Modernity at Gunpoint: Firearms Politics and Culture in Mexico and Central America by Sophie Esch (review)

Sophie Esch’s Modernity at Gun Point: Firearms, Politics and Culture in Mexico and Central America (2018) is a text that “works to bring the critical study of weaponry into the realm of the humanities” (Esch 18). In order to do this, Esch approaches the firearm as a cultural object and mobilizes a wide spread of methodologies and theoretical perspectives to achieve this. Singularly, the text approaches Mexico and Central America, two regions that, as the text notes, while next to each other, are rarely studied together (although there is a growing body of work doing this, especially concerning the contemporary political impasse that encompasses the US, Mexico and Central America).

The text does a fair job in expanding upon the complicated relationship between Mexico and different Central American countries in different periods. The analysis of Mexico and its firearm culture is detailed and includes important discussions on gender and literary critique. It also focuses on Nicaragua and its cultural production in connection with the firearm during the 1980s revolutionary period, but discussion beyond this only scrapes the surface of the rest of the Central American conflicts. The decision to focus on Mexico and Nicaragua is a logical one. Afterall, these two are “successful revolutions” in that they both took over the state to different effects. In the last chapter, the text returns to an analysis of Mexico and the Narco complimented by an epilogue. It would have been interesting to see Esch’s methodology approaching the Maras, and their symbols and weapons in relation and connection with the Mexican Narco. Most importantly, perhaps, the text provides a unique approach and perspective to visualize Mexico, Central America and their cultural products.

Symbolically, Esch reads the firearm as artifact (to highlight the sociocultural meaning of their use), trope (as it moves from function to a metaphorical meaning) and prop (as removed from its deadly function to become a prop for a performance). In addition to this perspective. The author notes that the firearm holds three material values: a functional value—as tool of death, an economic value—as produced commodity, and a spectral value— as what remains of the object once it is gone. These three material values drive the analytical perspectives in each of the book chapters and intersect with the symbolical values in interesting ways. The six chapters are organized both historically and geographically. The originality of the approach is certainly the book’s strength as it underscores the firearm as “a key artifact of political struggles in Mexico and Central America” (208).

The first and second chapters of the text focus on revolutionary Mexico. As in the rest of the text, Esch approaches narrative and song. This chapter looks at Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho to expose how firearms become personal and holding one, empowering. Recalling the iconic image of the revolutionary draped in cartridge belts, Esch explores how the novel simultaneously abstracts and visualizes the common man. As such, wearing cartridge belts provided the followers of Villa a political voice. In the same fashion, although not often perceived as political subjects in the time period, women mimicked the cartridge belts with rebozos pointing to a type of female agency in the face of an absence of that agency. What is left, however, is the image of the soldadera. The soldadera, as Esch recalls from the corrido “Juana Gallo” or “la chamuscada” will remain in the Mexican imaginary eventually inspiring films with those titles. By reading the intersections and inability of women in Cartucho to have and use guns, and instead be at their mercy (and therefore at the mercy of the men that hold them), Esch notes that instead of participating as actors of violence “in Cartucho, women participate by becoming the storytellers of the revolution” effectively establishing themselves as the archivists of the revolution (69). Among corridos and cartridge belts crossed over the chest, images of Villa, Zapata, Soldaderas, Letrados, Insurgentes and...