is positioned in conventional roles. Although her leadership defies traditional gender hierarchies, the objectification of her body reiterates those very traditions and standards of beauty. These descriptions also distance Samantha from narcocultural aesthetics, which in depicting her as a businesswoman ultimately glamourize and normalize the drug trafficking world. In pursuing this research, Castellanos Gonella’s theoretical framework includes such authors as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Judith Butler, Howard Campbell (Drug War Zone), Anajilda Mondaca Cota, and Elsa Ivette Jiménez Valdez (“Mujeres, narco y violencia: Resultados de una guerra fallida”).
These three contributions focus on some of the most recent cultural products and theoretical discussions involving the drug trade in Latin America, which continues to (mis)shape this region by its forced integration into the globalizing logic of capital. If the drug trade entails an exertion of power under the guise of social disorder, where domestic and international geopolitical forces converge (Sergio González Rodríguez, El hombre sin cabeza 126), the goal of any cultural analysis should be to explore the specific ways in which this culture/drug traffic articulation occurs. Ultimately, as these authors suggest, the objective is to uncover the regional, national, and personal stakes of cultural production in the age of the narcos.