Senderos de violencia: Latinoamérica y sus narrativas armadas ed. by Oswaldo Estrada (review)

The disquieting and persevering occurrence of violent acts in our contemporary world calls for volumes such as Senderos de violencia: Latinoamérica y sus narrativas armadas, so that, unlike the local societies described in it, we do not look away from problems that affect all of us. The questions posed by its editor, Oswaldo Estrada, is how violence can be narrated and, more importantly, how its cultural representation can go "más allá" (15). This question is also addressed, at a second level, to academia itself. In this sense, in most articles, there is a serious attempt, on the one hand, to denounce the political forces' responsibility in the crimes committed and, on the other hand, to look into the "subjective" dimension of violence (Žižek). In line with this second approach, which is "por así decirlo más humano" (16), the compilation includes five essays by well-known writers: Juan Villoro, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Diego Trelles Paz, Lina Meruane, and Sandra Lorenzano that exemplify for the reader what the academic articles try to demonstrate through affect theory applied to the representation of violence.

Although most articles focus on the present and/or a recent past, the consideration of the continent's colonial past is imperative. The critical contributions are grouped in four sections mostly covering, but without being limited to, a specific country or region within Latin America. Juan Villoro introduces the first group of essays comparing how the new and older Mexican governments have dealt with the problem of narcotrafficking and how this is reflected through the media. Villoro describes what could be distinguished as mythologized narcoaesthetics and censures the distortion reproduced in several literary works because they mirror the political hegemonic discourse. Oswaldo Zavala coincides with Villoro's opinion and adduces the distorted representation of the narcoworld to the emphasis on "cadáveres sin historia." Zavala calls for the re-politization of the narconarratives as a way to contest the idea that the narcos' power escapes the state and its institutions. The next and the last articles redirect our attention towards the effect of narcoviolence on its most unprotected victims: women and immigrants respectively. With Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, Alejandra Márquez proves how the feminine protagonists studied are forced to take over the violence oppressing them in order to survive. On his part, the works analyzed by Ramón Ortigas underline the role of the political institutions from both sides of the border in the violence denounced. Finally, in his critical piece, Rafael Acosta combines the study of some popular corrido and vallenato songs with a Mexican and a Colombian novel. He demonstrates that the hegemonic forces, both the illegal armed groups and the state, make use of popular culture in order to impose and legitimate their authority.

The second section starts with Rodrigo Rey Rosa's personal account of his visit to Santa María de Nebaj and of the process of exhumation of the victims of Guatemala's civil war. Despite its bureaucratic and also practical difficulties, the exhumations are necessary because of the recovery of the historical memory that they signify. A similar process implies the rescue of the "Archivo de la Policía Nacional," event treated in Rey Rosa's El material humano, which, according to Alexandra Ortiz Wallner, gives the novelist a powerful locus of enunciation. Next, María del Carmen Caña Jiménez studies the "violencia latente" of a body of texts encompassing several Central American countries. Emanating from the neoliberal conditions of the risk society from which that type of violence arises, Caña Jiménez also highlights the presence of a series of security artifacts that creates alterity among individuals. The last essay of this section diverts the apparent concentration on Central America and focuses on Puerto Rico, but it also reunites several theoretical points already addressed in previous articles. With an eclectic selection of works, John Waldron proves how the docility traditionally attributed to Puerto Ricans is...