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  • Modernity at Gunpoint: Firearms, Politics, and Culture in Mexico and Central America by Sophie Esch
  • Carolyn Fornoff
Esch, Sophie. Modernity at Gunpoint: Firearms, Politics, and Culture in Mexico and Central America. U of Pittsburgh P, 2018. 284 pp.

Modernity at Gunpoint navigates the legacy of armed struggle and violence in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mexico and Central America by zooming in on a single object: the firearm. Through this object-oriented analysis, Sophie Esch carefully unpacks the divergent values that have been attached to the firearm over the last century. These values range from the functional, to the sociocultural, to the performative. At times, the firearm is simply a prop that signifies power. At other moments, it embodies the political presence of the subject that wields it. The weapon's allegorical significance as an emblem of liberation brushes up against its spectral resonances, the painful wounds and echoes that linger in its wake.

In her wide-ranging study, Esch considers an array of cultural objects, from the literary canon to photographs, songs, murals, and even Tumblr accounts. By casting a wide net, Esch crafts compelling chapters brimming with examples that make for an engaging read. She persuasively makes the case to expand analysis of armed struggle beyond the usual literary subjects. Songs and images inform and reinforce the values attached to weapons and revolution. The book's chronological structure flows naturally from the Mexican Revolution, to the Nicaraguan Sandinista Revolution, and concludes with a look at the contemporary moment, marked by the violence of the drug war.

Modernity at Gunpoint also makes an important intervention within Latin Americanist cultural analysis by bringing both Mexico and Central America into its purview. This comparative approach dramatizes the benefits of thinking about these [End Page 297] neighboring regions in tandem as geographically proximate spaces with distinct, yet mutually informing, regional struggles. Contemporary migratory flows and the interlocked nature of regional drug trade have, of course, thrown the relatedness of these regions into high relief. Yet scholars have been hesitant to do so in practice—a problem that Esch discusses in the introduction. Modernity at Gunpoint paves the way toward such comparative analysis. While her chapters largely compartmentalize the analysis of Mexico and Nicaragua, Esch constantly references the threads that bind them together, while also attending to the distinctive particularities of each case.

Chapters one and two focus on the protagonism of rifles and cartridges in the most violent period in Mexican history, the Revolution. The firearm was a central tool in this fight, as well as an observable indication of its wearer's political agency. Through lively analysis of corridos, photographs, and literary texts, Esch argues that, by wielding firearms, the revolutionary bola "became visible within the political arena," and affirmed its "presence as political subjects" (45). Indeed, the rifle operated as "the prosthesis for citizenship" (48). Esch pays close attention to the gendered meaning ascribed to these weapons. In Nellie Campobello's Cartucho, the rifle not only gives agency to the Revolution's "nobodies," but also functions as a trope of male violence, highlighting its dual role as an "empowering and traumatizing artifact" (51).

Chapter two is more limited in scope. Its zeros in on Martín Luis Guzmán's classic revolutionary novel, El águila y la serpiente (1928). Guzmán portrays Pancho Villa's pistol as a sign of revolutionary virility and aggression. Esch argues that, in this rendition, Villa is a cyborg, a man inseparable from his technology of choice. The pistol is an extension of his body—and the letrado interpellator views his cyborg tutor with eroticized fascination and terror. Esch is indebted to affect-oriented readings of the novel by Adela Pineda Franco and Horacio Legrás, and builds upon readings of the novel's pivotal episode, "La fiesta de las balas," as a cinematic rendering of aestheticized violence.

Chapters three and four pivot to consider the firearm in Sandinista discourse and postrevolutionary cultural production. The Sandinista mantra of "the people in arms" reimagined weapons to no longer be tools of State oppression, but to paradoxically signify the end of violence, brought about through violent means. With a rifle in hand, the New Man...

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