Narrating Narcos: Culiacán and Medellín

Gabriela Polit Dueñas

Okt 2013 · University of Pittsburgh Press

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Narrating Narcos presents a probing examination of the
prominent role of narcotics trafficking in contemporary Latin American
cultural production. In her study, Gabriela Polit Dueñas juxtaposes two
infamous narco regions, Culiacán, Mexico, and Medellín, Colombia, to
demonstrate the powerful forces of violence, corruption, and avarice and
their influence over locally based cultural texts.

Polit Dueñas
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 Dueñas 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
Dueñas 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 Culiacán, 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 Medellín, 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 Dueñas 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 combined
with textual analysis. Here, the relationship of writer, subject, and
audience becomes clearly evident, and our understanding of the cultural
bonds of Latin American drug trafficking is greatly enhanced. As such,
this book will be an important resource for students and scholars of
Latin American literature, history, culture, and contemporary issues.

 

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