Narratives of Vulnerability in Mexico's War on Drugs

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

   PDF

2. Introduction. Vulnerability and Victimhood in Mexico’s War on Drugs: A Human Rights Crisis

   • Raúl Diego Rivera Hernández

   Pages 1-26

3. Vulnerabilities and Resistances in Transit: Narratives of Central American Colonial Transmigrants

   • Raúl Diego Rivera Hernández

   Pages 27-82

4. “Nos están matando!”: Professional Reflexivity on Violence Against Mexican Journalists in Contemporary Chronicles

   • Raúl Diego Rivera Hernández

   Pages 83-132

5. Dissident Mourners: Victims’ Political Participation in Human Rights Activism

   • Raúl Diego Rivera Hernández

   Pages 133-189

6. Conclusion

   • Raúl Diego Rivera Hernández

   Pages 191-200

7. Back Matter

   Pages 201-211

   PDF

This book explores the current human rights crisis created by the War on Drugs in Mexico. It focuses on three vulnerable communities that have felt the impacts of this war firsthand: undocumented Central American migrants in transit to the United States, journalists who report on violence in highly dangerous regions, and the mourning relatives of victims of severe crimes, who take collective action by participating in human rights investigations and searching for their missing loved ones. Analyzing contemporary novels, journalistic chronicles, testimonial works, and documentaries, the book reveals the political potential of these communities’ vulnerability and victimization portrayed in these fictional and non-fictional representations. Violence against migrants, journalists, and activists reveals an array of human rights violations affecting the right to safe transit across borders, freedom of expression, the right to information, and the right to truth and justice. 

• War on Drugs
• Enforced Disappearance in Mexico
• Migrants and the US-Mexico Border
• Narratives of Vulnerability
• Journalists
• Central American Migrants in Transit
• latin american politics

“This book is a hopeful one in its recuperation of the multiple practices of collective and creative resistance that oppose and persist during the neocolonial war in contemporary Mexico. Diego Rivera Hernández has composed with sensitivity a comprehensive mosaic of fiction and non-fiction texts of various genres, which are criss-crossed by the voices of migrants, journalists, and victims of extreme violence, all of whom have become this country’s moral conscience. Without straying from critical analysis, the author has produced a book against amnesia, as it reminds us that memory contains the seeds of a fairer horizon.” (Carolina Robledo Silvestre, Conacyt-CIESAS Mexico City) 

“In Narratives of Vulnerability in Mexico’s War on Drugs, Raúl Diego Rivera Hernández explores alternative ways of articulating the dominant narratives of the ‘War on Drugs’ promulgated by the United States in the early 1970s that unleashed violence both on Afro-Americans in the U.S. and on communities throughout Latin America. By focusing on the ongoing migrations, disappearances, and human rights violations precipitated by the ongoing ‘war’ that covers for rapacious neoliberalism, this book tells another, necessary story. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, this is essential reading for those concerned with the urgent issues of hemispheric migration and human rights.” (Diana Taylor, Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish, New York University, USA) 

“Narratives of Vulnerability in Mexico’s War on Drugs stands apart from a recent wave of academic books on organized crime and anti-drug policy by exploring the often-overlooked potential for political engagement and resistance of those most vulnerable to the country’s unprecedented violence: migrants, journalists and activists. Through a convincing multidisciplinary examination of literary works, journalistic chronicles and documentary film, Diego Rivera Hernández goes beyond the reiterative approaches to “narcoculture” and its mythology of “cartels,” “jefes” and “sicarios.” Instead, his book sheds light on empowered victims that become political subjects as they confront the complex crisis of human rights framed by the militarization of the shared “national security” agenda propelled by both the U.S. and Mexican governments. This is a thoughtful investigation about the ability of courageous people to reject reductive narratives of victimization and counteract the horrors of state violence, transnational crime and precarity by mobilizing to enact social change and seek transitional justice.” (Oswaldo Zavala, City University of New York, USA author of Los cárteles no existen. Narcotráfico y cultura en México)

 

• Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Villanova University, Villanova, USA

  Raúl Diego Rivera Hernández

Raúl Diego Rivera Hernández is an Associate Professor at Villanova University. He has Edited Del Internet a las calles: #Yosoy132, una opción alternativa de hacer política (2016). His research chiefly focuses on cultural representations of the human rights crisis and the War on Drugs in Mexico.   

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