Artful Assassins: Murder as Art in Modern Mexico (review)

Violence is a foundational building block of the modern Mexican nation as political entity and imagined community. Artful Assassins is an intriguing exploration of how post-revolutionary crime narratives and the plastic arts have responded to this modern identity. Sánchez convincingly argues that in the paintings and sculptures, five novels and three films studied “[a]ssassination and murder are acts that simultaneously delineate and transcend the symbolic boundaries of the nation” (2). Beyond inclusion in a genre, what all of the post-revolutionary works have in common is that murder and assassination (the same word in Spanish, used more or less interchangeably in the English translation) are ways to maintain an established order and, moreover, an aesthetic process intended to provoke contemplation of national ideologies.

Beginning with film from the 1940s, Artful Assassins offers a “panoramic vision” of those moments where both “intellectual” and “massified” art addressed its own relationship to an “institutionalized revolution.” Dialoguing with previous scholarly investigations of crime narrative by a number of critics, Carl D. Malmgren, Amelia S. Simpson, and Glen S. Close among others, Sánchez departs from these studies by not directly addressing any structural or generational questions. Intentionally avoiding how the detective or neopolicíaca novel is related to established genre conventions or a canon, Artful Asassins focuses almost exclusively on the way the particular narrations make use of violence as a national institution. A fundamental aspect of this discussion is how crime novels and national art occupy a hybrid space where they are simultaneously “high” and “low” cultural creations. By using a “massified” form, the crime novel, to make an erudite statement about nationality, the case studies are indicative of larger stylistic and critical trends that point to a fundamental duality of Mexican nationality: “destroyer and creator, counterrevolutionary and revolutionary, Mexican and non-Mexican” (7). On the theoretical level, the analysis of Artful assassins draws primarily from cultural theorists Tzvetan Todorov, Néstor García Canclini, and Benedict Anderson. The conclusion emphasizes a circularity of movement between pre- and post- revolutionary Mexico City that ultimately points to the state’s failure to assimilate to a fully modern nation.

The strongest analysis is found in Chapter One, “Before Mexican Crime Fiction.” In the well investigated discussion of national culture and the muralist movement, Sánchez argues that works like David Alfaro Siqueiros’ Del porfirismo a la Revolución documented a moment of common history of institutional violence which allowed for Anderson’s homogeneous imagined community and common time. In the chapters that follow, fictional “national” crimes, rather than meditate on or recreate historical acts, are analogous to the violence committed by a strong and violent patriarchal system as representative of the Mexican state. Moreover, as the institutionalized revolution devolved and fragmented through time, it was likewise reflected throughout the arts. In Chapter Three, the discussion of Cosa fácil (1977) by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, and the piece Zapata o Viva Zapata, ¡Cabrones! (1989–1933) by Alberto Gironella is an especially thought provoking analysis of how the construction of gaze is related to the authenticity of representation of the idealized intentions and lived realities of the Revolution.

Although all of the chapters offer valuable perspectives on the novels and films under consideration, in a few circumstances the analysis felt incomplete. For example, Chapter Two aligns President Manuel Ávila Camacho’s effort to modernize Mexico with capitalism and urbanization (37). One of the paintings included in the chapter, La Ciudad de México visto desde el monumento de la Revolución, by Juan O’Groman, is a fascinating example of the mapped “face” of the growing metropolis through its cartographic, economic, and human scales framed within historical contexts. Although Sánchez sets up an urban reading of the two crime novels included, Ensayo de un crimen and El hombre sin rostro, he directs the analysis to how the novelized murders reflect and criticize the discursive “face” of the government in terms of its gendered and patriarchal...