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Abstract
This article takes as its starting point the striking juxtaposition of the commemorative activities of 2010 surrounding the celebrations of the bicentenary of the struggle for Independence and the centenary of the outbreak of revolution and the circulation of atrocity images charting the so-called ‘War on drugs’ within the pages of Mexico's respected news weekly Proceso. It asks: how are we to understand the cultural moment that finds the proliferation of visual artefacts associated with the Bi/Centenary involved in the making palpable and present the intangible—namely the modernity of the nation—that sit alongside the severed heads and body parts in Mexico's current violent conflict? Whilst acknowledging the global flows of contemporary visual cultures, it argues that it is essential to locate the circulation of atrocity images within the context of the specificities of the Mexican media environment in which such images bear powerful forensic testimony. It is equally important explore how such images form part of a longer visual genealogy related to the meanings attached to iconoclasm in the colonial baroque imaginary.
Notes
1 Hayden White, ‘The Historical Event’, Representations, 19:2 (2008), 9–34 (pp. 9–10); Nicholas Dirks, ‘History As a Sign of the Modern’, Public Culture, 2:2 (1989), 25–32 (p. 25).
2 For the official government website, see <http://www.bicentenario.gob.mx/> (consulted 24 June 2014). For an analysis, see Shelley Garrigan, ‘Dematerializing Patrimony: The Mexican Bicentennial in the Digital Era’, Iberoamericana, 10:39 (2010), 211–27. For 20/10, see <http://www.20-10historia.com/index.phtml>. For the special issues of Proceso, about which more below, see <http://tienda.proceso.com.mx/category.php?id_category=18&n=20> (consulted 24 June 2014).
3 As analysts of the Bicentennial and Centennial celebrations have noted, taking place during the second consecutive term of a conservative, Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN) government, headed by Calderón, the movement for Independence was much more prominent in official discourse than the revolution, with its associations with the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). Until its historic defeat in 2000, the PRI held on to power for over seventy years. This was nowhere more evident than in the ceremony that took place on 30 May 2010, at which the urns containing the remains of independence heroes were transferred from the mausoleum of the Columna de la Independencia to Chapultepec Castle, where they were examined in a specially-erected laboratory to be subsequently transferred to the Palacio Nacional for display in the exhibition ‘México 200 Años, la Patria en Construcción’. Calderón presided over the ostentatious transfer of the illustrious remains.
4 See, inter alia Joel Kurtzman, ‘Mexico's Instability Is a Real Problem’, The Wall Street Journal, 16 January 2009, <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123206674721488169.html> (consulted 14 June 2014). Analysis of the ‘War on Drugs’ is burgeoning in a range of fields, from political science through cultural studies. The work of Luis Astorga, which has appeared in academic and journalistic formats, provides an important historical perspective as well as contemporary analysis: Luis Astorga, El siglo de las drogas. El narcotráfico, del Porfiriato al nuevo milenio (México D.F.: Espasa, 1996); Astorga, ‘Estado, drogas ilegales y poder criminal: retos transexenales’, Letras Libres (noviembre 2012), 26–31. See also Criminal Insurgencies in Mexico and the Americas: The Gangs and Cartels Wage War, ed. Robert J. Bunker (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013). For cultural studies analyses, see essays by Osvaldo Zavala and Estelle Tarica in Heridas abiertas: biopolítica y representación en América Latina, ed. Mabel Moraña & Ignacio M. Sánchez (Madrid: Iberoameriana/Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana, 2014).
5 For an attempt to nuance the report, see Ioan Grillo, ‘Analysis: Mexico a Failing State? ’, Global Post, 16 February 2009, <http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/mexico/090212/analysis-mexico-failing-state> (consulted 25 June 2014); for the death and disappeared tolls, see La Redacción, ‘Más de 121 mil muertos, el saldo de la narcoguerra de Calderón: Inegi’, Proceso, 30 de julio de 2013, <http://www.proceso.com.mx/?p=348816> (consulted 25 June 2014; Marcela Turati, ‘Desaparecidos: las listas caóticas’, Proceso, 13 de marzo de 2003 <http://hemeroteca.proceso.com.mx/?page_id=278958&a51dc26366d99bb5fa29cea4747565fec=335824&rl=wh> (consulted 25 June 2014).
6 Ioan Grillo, ‘Behind Mexico's Wave of Beheadings’, Time, 8 September 2008, <http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1839576,00.html> (consulted 25 June 2014); Ioan Grillo, El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency (London: Bloomsbury, 2011).
7 In a discussion of taxonomies of violence in Mexico, Alan Knight gives short shrift to notions that violence is somehow hard-wired into the Mexican psyche, such as those put forward by Enrique Krauze, which he characterizes as ‘useless even counterproductive’ (Alan Knight, ‘War, Violence and Homicide in Modern Mexico’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 32:s1 [2013], 12–48 [p. 16]).
8 Nicholas Spadaccini & Luis Martín-Estudillo, ‘Introduction: The Baroque and the Cultures of Crisis’, in Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context, ed. Nicholas Spadaccini & Luis Martín-Estudillo, Hispanic Issues 31 (Nashville: Vanderbilt U. P., 2009), ix–xxxvi (pp. ix, xxxi).
9 Mabel Moraña, ‘Baroque/Neobaroque/Ultrabaroque: Disruptive Readings of Modernity’, in Hispanic Baroques, ed. Spaddacini & Martín-Estudillo, 241–281 (p. 242).
10 Lois Parkinson Zamora, ‘New World Baroque, Neobaroque, Brut Barroco: Latin American Postcolonialisms’, PMLA, 124:1 (2009), 127–42 (p. 136).
11 Thanks to a European Research Council Marie Curie Research Fellowship, at the time of writing I have been based in Mexico City since February 2013. As a result I have had a ‘ringside seat’ on the latest developments of what is often termed the ‘colombianización’ of Mexico. These include: the emergence in January 2014 of the ‘autodefensas’ in the state of Michoacán in response in the absence of a State-backed strategy to tackle the cartel known as the Caballeros Templarios; the arrest, in February of the same year, of Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán Loera, leader of the Sinaloa Cartel; and at the time of writing, the disappearance and presumed murder on 26 September 2014 of forty-three student teachers from Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, which has provoked widespread indignation and condemnation both nationally and internationally.
12 I am intentionally allowing for a slippage between ‘vistas’ as a past participle and noun in my translation.
13 Elspeth H. Brown & Thy Phu, ‘Introduction’, in Feeling Photography, ed. Elspeth H. Brown & Thy Phu (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2014), 1–25 (pp. 4 & 2).
14 As Pablo A. Piccato observes, deriving its name from the abundant display of blood, the emergence of the Nota Roja in the twentieth century in Mexico, as in other places, ‘witnessed the development of a visual language that filled newspaper pages with naked or decomposing cadavers, “mug shots” of the suspects, and crime scenes with the objects and traces of death’ (‘Homicide as Politics in Modern Mexico’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 32:s1 [2013], 104–25 [p. 116]). Proceso, however, stands at the other end of the spectrum from this sensationalist format.
15 Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Harmondsworth, 1979), Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003); Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, ed. Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards & Erina Duggane (Williamston: Williams College Museum of Art, 2007); Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis, ed. Geoffrey Batchen, Mick Gidley, Nancy K. Miller & Jay Prosser (London: Reaktion Books, 2012); Estética y violencia: necropolítica, militarización y vidas lloradas, comp. Helena Chávez Mac Gregor (México D.F.: UNAM/MUAC, 2012).
16 David Campbell, ‘Horrific Blindness: Images of Death in Contemporary Media’, Journal for Cultural Research, 8:1 (2004), 55–74 (p. 64). Campbell's is a powerful voice that argues against the myth of the anaesthetizing effects of photography set out so influentially by Sontag in On Photography. See, for example, David Campbell, ‘The Myth of Compassion Fatigue’, in The Violence of the Image: Photography and International Conflict, ed. Liam Kennedy & Caitlin Patrick (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 97–124.
17 Campbell, ‘Horrific Blindness’, 70.
18 In the ‘not free’ category, Mexico finds itself in the company of Ecuador, Honduras, and Venezuela, with the rest of Latin America ‘free’, with the exception of Uruguay, which is ‘partly free’. Methodology and detailed comment can be found at <http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/freedom-press-2014#.U6yMsvldWSr> (consulted 26 June 2014).
19 <http://diario.mx/Local/2010-09-19_cfaade06/> (consulted 26 June 2014). Another sign of the perils associated with journalism as a profession in Mexico: Proceso has adopted the practice of signing certain reports concerned with organised crime by ‘La redacción’ rather than a named journalist.
20 Nasheli Jiménez del Val, ‘Government Gore: The Images of Beltrán Leyva's Body and the Mexican (Failed) State’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia, 20:3 (2011), 281–301 (p. 283).
21 Jiménez del Val, ‘Government Gore’, 291.
22 At the time of writing, the link to the pdf version of the ‘Acuerdo’ was no longer functional; the key points and analysis are set out in the following reports available online and published in El Universal and La Jornada respectively: <http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/754131.html> <http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2011/03/25/politica/005n1pol> (consulted 30 June 2014). For a point-by-point critique of the ‘Acuerdo’, see Arcadi Espada, ‘La violencia en los medios: por una cobertura responsable’, Letras Libres (julio 2011), 24–31.
23 Gabriela Gómez Rodríguez, ‘ ¿Acuerdo entre medios para la cobertura de la violencia? El caso de Milenio-Jalisco’, <http://148.206.107.15/biblioteca_digital/articulos/7-586-8371jkd.pdf> (consulted 30 June 2014).
24 Juan Villoro, ‘Advertencia para la mirada’, Proceso, ‘El sexenio de la muerte: Memoria gráfica del horror’ (2012), 4–5.
25 Villoro, ‘Advertencia para la mirada’, 5.
26 Carlos María Meza & Anasella Acosta, ‘Publicar o no, he ahí el dilema’, Cuartoscuro, 17:106 (2011), 24–30 (p. 25).
27 Meza & Acosta ‘Publicar o no, he ahí el dilema’, 25–26, 30.
28 Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich & Ann Reynolds, ‘Introduction: Political Emotions and Public Feelings’, in Political Emotions, ed. Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich & Ann Reynolds (New York/London: Routledge, 2010), 1–16 (p. 5); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’, in her Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2003), 123–52.
29 At the time of writing, I am working on a project on the place of tears and crying in Mexican history and culture, which is informed by work in the burgeoning field of emotions research.
30 Rita Felski, ‘Suspicious Minds’, Poetics Today, 32:2 (2011), 215–34 (p. 229).
31 Martin Jay, ‘Cultural Relativism and the Visual Turn’, Journal of Visual Culture, 1:3 (2002), 267–78; Andrea Noble, ‘Visual Culture and Latin American Studies’, The New Centennial Review, 4:2 (2004), 219–38.
32 Serge Gruzinski, Images at War: Mexico From Columbus to Blade Runner (1492–2019), trans. Heather MacLean (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2001).
33 Knight, ‘War, Violence and Homicide in Modern Mexico’, 16. In the introduction to Cruel Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2013), Jean Franco poses a similar dilemma, when she states that although her focus is ‘on Latin America, I do not intend to suggest that cruelty is uniquely exercised there; rather I examine under what conditions it became the instrument of armies, government, and rogue groups and how such conditions might be different in these cases than in the often-discussed European cases’ (2).
34 Regina Janes, Losing our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture (New York: New York U. P., 2005).
35 W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Cloning Terror: The War of Images’, in The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics, ed. Diarmuid Costello & Dominic Wilson (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), 179–207 (p. 195). Although not a line of argument I have space to develop here, the question of identification with the victim is especially fraught in the case of the 2009 special issues of Proceso. Without exception, the presence and reactions of those that mourn the anonymous victims is absent from the frame of representation. It is only in the 2012 ‘Sexenio de la muerte’ that a handful of images represent grieving relatives, thereby endowing the victims with status as somebody's loved one, worthy of mourning.
36 Rodrigo Parrini, ‘Bodyscapes. Globalization, Corporeal Politics, and Violence in Mexico’, Social Text, 28:3 (2010), 67–89 (p. 79).
37 Sergio González Rodríguez, El hombre sin cabeza (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2009), 51.
38 Janes, Losing our Heads, 12.
39 Mitchell, ‘Cloning Terror’, 195.
40 Lois Parkinson Zamora, The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006), 19.
41 Gruzinski, Images at War, 31.
42 Gruzinski, Images at War, 34.
43 Gruzinski, Images at War, 35.
44 Claudio Lomnitz, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2001), 154.
45 Nancy Farriss, ‘Introductory Essay: The Power of Images’, Colonial Latin American Review, 19:1 (2010), 5–28 (p. 5).
46 The Virgen of Guadalupe has generated a significant critical literature, including: Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of National Consciousness 1531–1813, trans. Benjamin Keen (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974); David Brading, Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2001); and, most recently, Jeanette Favrot Peterson, Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2014).
47 Jaime Lara, Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 242, 253.
48 Jeremy Adelman, ‘The Rites of Statehood: Violence and Sovereignty in Spanish America, 1789–1821’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 90:3 (2010), 391–422 (p. 422).
49 Lyman L. Johnson, ‘Why Dead Bodies Talk: An Introduction’, in Death, Dismemberment, and Memory: Body Politics in Latin America, ed. Lyman L. Johnson (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2004), 1–26 (p. 2).
50 Christon I. Archer, ‘Death's Patriots—Celebration, Denunciation, and Memories of Mexico's Independence Heroes: Miguel Hidalgo, José María Morelos, and Agustín de Iturbide’, in Death, Dismemberment, and Memory, ed. Johnson, 63–104 (p. 72).
51 Lomnitz, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico, 87.
52 See the MOMA exhibition ‘Manet and the Execution of Maximilian <http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2006/Manet/index.htm>, and Jesse Lerner, ‘Imported Nationalism’, Cabinet, 5 (2001/02), <http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/importednationalism.php> (consulted 23 July 2014).
53 For the demographic cost, see Knight, ‘War, Violence and Homicide in Modern Mexico’, 25.
54 John Mraz, ‘War is Hazardous for Your Health: Photographs and Testimonies about Death, Wounds, Disease and Medical Care during the Mexican Revolution’, Imagens, 18:3 (2011), 893–905; Mraz, Photographing the Mexican Revolution: Commitments, Testimonies, Icons (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2012); Olivier Debroise, Fuga mexicana. Un recorrido por la fotografía en México (México D.F.: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1994).
55 Andrea Noble, Photography and Memory in Mexico: Icons of Revolution (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 2010).
56 Friedrich Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 1998), 789.
57 Dennis Gilbert, ‘Rewriting History: Salinas, Zedillo and the 1992 Textbook Controversy’, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 13:2 (2003), 127–59 (pp. 127, 133).
58 Samuel Brunk, The Posthumous Career of Emiliano Zapata: Myth, Memory, and Mexico's Twentieth Century (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2008). For a detailed discussion of the photographic representation of Zapata's corpse, see Noble, Photography and Memory in Mexico, 120–39.
59 Rebeca Monroy Nasr, ‘La revista Todo y la nota roja’, unpublished conference paper, presented at ‘Nota roja: lo anormal y lo criminal en la historia de México’, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City, 6–8 August 2014. As Monroy Nasr goes on to note, even though the violence of the revolutionary years was banished from sight in this period—and the same is true for the cinema of the early period—the press ‘ponía en el día a día los acontecimientos más turbios, desastrosos y dolorosos de esa sociedad que había visto su tejido social desgajarse por los diez años de la contienda armada’.
60 Claudio Lomnitz, Death and the Idea of Mexico (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 484 (emphasis added).
61 On Díaz, see Rogelio Jiménez Marce ‘La creación de una genealogía liberal’, Historias, 51 (2002), 27–49. On Zapata's neo-liberal reincarnation, see Lynn Stephen ¡Zapata Lives! Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2002).
62 At the time of writing, the headline international news is of the beheading of the US journalist James Foley on 19 August 2014 by Islamic State militants in revenge for US airstrikes against the Iraqi insurgency. Despite efforts to suppress it, the video of the beheading continues to circulate on the internet.
63 Claudio Lomnitz, ‘Narrating the Neoliberal Moment: History, Journalism, Historicity’, Public Culture, 20:1 (2008), 39–56 (p. 39).
64 Moraña, ‘Baroque/Neobaroque/Ultrabaroque’, 275.