From Narcoliterature to Narratives of Migration, or the Limits of Narrating Violence in Contemporary Mexican Literature

In the mid-2000s, the war on drugs became the dominant discourse in public debates about violence in Mexico. This discourse allowed the emergence and consolidation of narcoliterature as one of the main modes of representation to make sense of the widespread rise of violence in Mexico. As critics have pointed out, the inauguration of the cultural and political imaginary brought about by the war on drugs provided the Mexican state with the representational coordinates to justify the militarization of the country and to rationalize it as the only possible and logical strategy to confront the ever-elusive cartels. Within this context, in this article, I take the political and aesthetic coordinates characteristic of narcoliterature to argue that recent Mexican narratives on or about undocumented migration engage with violence within the representational coordinates and imperatives of the war on drugs as their horizon of ideological intelligibility. This, I argue, dehistoricizes the migrant struggle in Mexico, disconnecting it from the social and political contexts that intensified the forcible displacement of historically subordinated communities in Central America and Mexico. In this sense, I suggest that cultural and literary criticism must engage with contemporary migration narratives in Mexico as a space to reflect not only on the ongoing crises of governance and sovereignty in Mexico but, more importantly, to reveal how displacement, forced migration, and the precarization of life and labor are central to and constitutive to neoliberalism