Violent Tales: Cultural Representation in Colombia and Mexico

In recent years, violence has become the primary lens through which Mexico and Colombia are seen. The long-standing conflict between leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitary groups, and the army in Colombia; the all-encompassing cartel-driven violence in some regions of Mexico; the violent dynamics that structure the journeys of migrants searching for opportunities in the mythic North, including the thousands of women and unaccompanied minors who face sexual and physical abuse in their quest for a better a life; and, especially, the international profile of the War on Drugs, have made violence the double synecdoche of representation for both Colombia and Mexico. This dynamic has created a lucrative market hungry for what Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola describes as the perpetuation of "the commercialization of the margins and [the] promotion [of] the exoticization of a 'raw' Latin American reality" that caters to an audience eager to consume cultural products that have "something new, something light …, but with a certain 'cultural weight'" (43). Writers, intellectuals, and artists have found themselves in the midst of a complex dynamic that narrows their scope while at the same time expands their markets, encouraging the exploration of dire social and political realities in ways that often flatten or even foreclose analysis.

The collection of articles in this special issue critically engages with such dynamics. The contributors examine the ways in which recent art forms and cultural products—ranging from literature, film, graphic novels, art, journalism, popular culture, and mass media—deal with the multiple forms of violence that have historically shaped Mexican and Colombian culture. From a variety of perspectives and theoretical approaches, authors contribute to the understanding of the local and global implications of representational practices that attempt to explain, narrate, and/or process violence. The articles analyze how cultural production grapples with the imprint that violence has left on the symbolic configuration of both nations in recent decades. They do so by engaging in discussions about such topics as the tensions between institutional and systemic violence and grass-roots political resistance; the intersection of violence, representation, and gender; and the role of literature, film, art, and mass media in the politics of memory.

Colombia and Mexico are far from being the only two countries in the hemisphere impacted by severe violence in the last few decades. From the brutal dictatorships of the Southern Cone to the bloody civil wars of Central America fueled by the Cold War, the twentieth century in Latin America was convulsed and bloody. The aggressive neocolonialism of the neoliberal reforms implemented in the 1980s, combined with predatory environmental policies and widespread corruption, have resulted in extreme contrasts. The precarization of life and labor for the vast majority of the region's inhabitants coupled with the production of massive amounts of wealth for local elites and transnational companies have made Latin America one of the most unequal regions in the world. The same factors have also produced unstable and increasingly authoritarian governments from both the right and the left, as well as sociopolitical conflicts that are too often resolved through violence, constantly putting the lives and livelihoods of the growing numbers of vulnerable peoples at risk, including, among others, indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, women, and sexual and gender minorities.

Indeed, Colombia and Mexico are not even the most violent countries in the region. In 2016, Colombia had the seventh highest homicide rate in Latin America, behind El Salvador, Venezuela, Honduras, Jamaica, Guatemala, and Brazil; and Mexico followed in ninth place, after Puerto Rico (Gagne). However, due to the overexposure of the War on Drugs in the global symbolic and political imaginary, Mexico and Colombia have been grouped together in ways that set them apart from other countries in the region, establishing an almost indexical relation between them and the violence and corruption that are perceived to plague the hemisphere. Expressions like "the Colombianization of Mexico" attest to the degree to which both nations have been identified with violence and drugs. This wording—used in specialized publications, mass media and popular culture alike—places Colombia and Mexico in a shared temporality...