NARCO REALISM IN CONTEMPORARY MEXICAN AND TRANSNATIONAL NARRATIVE, FILM, AND ONLINE MEDIA by Christopher Nielsen B.A. in Linguistics and Anthropology, Brigham Young University, 2006 M.A. in Spanish, Brigham Young University, 2008 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2014 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Christopher Nielsen It was defended on April 28, 2014 and approved by Juan Duchesne-Winter, PhD, Professor John Beverley, PhD, Distinguished Professor Joshua Lund, PhD, Professor Giuseppina Mecchia, PhD, Professor Dissertation Director: Juan Duchesne-Winter, PhD, Professor ii Copyright © by Christopher Nielsen 2014 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Juan Duchesne-Winter, John Beverley, Joshua Lund, and Giuseppina Mecchia for their intellectual guidance and friendship. I would also like to thank Hermann Herlinghaus for his friendship and mentorship and acknowledge him as a committee member, even though, because of a technicality, I was not allowed to include him on the defense approval page above. iv NARCO REALISM IN CONTEMPORARY MEXICAN AND TRANSNATIONAL NARRATIVE, FILM, AND ONLINE MEDIA Christopher Nielsen, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2014 This dissertation theorizes the political meaning of contemporary “narco narratives” from or about Mexico. It challenges “the narco-realist thesis,” that is, the increasingly common notion that the Mexican drug trade/war constitutes a privileged framework for interpreting Latin America as a whole. The novels, films, and online media analyzed hereing avoid the narco-realist reduction of the Hemisphere to the image of a Narco-Mexico and instead set themselves the task, at once subtler and more ambitious, of using themes of drugs and violence as a kind of magnifying glass through which to perceive, for instance, the nature of power and violence in general or even the ontological basis of reality itself. “Chapter One” equates aesthetics with ontology and explores the inherently narcotic nature of power and sovereignty in Trabajos del Reino by Yuri Herrera and La vida es sueño Pedro Calderón de la Barca. The second and third chapters expand definition of “narco narrative” by exploring “pharmacological” themes and concepts in narratives about Mexico but not directly related to drug trafficking or violence. v “Chapter Two” offers analyzes how Jorge Baradit's neo-fantasy novel Ygdrasil contributes to the critique of the common apocalyptic interpretation of drug-related violence in Mexico, suggesting that any real apocalypse would derive from capitalism, not the supposedly radical evil of narcos. In “Chapter Three,” Bernard Stiegler's “pharmacological critique” of capitalism is used to analyze the political ontology of late capitalism in the films of US Latino director Alex Rivera. “Chapter Four” theorizes and the role of the environment in grass-roots resistance to cartel violence as manifested in Youtube video testimonies by drawing on theories of “object-oriented ontology.” vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE LA VIDA NARCA ES SUENO: ON THE PHARMACOLOGY OF POWER IN YURI HERRERA’S TRABAJOS DEL REINO AND CALDERON’S LA VIDA ES SUENO...........................................................................................................................................25 The Baroque Pharmacology of Power.......................................................................................26 La vida narca es sueño..............................................................................................................37 CHAPTER TWO NO FUTURE: CONSPIRACY, PHARMACOLOGY, AND APOCALYPSE IN JORGE BARADIT'S YGDRASIL................................................................................................................57 CHAPTER THREE NEURONAL TESTIMONIO AND PHARMACOLOGICAL DEPROLETARIANIZATION IN ALEX RIVERA'S SLEEP DEALER..............................................................................................82 CHAPTER FOUR THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF THE LAND IN CONTEMPORARY REPRESENTATIONS OF NARCO VIOLENCE: ONTOLOGY OF VULNERABILITY AND OBJECT-ORIENTED RESISTANCE.........................................................................................126 Representing Victims of Narco Violence................................................................................126 The Land as Victim..................................................................................................................128 vii Ontology of Vulnerability and Object-Oriented Resistance...................................................145 WORKS CITED..........................................................................................................................152 viii LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 1 Cleaning. Teresa Margolles, 2009................................................................................126 Fig. 2 Vaporización. Teresa Margolles, 2002...........................................................................127 Fig. 3 From “Caballeros Templarios en Michoacán Testimonio Autodefensa Ciudadana”....140 Fig. 4 “Me alzo con mis ramas” from “Cherán”.......................................................................142 ix INTRODUCTION The figure of the Latin American militant actor, though showing signs of resurfacing in Bolivia’s indigenous movement, Chile’s student movement, Brazil’s recent protests, Colombia’s agrarian strikes or Mexico’s education protests and #YoSoy132 movement, the recent protests in Venezuela or, perhaps more polemically, the self-defense groups in Michoacán—just to name a few exemplary sites—still, for the most part, lies relatively dormant. At least, that is, in the hemisphere’s aesthetic imagination. There are, as yet, few artistic representations of the new kinds of subversive political actors emerging in contemporary movements.1 The ever-present Che and Marcos t-shirts notwithstanding, the aesthetically hegemonic antinomic figure in Latin America seems increasingly to be the narco. This is most obviously the case in México, where there has been an explosion of “narco-literature” and “narco-cinema”, with narcocorridos enjoying widespread popularity for over thirty years now. Narco themes have also loomed large in in novels by Colombian writers like Fernando Vallejo, Jorge Franco Ramos, and Juan Gabriel Vásquez, for example, or in films ranging from the indie classic Rodrigo D, no futuro to the international collaboration María, llena eres de gracia. As Jorge Volpi has put it, “‘La literatura del narco’ se ha convertido en el nuevo paradigma de la literatura latinoamericana (o al menos mexicana y colombiana): donde antes había dictadores y guerrilleros ahora hay capos y policías corruptos; y, donde antes prevalecía el realismo mágico, ha surgido un hiperrealismo fascinado con retratar los usos y costumbres de estos nuevos antihéroes” (“Cruzar la frontera”). 1 A notable example is Argentine director Santiago Mitre’s 2011 film El estudiante. 1 Volpi has argued that so-called narco literature is less an actual genre than a marketing ploy, on the part of publishers, and, on the part of critics and academics, a nostalgic attempt to revive the idea of “Latin American Literature.” He has lamented the fact that, in the minds of readers in the Global North, “Latin American Literature”, once equated with magic realism, is now coming to be seen as synonymous with narco-literature, in spite of the fact that “sólo se haya reflejado en la ficción de Colombia, México y, en menor medida, Centroamérica” (74). Volpi ascribes the international appeal of narco-literature, like guerrilla novels or dictator novels before them, to “la necesidad de exotismo de Occidente” (74). “Para los nostálgicos”, he writes, narco-literature “significa la resurrección de América Latina” (74). According to this view, there is a perverse logic at work in “the West”, which locates the essence of the Latin America in the present-day horrors that attend narco-trafficking and the so-called drug war. The hope would be that, although the essence is terrible, at least there is still an essence—maybe, just maybe, some of the hopes that were formerly hung on the idea of “Latin America” (whether “orientalizing”—“We know we are civilized because we can see they are barbaric”—or emancipatory ones—“The revolution will spread from Latin America to the rest of the world”) are still worth believing in, as long as “Latin America” still exists. Volpi is right to call attention to the problematic uses that the notions of “Latin America” and “Latin American Literature” have been put to. Surely we can do better as critics than to reduce the aesthetic diversity and sociopolitical complexity of an entire hemisphere to facile and self-serving notions of continental essence (represented, as the case may be, by the figure of the dictator, the guerrillero, or the narco). In other ways, however, Volpi’s criticism is off the mark. First of all, while much of the literary and political criticism produced outside Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries is supported by departments of “Latin American Literature” and presented in forums convoked 2 under the same name, numerous critics, at least since the postcolonial and subaltern turns of the 1980s, have long since complicated