Dining with the Devil: Identity Formations in Juarez, Mexico

Abstract

This article analyzes popular narratives surrounding the theme of drug lords in the Mexican border city of Juarez and their multifaceted social, ideological, and material effects. This analysis takes into consideration the historical context of eruptions of violence that Juarez has endured in the last few years. Complex formations of the Mexican identity are now being reformulated in hierarchical, gendered, and racialized identities, which project the very strong and powerful social frictions currently emerging from complex socioeconomic factors resulting in mass poverty and migration. These elements are evinced in the narco-narratives within their violent contexts. However, violence in Juarez must not be interpreted as upsurges outside the control of the state, but rather as byproducts of conflict within it (see Das and Poole 2004). Thus, on the border, Juarez becomes a central site, not a periphery, in which economic and political forces materialize in the middle of complex social dynamics.

Keywords:

• narco-culture
• narco-narratives
• border identities
• Juarez
• Mexico
• masculinities

Acknowledgments

I thank Gilberto Rosas, for his guidance and assistance; Song Hong Cho, for all his feedback and support; and the anonymous reviewers of an earlier draft of this article. All errors are my own.

Notes

1. Burrería is a traditional Mexican restaurant, especially popular in the City of Juárez, where they sell burritos, a flour tortilla filled with any kind of meat, beans, or other prepared dishes.

2. All translations are mine.

3. The main cartels include the Chapo Guzmán Cartel, the Tijuana Cartel, the Gulf Cartel, and the Juárez Cartel, who control the El Paso/Juárez plaza (Campbell 2008).

4. Here Palaversich (2006)is making reference to writer Federico Campbell (2001).

5. “In the popular soap opera Todo por amor, aired by TV Azteca in 2000, two of the main characters were drug traffickers who were romantically involved with beautiful and virtuous women from respected families” (Palaversich 2006:86).

6. Palaversich (2006)includes here that “this recognition is also reflected in the creation of widely accepted and used neologisms such as narcocultura, narcopolítica, narcoeconomía, narcoviolencia, narcosanto, narcosatánico, narcoestética, narcochic, narcocorrido, and narconovela, among many others” (86).

7. Felipe Calderón is now the second president from PAN (Partido Acción Nacional) after more than 70 years of PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) being in power.

8. Organized crime has lost its value codes and pacts; they not only assassinate their opponents and their family members but now also kill many innocent people and commit these murders in front of schools, churches, or other public places (Norte Digital 2010-06-01 in http://nortedigital.mx/noticias/inseguridad_cdj/6983/). By mid-2010, 60 children were reported killed as a result of organized crime (Norte Digital 2010-07-18 in http://nortedigital.mx/noticias/inseguridad_cdj/9674/). Moreover, the Mexican authorities reported the following average daily statistics for the period until May of that year: 7 people killed; 43 cars stolen (7 of these taken from their owners through violence and firearms); 2.8 families suffered house robbery (one household every four days robbed with the use of force); and 3 business stores robbed (every 1.1 days a business store was robbed with the use of violence). Furthermore, every 3.8 days someone was a kidnapped, every 2 days an extortion was reported, and every 6 days a bank was robbed in the city (all this without taking into account that specialists observe that people only report an average of one in every four crimes). Moreover, a woman was assassinated every 1.7 days, a policeman every 3.8 days, and a minor every other day. Finally. a decapitated body appeared every 17.5 days (Norte Digital 2010-05-23 in http://nortedigital.mx/noticias/local/6087/, my translation).

9. There has been a social transformation in Mexico as part of worldwide transformations of mass-consumer culture under capitalism. In Mexico lower middle classes display less and less difference in their tastes and habits from their upper middle-class counterparts as a product of global marketing and of illegal transactions; mass media products are now easily available through street piracy and/or throughout the web (Zermeño 1993:65). People now have easy access to mass media products like music, TV shows, movies, video games, computer software, etc. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the concept of social class has been blurred because of the neoliberal emphasis on consumption. Because consumption has turned out to be the “moving spirit of the late twentieth century,” there has been a parallel “eclipse of production” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001: 4). As a result, the workplace is no longer a secure source of income, and labor has been relocated to low-cost, less taxed, and less protected working conditions. Hence, the paradox of class in the twenty-first century resides in the fact that neoliberalism aims to instill an ideology and practice that is based on the market promoting a separation of labor from its human context.

10. President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa has affirmed to entrepreneurs in the tourism business that more than 90 percent of the killings attributed to the war against narco-traffiking include people involved in this illegal trading and that the number of civil casualties is really low (Norte Digital 2010-04-18 in http://nortedigital.mx/noticias/nacional/4013/, my translation).

11. These authors observe that the mestizo identity is not always assumed by all Mexicans and in this way it is sometimes a false identity.

12. “A number of campaigns were undertaken during the initial period of Spanish settlement in the region on Chihuahua City to rid the area of an indigenous population … The Church, as well, assisted in the creation of this Chihuahua Apartheid by concentrating Native Americans in regions distant from “White” settlements” (Macías-González 1995: 30).

13. Especially during the Porfiriato, where middle and upper classes under French positivism comprised a selective group that practiced highly refined bourgeois lifestyles and that shared a racist ideology based on social Darwinism (Macías-González 1995).

14. However, this indigenist movement did not try to improve the social and economic conditions of the numerous Indian groups; on the contrary it only led to a romantization of the Indians as a thing of the past. This constructed the mestizo imaginary and gave them the protagonist role for the Mexican success.

15. Omi and Winant have used “ … the term racial formation to refer to the process by which social, economic and political forces determine the content and importance of racial categories, and by which they are in turn shaped by racial meanings” (1986: 61).

16. This is taking into account the formation of the Mexican national identity after the revolution that was based on Manuel Gamio and Vasconcelos's concept of mestizo and the idea that Mexicans come from the union of a Spanish father and an indigenous mother (see Lomnitz 1993).

17. As a matter of fact, Palaversich (2006)observes that there also exists the category of the narco-junior, a drug dealer from a privileged class who is in the narcotics business.