Drugs, Violence and Latin America: Global Psychotropy and Culture

253 Pages·2021·5.383 MB·English

by  Joseph Patteson

Drugs, Violence and
Latin America
Global Psychotropy and
Culture
Joseph Patteson
Drugs, Violence and Latin America
Joseph Patteson
Drugs, Violence and
Latin America
Global Psychotropy and Culture
Joseph Patteson
Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Augustana University
Sioux Falls, SD, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-68923-0 ISBN 978-3-030-68924-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68924-7
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A
cknowledgments
I had a lot of help, direct and indirect, so I would like to express my appre-
ciation to Mom and Dad, who taught me how to love and how to ques-
tion—I’m not sure you need much more than that (Andrew, Thomas,
Mary, and Michelle helped, too). To Sonja Hernandez, who starts with
something shapeless and inert and ends with something that works—
something beautiful and strong. To Grover and Neko, for changing my
life dramatically for the better, and for the daily inspiration and challenge
of their thoughts and actions. And to my mother-in-law, Pam.
This project began with my doctoral work at the University of
Wisconsin–Madison, so big thanks are due to Rubén Medina, for continu-
ally being there with indispensable support and guidance while giving me
the space and freedom to develop my own ideas; to Glen Close, for going
above and beyond with detailed readings, challenging comments, and
dark humor; to Kata Beilin, for long-standing encouragement and theo-
retical inspiration to defamiliarize the familiar and denaturalize nature; to
Steve Hutchinson, for encouraging me from the dubious beginnings of
my graduate career, for inspiration, and, perhaps most importantly, for
laughter; to Kathryn Sanchez, for invaluable academic and professional
support and unparalleled generosity; and to Alberto Vargas for his ongo-
ing interest and encouragement. Also deserving of much appreciation for
their unfailing support are Severino Albuquerque, Pablo Ancos, Sarli
Mercado, Kristin Neumayer, Eve Pujol, Ron Sousa, and Alice Weldon.
Thanks to the staff of the Fryxell Humanities Center at Augustana
University, especially Karie Frank (gracias por los libros). Speaking of which,
this project would have been impossible without my suppliers, so thanks
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
to the staff of Memorial Library at UW–Madison and the folks at Mikkelsen
Library at Augustana—especially the indefatigable Becky Folkerts. Thanks
to my wonderful colleagues in the Department of Modern Foreign
Languages—Pilar Cabrera, Scott Fish, Monica Lhotzky, Stephan Lhotzky,
Michael Rueter, and Sam Ogdie—and across campus at Augustana.
A version of Chap. 5 was first published in A Contracorriente and a ver-
sion of Chap. 6 first appeared in Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos
(RCEH), and in addition to thanking those publications for granting per-
mission for that work to appear here, I would also like to express my
appreciation to my editors for their help in the publishing process, which
is arduous not only for authors: thanks to Greg Dawes at A Contracorriente
and Odile Cisneros at RCEH, and especially to Camille Davies and her
team at Palgrave Macmillan for making this process relatively painless. But
we wouldn’t want it to be too easy: thanks also to the anonymous review-
ers of the articles and the book for their stringent and insightful critiques.
Nor can research happen without material support. Thanks to the
Hemeroteca Nacional de México for use of their resources and to the fol-
lowing for financial support: the Department of Spanish and Portuguese,
the Institute for Regional and International Studies, and the Graduate
School of the University of Wisconsin–Madison; the Mellon Foundation
and the state of Wisconsin; and the Augustana Research and Artist Fund
and the Jane and Charles Zaloudek Faculty Research Fellowship fund at
Augustana University.
I also have to recognize the transformative friendship and over-the-top
generosity of José Luis and Tía Maricela, Bito, Eber, Tía Cleme y Manuel,
Tía Tonya, Tía Yolanda, Tía Pita, Doña Celia, and the whole family.
Thanks also to Luis Espíndola for music and eccentricity.
Thanks to Marcela Romero Rivera and Melissa Frost for being brilliant
and tireless collaborators and to all the colleagues who participated with
me in panels at the Congress of the Latin American Studies Association,
the Juan Bruce-Novoa Mexican Studies Conference at UC Irvine, and the
Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, as
well as the organizers of those conferences.
To Jean Franco, thanks for being inspiring in every sense imaginable.
To Julio Ramos, thanks for your challenging ideas and outsized support
and encouragement. Thanks to my students, especially those who took
Spanish 396 with me at Augustana: you always help me think through
these questions anew. Two students who worked with me as research assis-
tants deserve special recognition. Grace Wallin gave me invaluable
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii
assistance processing the literature on neuroscience and aesthetics, signal-
ing potential connections with my work. Carla Graciano deftly waded
through piles of high theory with me, pointing out linkages and offering
incisive and valuable critiques of my work.
Good ideas do not emerge in a vacuum, and anything of value in this
book was fertilized by everyone mentioned above, as well as Rafael Acosta,
Edith Beltrán, Brandon Bisbey, Adela Cedillo, Pedro García-Caro, Nicole
Fadellin, Emi Frerichs, Eric Hartman, Lizardo Herrera, Alex Kloth,
Cristian Kroll, Ruth Llana Fernández, Micah McKay, Alec Schumacher,
Sayak Valencia, Jaime Vargas Luna, and others who I have no doubt left
out, with apologies. Every defect of the present work, however, I jealously
guard as my own intellectual property.
c
ontents
1 Introduction 1
2 A Dialectics of Intoxication 25
3 Loaded and Exploded: Countercultural Travel and Its
Colonial Shadow 69
4 From Flower Power to Les fleurs du mal: la Onda literaria 101
5 High Crimes: Élmer Mendoza’s “Zurdo” Mendieta Series
and the Psychotropic Economy 125
6 Disturbing Innocence: Defamiliarizing Narco-violence
Through Child Protagonists in Fiesta en la Madriguera
and Prayers for the Stolen 149
7 Escape Velocity: Narcossism, Contagion, and
Consumption in Julián Herbert 173
8 Conclusion 207
ix
x CONTENTS
Bibliography 217
Index 235
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
When we contemplate grisly acts like the decapitation and public display
of corpses by criminal organizations, or mass murder and burial of “sus-
pected gang members” by security forces, whether as represented in the
news media, in government or NGO reports, or in fictionalized form in
novels or film, there is an understandable tendency to focus on the “sober-
ing” reality of this violence and to expect it to be represented through a
gritty, clear-eyed lens. The violence appears as the underside of an interna-
tional economic and political reality that is fueled by far-off intoxication, a
phenomenon separated from narco-violence by real or ideological barriers
of nation, class, race, and the nature of experience. The intoxicated experi-
ence of the drug user is held at arm’s length from the violence that rages
on the ground where drugs are produced or trafficked, to reinforce the
fact that the “drug problem” has been first and foremost a problem origi-
nating in the global North and that places like Mexico become caught
between the forces of economic demand and political pressure for milita-
rized interdiction that radiate out especially from the United States.
It seems almost distasteful, for example, to place representations of
such violence in dialog with the heady ruminations of those hedonistic,
self-indulgent, Western thinkers and writers whose dalliance with the
pharmakon have inspired so many literary flights of fancy. In addition to
the valid concern mentioned above, there is a resistance to considering the
role of intoxication in cultural production in the narco era because of per-
sistent attitudes about intoxication that are widespread across cultures and
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Switzerland AG 2021
J. Patteson, Drugs, Violence and Latin America,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68924-7_1