Emotional Violence and Culture in Mexico

This collection of essays rethinks the way the connections between culture and emotional violence in Mexico can be understood. A key element that in recent times has forged the way Mexico has been viewed both at home and abroad; direct, and indirect references to physical violence in Mexico are abundant: drug-trafficking, femicide, the escape and capture of notorious criminals involved with actors and television artists are points of reference and reflection. Recently, scholars and activists who focus on Mexican violence have underlined the disappearance of the 43 students from a teaching college in Ayotzinapa, Mexico in the fall of 2014 as a landmark moment. Before that, these groups showed concern for the violence surrounding the 1968 student movement and massacre. Both events heavily underline the multiple forms of emotional violence connected to the death and disappearance of Mexico’s youth. Those events from 1968 were greatly debated by intellectuals in Mexico. Among the ideas exchanged at that time, one point considered a key question: the origin of violence in Mexico. Nobel Prize winning intellectual, Octavio Paz, argued that the massacre of students was part of a cycle of violence that is intimately linked to Mexican history. This view portrays Mexican violence as an inevitable ritualistic sacrifice of human life that was accepted by many, though this outlook that depicts Mexican life as an element of little value and its government as draconian was also strongly disputed by others. This present collection of essays draws upon findings from a Mexican research unit that studies violence in Mexico, a selection of international scholars, and one of the well-documented opponents to Paz’s theory regarding the repeated and circular presence of violence in Mexico: Elena Poniatowska; to offer new ideas regarding the recent portrayal of emotional violence in Mexico. Raymond William’s writings on the dominant, the residual and the emergent offer an additional theoretical framework to guide this volume. This study will evidence how literature, art, and other cultural and historical manifestations conceive violence in Mexico to understand the extent to which there is residual alignment with the cyclical portrayal of violence promoted by Paz and others and the extent to which there is an emergent cultural alternative, a model promoted by Elena Poniatowska’s method for understanding Mexico’s troubled relationship with emotional violence.

As the strong presence of researchers from the Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas might suggest, this project was originally forged in Mexico. Within the faculty of arts at that university one of the co-editors: Maritza M. Buendía, is one of the coordinators of a research unit that studies the intersections between violence and culture in Latin America. In addition to Buendía, our contributors Gonzalo Lizardo and Rita Vega are two of the strongest researchers within that unit. During Nathanial Gardner’s visiting professorship at the Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas in the spring of 2015 he too came in contact with the discussions on culture and violence in Mexico at that university. It was during that time that the co-editors conceived the idea of an edited volume. Nathanial Gardner brought to the project, both the strong UK-based scholars of Mexican Studies: Victoria Carpenter, Lloyd Davies, and Christopher Harris and was also able to secure the strategic contribution and respectability that Elena Poniatowska brings to the volume.

When Elena Poniatowska was approached to participate in this project she was immediately drawn to it and has underlined the relevance of a discussion on violence and culture in Mexico. As her contribution she has offered a piece from her major study on marginality in Mexico: Fuerte es el silencio because it draws attention to the fact that the recent disappearances in Mexico are indeed a part of a pattern of the vanishing of political opponents and other members of the opposition in Mexico that until very recently received relatively little critical attention. Though her thoughts regarding the mechanisms and patterns of emotional violence in Mexico are extremely relevant to our central argument, we also recognize that this landmark piece is widely available in Spanish; hence, we...