The University of Arizona Press
June 11, 2024
Focusing on both Mexico’s northern and southern borders, Border Killers uses Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics and various theories of masculinity to argue that contemporary Mexico is home to a form of necropolitical masculinity that has flourished in the neoliberal era and made the exercise of death both profitable and necessary for the functioning of Mexico’s state-cartel-corporate governance matrix. Today, author Elizabeth Villalobos answers questions about the work:
Your work engages with Mexican cultural production to better understand the violence along Mexico’s borders, both north and south. How did you come to this project?
The northern border of Mexico has always had primacy over the southern border in many ways, and there are many academic studies that have been done on the northern limits of the country as a geographical, political, social, economic, and cultural space. It was important for me to focus my research on this area because I grew up on the northern border, but at the same time, it seemed necessary to include the context of the southern border because of the lack of critical studies that examine the literature, theater, and film of both borders. I’ve always felt close to the south, where my father lives. In fact, this project originated even further south in Argentina, where I did research on human rights in the context of detention centers for the torture and extermination of about thirty thousand people in the last dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. I was able to interview survivors from these concentration camps, and one of them challenged me, saying, “What are you doing here when Mexico has its own killers?” That conversation set me off on the last twenty years of investigation of killers in Mexican cultural production.
You demonstrate how border violence was and is often misrepresented, dismissed, and sensationalized by popular Mexican news media. Therefore, one must turn to creative work to get a fuller understanding of the underlying forces resulting in violence. What are some of the works you discuss?
The book advances a theory of works that I call “interstitial narratives,” many created by artists born in the 1970s. Such narratives investigate the impact of neoliberalism in the Mexican border milieu with a distinctive approach to violence. These works are unlike the famous and much-studied narcocorridos and narcocinema that lionize the violence specialists of narcotrafficking cartels and replicate the iconography of narcoculture. In addition, they vary from la nota roja [blood-soaked journalism] that reproduces gory death ad infinitum in the news and media. Rather, my book argues that interstitial works have different aesthetic and ideological commitments. These works decenter cartels, place violence off stage or off the page, and are characterized by five qualities or topical concerns: refusal; spectrality; the flattening of cultural hierarchies; the failure of the state and its national imaginaries; and mass production in a neoliberal global order.
Some of the most well-known works from the eight cultural narratives that I discuss in my book in prose, theater, and film are the noir detective novel Partitura para mujer muerta by Vicente Alfonso, the play Ánima sola by Alejandro Román, and the documentary film La libertad del diablo by Everardo González.
This study is grounded in Achille Mbembe’s theorization of necropolitics, the idea that states profit by inflicting death on the many, including their own citizens. How are creative works demonstrating the real-world impacts of this idea in the borderlands?
These creative works abstain from graphic displays of violence to instead examine necropolitics and its connections with past forms of oppression. The interstitial narratives discussed in Border Killers tell us about the tragedies of workers in contemporary Mexico’s neoliberalism, in spheres such as maquiladoras, narcotrafficking, human trafficking, criminal gangs, the military, the police, and the sicariato [hired assassins]. While many scholarly works explore the perspectives of victims in Mexico’s cultural production, my book is one of a smaller number that investigate the perspective of the perpetrators, who are revealed to be victimizers and, in a sense, victims as well, trapped within collapsing possibilities for bettering their lives.
Your work underscores the important and sobering contributions of the arts in critiquing and drawing attention to violence and its impact on lives in the borderlands. What do you see as hopeful in this kind of work?
Art that is critical of the impact of neoliberalism in Mexico is devastating, but it is necessary to identify and reflect on the systems of violence that affect daily life in border areas. These works allow us to recognize the humanity of both victims and perpetrators and demystify the idea that assassins are merely monsters. We must face the reality that murderers are human beings who commit terrible acts but also have stories that deserve to be told and are capable of experiencing all the feelings of any other human being. So, this work is hopeful in that it allows us to see art as a weapon that can disarm the official and popularized discourses in the media about murderers, masculinity, and violence in Mexico and its borderlands.
What are you working on now?
At the moment, I’m working on a comparative study of documentary theater and film about life after the implementation of necropolitics in Argentina and Mexico. Writing Border Killers was a reaffirmation for me that one of my main interests in researching violence and human rights is in analyzing the different ways in which people are able to affirm life after being deeply affected by the terrifying conditions of extremely violent regimes. There is an increasing number of creative works in this vein that require wider dissemination and research within and outside of academia.
I’m also working on another project investigating the cultural semiotics of visual images of the transborder U.S.-Mexican space in photography, painting, graphic design, sculpture, and installation works by artists that integrate an interdisciplinary perspective about migration, ecocriticism, gender, and human rights.
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Elizabeth Villalobos is an assistant professor of Spanish literature at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a scholar of Latin American literature and contemporary cultural production of Mexico and its border regions. She has conducted research on border studies and human rights in Mexico, Argentina, and Germany. Her research focuses on the intersections of gender, neoliberalism, and violence represented in prose, theater, and cinema of Mexico’s northern and southern border regions.
