Beyond the Corpse-Barbarian: The Radical (Mexican) Grammar of Death in the Works of Teresa Margolles and Sergio González Rodríguez

Abstract

Abstract, This article analyzes early works by Teresa Margolles (Lengua, 2000) and Sergio González Rodríguez (Huesos en el desierto, 2002) in terms of necrowriting, that is, a grammar among and for the dead in the wake of the Mexican War on Drugs, which aims at resisting the predatory power of exacerbated neoliberalism that sustains the conflict. On the basis of Margolles’ and González Rodríguez’ early necrowriting techniques, the article develops a jurisprudential critique of the systemic violence suffered by people in contemporary Mexico in order to outline a robust notion of political mourning.

Keywords:

• Mexican Drug War
• femicide
• precarious lives
• necrowriting
• Teresa Margolles
• Sergio González Rodríguez

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I need to express my deepest gratitude to the editors of this special issue for their patience and generosity in waiting for the manuscript of this article. While I was working on it, Leticia, my mother, passed away in a distant land. The shackles of Covid-19 prevented me from attending her funeral. The pain of this loss—among many other Covid-19 little and big disasters—significantly slowed down my research. I thus dedicate this work, which I struggled so much to bring to fruition, to the beloved memory of Leticia.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 "El descanso del guerrero," in Taberna y otros lugares (1969. Ciudad de México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2019), 16. All unattributed translations are mine.

2 Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo, 3^rd ed. (1955. Ciudad de México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994), 10.

3 Gareth Williams, The Mexican Exception: Sovereignty, Police and Democracy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 18 ff.

4 See, for example, Héctor Aguilar Camín and Lorenzo Meyer, A la sombra de la Revolución Mexicana, 6^th ed. (1989. Ciudad de México: Cal y Arena, 1991); and Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez, El antiguo régimen y la transición en México, 2^nd ed. (Ciudad de México: Planeta/Joaquín Mortiz, 1999).

5 Sayak Valencia, "NAFTA: Capitalismo Gore and the Femicide Machine," Scapegoat 6 (2014): 132.

6 Achille Mbembe, "Necropolitics," Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 40.

7 See Oswaldo Zavala, "Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Drug War: The Critical Limits of Narconarratives," Comparative Literature 66, no. 3 (2014): 343–44.

8 Ibid.

9 Luis Astorga, Mitología del "narcotraficante" en México (Ciudad de México: Plaza y Valdés, 1995), 10 ff.

10 Zavala, "Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Drug War," 345; Los cárteles no existen: Narcotráfico y cultura en México (Barcelona: Malpaso, 2018), 15–16.

11 I owe the readers of Law and Literature a full disclosure of my personal relationship with Sergio, who was uncle of José de Jesús González Aceves, my dearest childhood friend. Jesús introduced me to Sergio when I was fifteen years old. I considered Sergio one of my first mentors in the arts of reading and writing, and a precious friend. I admired his vast cosmopolitan culture, sharp intelligence, warm demeanor and unremitting courage long before I read any of his essayistic and novelistic works.

12 Rebecca Scott Bray, "En Piel Ajena: The Work of Teresa Margolles," Law Text Culture 11 (2007): 13; Dulce María Alvarado Chaparro, "Performance en México (Historia y desarrollo)" (Bachelor on Visual Arts diss., Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2000), 317 ff.

13 Rebecca Scott Bray, "Teresa Margolles's Crime Scene Aesthetics," South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 4 (2011): 943.

14 Cuauhtémoc Medina, "Zones of Tolerance: Teresa Margolles, SEMEFO and Beyond," Parachute, no. 104, October 2001, 34; Alvarado Chaparro, "Performance en México (Historia y desarrollo)," 321.

15 Cuauhtémoc Medina, "Espectralidad materialista," in Teresa Margolles: ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar?, ed. Cuauhtémoc Medina (Barcelona / Ciudad de México: RM / Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2009), 19.

16 Scott Bray, "Teresa Margolles's Crime Scene Aesthetics," 935.

17 Linda Egan, "Play on Words: Chronicling the Essay", in The Contemporary Mexican Chronicle: Theoretical Perspectives on the Liminal Genre, ed. Ignacio Corona and Beth E. Jörgensen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 95 ff; Carlos Monsiváis, "De la Santa Doctrina al espíritu público (Sobre las funciones de la crónica en México)," Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 35, no. 2 (1987): 756 ff.

18 Juan Carlos Aguirre, "In the Province of Politics: Narrating Endemic Violence and State Crisis in the Twenty-First Century Mexican Chronicle," The Global South 10, no. 1 (2016): 14–15; Tanius Karam, "Recorridos, espacios y desánimos por la Ciudad de México en Carlos Monsiváis," Textos Híbridos: Revista de estudios sobre la crónica latinoamericana 1, no. 2 (2011): 60–61.

19 Anadeli Bencomo, "Los relatos de la violencia en Sergio González Rodríguez: Huesos en el desierto, El Vuelo y El hombre sin cabeza," Andamios 8, no. 15 (2011): 17 ff.

20 Derek Beaudry, "The Abject Architecture of Decontainment in the Mexico of Sergio González Rodríguez," CR: The New Centennial Review 19, no. 2 (2019): 140.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.; Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, "Sergio González Rodríguez: Literatura y pensamiento en la edad de la catástrofe," Hispanic Review 82, no. 3 (2014): 286–87.

23 Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (1936. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), 73 ff.

24 Desmond Manderson, Danse Macabre: Temporalities of Law in the Visual Arts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 106.

25 Zavala, "Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Drug War," 340–41.

26 "Delirios de interpretación: Las mitologías de la violencia de Sergio González Rodríguez," Hispanófila 178 (2016): 115–16; Los cárteles no existen, 33–34, and 53 ff.

27 Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk, 77; Manderson, Danse Macabre, 106–07.

28 See Medina, ed., ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar?.

29 Ibid., 8.

30 Manderson, Danse Macabre, 241.

31 On the pernicious effects of these stereotypes, see Claudio Lomnitz, Death and the Idea of Mexico (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 52–7; and Luis Gómez Romero, "Beyond the Atlantic Gaze, or, a Mexican View on Art, Death, Time and Law," Etica & Politica/Ethics & Politics 22, no. 3 (2020): 469–78.

32 In Latin American feminist theory, the distinction femicide/feminicidio is quite significant. See Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano, "Introduction: A Cartography of Feminicide in the Americas," in Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas, ed. Rosa Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 3 ff. Diana Russell and Jill Radford first used the term “femicide” in 1976 to indicate the “misogynist killing of women by men.” See Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing (New York: Twyane, 1992), 3. In the wake of the murders of women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexican feminist Marcela Lagarde proposed the Spanish term feminicidio as a distinct concept aimed at naming “genocide against women.” See "Antropología, feminismo y política: Violencia feminicida y derechos humanos de las mujeres," in Retos teóricos y nuevas prácticas, ed. Margaret Louise Bullen and María Carmen Díez Mintegui (San Sebastián: Ankulegi, 2008), 216; and María de la Macarena Iribarne González, "Feminicidio (en México)," Eunomía: Revista en Cultura de la Legalidad, no. 9 (2015-2016): 208–13. I deliberately use the term femicide though because of its inherent analytical clarity: the violence addressed against women precisely because they are women (rather than the intention of gender cleansing or mass killing) is central to understand the murders of women in the Mexico-U.S. border.

33 Carmen Boullosa and Mark Wallace, Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the "Mexican Drug War” (Chennai: Or Books, 2015), 55 ff; Luis Astorga, El siglo de las drogas: Del Porfiriato al nuevo milenio, new ed. (1996. México: Debolsillo, 2016), 155 ff.

34 Medina, "Zones of Tolerance," 37.

35 Luis Astorga, "¿Qué querían que hiciera?": Inseguridad y delincuencia organizada en el gobierno de Felipe Calderón (México: Grijalbo, 2015), 21–23; Boullosa and Wallace, Narco History, 95–141.

36 Williams, The Mexican Exception, 154.

37 Mariana Valverde, The Force of Law (Toronto/Berkeley: Ananansi Press, 2010), 76.

38 Ibid.

39 Katherine T. McCaffrey, "Gender and Militarism," in Militarization: A Reader, ed. Roberto J. González, Hugh Gusterson, and Gustaaf Houtman (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019), 84; Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 60 ff.

40 On April 2014, the Secretary of Defense stopped reporting on the outcomes of the confrontations between the army and suspected criminals. Only the accountability of the army came to a halt, as the violence has not ceased. See Daniela Rea and Pablo Ferri, La Tropa: Por qué mata un soldado (Ciudad de México: Aguilar, 2019).

41 Carlos Silva Forné, Catalina Pérez Correa, and Rodrigo Gutiérrez Rivas, "Índice de letalidad 2008-2014: Menos enfrentamientos, misma letalidad, más opacidad," Perfiles Latinoamericanos 25, no. 50 (2017): 339.

42 Ibid., 343–44.

43 June S. Beittel, Mexico: Organized Crime and Drug Trafficking Organizations, R41576, 2020, 6

44 Juan Villoro, "El clan de la última letra," Reforma, 19 August 2012, 14 Enfoque.

45 Adriana Cavarero, Orrorismo: Ovvero della violenza sull’inerme (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2007), 41 ff.

46 The National Guard was created in 2019 as a gendarmerie that absorbed units and officers from the Federal Police, the Military Police, and the Naval Police. The institutional structure of the National Guard therefore facilitates its operation as an extension and subsidiary of the military. See Secretaría de Gobernación, "Decreto por el que se reforman, adicionan y derogan diversas disposiciones de la Constitución Política De Los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, en materia de Guardia Nacional," Diario Oficial de la Federación, 26 March 2019, transitory article 2.

47 Roxana Vivanco, "El día en que López Obrador perdió Culiacán," Proceso, no. 2242, 20 October 2019, 10 ff.

48 Marcos Vizcarra, "Suman 4 civiles víctimas de balacera en Culiacán," Reforma, 22 October 2019, 1A.

49 Reforma/Staff, "'Fueron muchas balas, muy feo': Ingresaron sicarios a complejo 21 De Marzo," ibid., 26 October, 12A.

50 Paulina Villegas, "After Soldiers Surrender El Chapo’s Son, a Shocked Mexican City Sighs with Relief," New York Times, 20 October 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/20/world/americas/culiacan-mexico-chapo-son.html. 28 January 2021.

51 Jesús J. Esquivel, “Detrás de todo, la mano del ‘Mayo’ Zambada," Proceso, no. 2242, 20 October 2019, 10.

52 Jannet López Ponce, "AMLO dice que sigue orden de extradición contra Ovidio Guzmán; 'no se cancela'," Milenio, 31 October 2019, https://www.milenio.com/policia/amlo-proceso-extradicion-ovidio-guzman-hijo-chapo. 28 January 2021.

53 Jorge Monroy, "Y la entidad, con al menos 8,000 soldados, policías y de la GN," El Economista, 20 October 2019, https://www.eleconomista.com.mx/politica/Y-la-entidad-con-al-menos-8000–soldados-policias-y-de-la-GN-20191020-0059.html. Accessed 27 January 2021.

54 Esquivel, "Detrás de todo," 6–7.

55 Azam Ahmed, "The Stunning Escape of El Chapo’s Son: It’s Like ‘a Bad Netflix Show’," New York Times, 21 October 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/world/americas/mexico-cartel-chapo-son-guzman.html. 29 January 2021.

56 Official narratives on the drug wars in Mexico have frequently demarcated an artificial line between violent perpetrators and innocent victims. Teresa Margolles has observed in this regard: “[…] I do not care if they were good or bad […] a single dead, a single murder represents a tragedy in a family.” See Taiyana Pimentel, "Conversación entre Taiyana Pimentel, Teresa Margolles y Cuahtémoc Medina," in ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar?, 89, 93.

57 Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 83 ff.

58 Ibid., 103.

59 Cristina Rivera Garza, Los muertos indóciles: Necroescrituras y desapropiación (Ciudad de México: TusQuets, 2013), 18.

60 Ibid., 270.

61 Ibid., 19.

62 Williams, The Mexican Exception, 154.

63 Rivera Garza, Los muertos indóciles, 22.

64 Roland Barthes, "La mort de l’auteur," in OEuvres Complètes, ed. Éric Marty (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 40 ff.

65 Rivera Garza, Los muertos indóciles, 281.

66 See Magdalena Zavala and Alejandrina Escudero, eds., Escultura mexicana: De la Academia a la instalación (Ciudad de México: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2001); and Virginia Bautista, "Reividican la escultura mexicana," Reforma, 25 April 2000, 1C.

67 On the social and political development of the Mexican democratic transition, see José Woldenberg, Historia mínima de la transición democrática en México (Ciudad de México: Colegio de México, 2012), 106–36.

68 Zavala and Escudero, Escultura mexicana, 375. An image of this work is available at: http://narcopolitics.blogspot.com/2011/02/teresa-margolles.html. 29 March 2021.

69 Medina, "Zones of Tolerance," 33.

70 Ibid.

71 Ibid., 34.

72 Ibid.

73 Ley General de Salud, (7 February), 1984, art 346. This Act has undergone multiple reforms since 2000, but its general principles in relation to the treatment of corpses have not changed in any significant way.

74 Ibid.

75 Ibid., art 327.

76 Ibid., art 324.

77 Ibid., art 321.

78 Ibid., art 350 bis 4.

79 Ibid., art 319.

80 Amy Sara Carroll, "Muerte Sin Fin: Teresa Margolles's Gendered States of Exception," TDR: The Drama Review 54, no. 2 (2010): 104.

81 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Written circa 350 BCE. Cambridge, Massachussets: Harvard University Press, 1934), 1129b.

82 Ibid., 1129a.

83 Immanuel Kant, Die Metaphysik der Sitten (1797. Ditzingen: Reclam, 1990), 354.

84 Ibid., 355.

85 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, in On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (1859. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 137.

86 Ibid., 139.

87 Ibid., 140.

88 Medina, "Zones of Tolerance," 35.

89 Ibid., 46.

90 Karen Hanson, "How Bad Can Good Art Be?," in Aesthetics and Ethics, ed. Jerrold Levinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 220–22.

91 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Massachussetts/London: Harvard University Press, 2000).

92 Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler, "The Dematerialization of Art," in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (1968. Cambridge, Massachusets: MIT Press, 2000), 46.

93 Peter Lamarque, "On Perceiving Conceptual Art," in Philosophy and Conceptual Art, ed. Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 9–11.

94 Terry Smith, One and Five Ideas: On Conceptual Art and Conceptualism (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2017), 119–33.

95 Medina, "Zones of Tolerance," 48.

96 Ibid.

97 Ibid., 48–49.

98 Ibid., 35.

99 Julia Banwell, "Agency and Otherness in Teresa Margolles' Aesthetic of Death," Altre Modernità, no. 4 (2010): 48.

100 Ngahiraka Mason and Ewen McDonald, eds., Public/Private-Tumatanui/Tumataiti: The 2^nd Auckland Triennal (Auckland: The Auckland Art Gallery/The University of Auckland/George Fraser Gallery/Artspace, 2004), 103–06.

101 Medina, "Zones of Tolerance," 46.

102 Thierry de Duve, Aesthetics at Large: Art, Ethics, Politics (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2018), 67 ff.

103 Ibid., 19.

104 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Justice (2004. Verso, 2020), 20.

105 Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009. London and New York: Verso, 2016), 3.

106 See Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

107 Aristotle, Politica, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Written circa 350-330 BCE. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 1252b 3–5; 1285a 6–10.

108 Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads (1939. London: Vintage, 2002).

109 Julia Banwell, Teresa Margolles and the Aesthetics of Death (Wales: University of Wales Press, 2015), 13.

110 "Agency and Otherness," 49.

111 Ibid., 48.

112 Scott Bray, "Teresa Margolles's Crime Scene Aesthetics," 936.

113 Rocío Silva Santisteban, "El arte revulsivo de Teresa Margolles: Agua de cadáver," La Insignia, 24 January 2004, https://www.lainsignia.org/2004/enero/cul_068.htm. Accessed 25 January 2021.

114 See Slavoj Žižek, Violence (London: Profile Books, 2009), 8–10.

115 Scott Bray, "En Piel Ajena," 14.

116 Ibid., 16.

117 See Sergio González Rodríguez and Rossana Fuentes-Berain, "Frontera: Dimensión desconocida," Reforma, 24 April 1996, 10A.

118 Sergio González Rodríguez, "Asesinatos seriales en Ciudad Juárez: Señalan a policías como cómplices," ibid., 18 June 1999, 12A.

119 "La oscuridad y la luz," Reforma 1999, 1 El Angel; Huesos en el desierto, 3^rd ed. (2002. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006), 274–75.

120 Huesos en el desierto, 276–77.

121 González Rodríguez ironically described himself as a “normal person” whose head flaunted a scar from a “curative trepanation.” See El hombre sin cabeza (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2009), 94.

122 See above, note 119. The femicides in Ciudad Juárez are also a key concern in Teresa Margolles’ oeuvre. See Florian Steininger, ed. En la Herida: Teresa Margolles (München: Hirmer, 2019).

123 Alice Driver, "Cultural Production and Ephemeral Art: Feminicide and the Geography of Memory in Ciudad Juárez" (PhD diss., University of Kentucky, 2011), 104.

124 Ibid.

125 González Rodríguez, Huesos en el desierto, 86–87. I have respected the italics that appear in the original Spanish version of the text.

126 Sergio González Rodríguez and Alice Driver, "Una entrevista con Sergio González Rodríguez," Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 19 (2015): 139.

127 Ibid.

128 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 3.

129 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (1995. Torino: Einaudi, 2005), 5–16.

130 González Rodríguez, Huesos en el desierto, 15.

131 Ibid.

132 Ibid., 11.

133 Ibid.

134 Ibid., 11, 284, Postfacio XX.

135 Zavala, "Delirios de interpretación," 128.

136 Ibid., 115 ff.

137 Ibid., 128.

138 Sergio González Rodríguez, "Viene a Juárez experto en asesinatos múltiples," Reforma, 4 June 1998, 10A; Huesos en el desierto, 125 ff.

139 Huesos en el desierto, 129.

140 Ibid., 130–31.

141 Butler, Precarious Life, 35.

142 González Rodríguez, Huesos en el desierto, Prólogo V. See also José Calvo, Derecho y narración: Materiales para una teoría y crítica narrativista del Derecho (Barcelona: Ariel, 1996).

143 González Rodríguez and Driver, "Una entrevista con Sergio González Rodríguez," 140.

144 Driver, "Cultural Production and Ephemeral Art," 104.

145 Ibid., 106.

146 González Rodríguez, Huesos en el desierto, 257.

147 Ibid., 284.

148 Ibid., 286.

149 Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (2004. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2012; repr., 8), 470.

150 Ibid.

151 "Sergio González Rodríguez bajo el huracán," in Entre paréntesis, ed. Ignacio Echeverría (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2004), 215.

152 Ibid.

153 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848. Wien: Sozialistische LinksPartei, 2000), 14.

154 Waltraud Queiser Morales, “The War on Drugs: A New US National Security Doctrine?,” Third World Quarterly 11, no. 3 (1989): 147 ff.

155 Astorga, El siglo de las drogas, 143–51; Froylán Enciso, Nuestra historia narcótica: Pasajes para (re)legalizar las drogas en México (Ciudad de México: Debate, 2015), 123–26.

156 Juan Villoro, "La alfombra roja," Proceso, no. 1735, 31 January 2010, 27.

157 See Franz Kafka, In der Strafkolonie (1919. Göttingen: De Gruyter, 2015).

158 Villoro, "La alfombra roja," 26; Jean-François Lyotard, "La prescription," Rue Descartes, no. 1/2 (1991): 244.

159 See, for example, Rea and Ferri, La Tropa, 251 ff; and Ana Lucía Juárez Armenta, Jorge Luis Amaya Lule, and Marion Rouillé Saba, "Huellas imborrables: Desapariciones, torturas y asesinatos por instituciones de seguridad en México 2016-2017," (Ciudad de México: Comisión Mexicana de Defensa y Promoción de los Derechos Humanos, 2018).

160 Williams, The Mexican Exception, 153.

161 See above, note 26.

162 Zavala, "Delirios de interpretación," 188–19; Los cárteles no existen, 21–22; Astorga, El siglo de las drogas, 203–04.

163 Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen: Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien (1932. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2002).

164 Zavala, "Delirios de interpretación," 124; Los cárteles no existen, 30 ff.

165 See Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010).

166 Williams, The Mexican Exception, 154.

167 Jacques Rancière, La mésentente: Politique et philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1995), 31.

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Notes on contributors

Luis Gómez Romero

Luis Gómez Romero migrated from Mexico to Australia in June 2013 to join the School of Law at the University of Wollongong, where he is currently a Senior Lecturer in Jurisprudence and Human Rights, and a member at the Legal Intersections Research Centre.