Narrative Flight: Comics, Cartels, and Crowds Across 40 Years of Crisis in Mexico

In 2015, drug trafficker Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s escape from prison provoked a fan frenzy that played out in public demonstrations as well as social and mass media. In this article, I argue that this episode must be understood as symptomatic of a long-term transformation of Mexico’s public sphere. The waves of economic crisis that began in the late 1970s unmoored personal desires and aspirations from the promises of the nation-state. The public sphere filled with dispersive tendencies; fiction and fantasy began to take unpredictable directions. To grasp this unmooring, I propose the idea of crowd-texts: circulating texts that interpellate their readers as fundamentally crowd-like in their unruly flight from the narrative teleologies that had sutured the nation. The first crowd-text I examine is a 1982 issue of the comic book La Familia Burrón (The Burrón Family). Set in the year of Mexico’s most emblematic currency devaluation, the comic puts an at once ironic and utopian spin on the crisis. In the 1990s and 2000s, similar dispersive tendencies can be found in the narcocorrido, a popular ballad-form dedicated to the exploits of drug traffickers. These songs, I argue, took narrative flight into openly violent terrain, where the rising institution of the cartels could, for many, supplant the expired promises of the nation-state. By comparing comic book and narcocorridos as popular representations of Mexico’s economic and public security crises, I show how these texts interpellate their publics as dispersive crowds, thus revealing a deeper crisis in the progress-oriented temporality of the Mexican nation-state and its public sphere.