Robert McKee Irwin

Arturo Chacón Castañón

Listening to Sicarios presents new insights into the lives of paid assassins of Mexicos drug trafficking syndicates from the perspectives of the assassins themselves. Based on an extraordinary series of ethnographic interviews carried out in the wake of the record levels of narcoviolence experienced in Ciudad Juarez between 2008 and 2012, this study analyzes the ways in which these young men interpret their actions across four key thematic axes: border infrastructures, youth and responsibility, masculinity and sentiment, and ethics: good vs. evil. It argues that sicarios follow a career path within a criminal corporate infrastructure that is especially robust in Mexican border cities. It also explores how sicarios understand youthful innocence in relation to adult accountability in the realm of violence that is frequently meted out by young men on other young men. It then analyzes sicarios expressions of feelings of power that may boost their sense of virility, as well as feelings of fear and regret that imply weakness. Finally, it examines how sicarios defend their personal integrity in the face of a public discourse that views their acts as savage.

Narcoviolence in Ciudad Juárez, 2008-2012

Listening to Sicarios

Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints investigates cultural icons of the late nineteenth century from Mexico's largely unstudied northwest borderlands, present-day Sonora, Baja California, and western Chihuahua. Robert McKee Irwin looks at popular figures such as Joaquín Murrieta, the gold rush social bandit; Lola Casanova, the anti-Malinche, whose marriage to a Seri Indian symbolized a forbidden form of mestizaje; and la Santa de Cabora, a young faith healer who inspired armed insurgencies and was exiled to Arizona. Cultural icons such as Murrieta, Lola Casanova, and la Santa de Cabora are products of intercultural dialogue, Irwin reveals, and their characterizations are unstable. They remain relevant for generations because there is no consensus regarding their meanings, and they are weapons in struggles of representation in the borderlands. The figures studied here are especially malleable, he argues, because they are marginalized from the mainstream of historiography. A timely analysis, Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints challenges current paradigms of border studies and presents a rich understanding of the ways in which cultural icons influence people's minds and lives. Robert McKee Irwin is associate professor of Spanish at the University of California, Davis, and the author of Mexican Masculinities (Minnesota, 2003).

Cultural Icons of Mexico's Northwest Borderlands

Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints

The rhetoric of "Mexicanness" makes constant use of images of masculinity, though it does so in shifting and often contradictory ways. Robert McKee Irwin's work follows these shifts from the male homosocial bonding that was central to notions of national integration in the nineteenth century, to questioning of gender norms stirred by science and scandals at the turn of the century, to the virulent reaction against gender chaos after the Mexican revolution, to the association of Mexicanness with machismo and homophobia in the literature of the 1940s and 1950s -- even as male homosexuality was established as an integral part of national culture. As the first historical study of how masculinity and, particularly, homosexuality were understood in Mexico in the national era, this book not only provides "queer readings" of major canonical texts of the period but also uncovers a variety of unknown texts from queer Mexican history. Book jacket.

Mexican Masculinities

Mónica Szurmuk

Diccionario de estudios culturales latinoamericanos

This book investigates cultural icons of the late nineteenth century from Mexico's largely unstudied northwest borderlands, present-day Sonora, Baja California, and western Chihuahua. A timely analysis, Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints challenges current paradigms of border studies and presents a rich understanding of the ways in which cultural icons influence people's minds and lives.

Sylvia Molloy

A man masquerading as a lesbian in Spain's Golden Age fiction. A hermaphrodite's encounters with the Spanish Inquisition. Debates about virility in the national literature of postrevolutionary Mexico. The work of contemporary artists Reinaldo Arenas, Severo Sarduy, and María Luisa Bemberg. The public persona of Pedro Zamora, former star of MTV's The Real World. Despite an enduring queer presence in Hispanic literatures and cultures, most scholars have avoided the specter of sexual dissidence in the Spanish-speaking world. In Hispanisms and Homosexualities, editors Sylvia Molloy and Robert Irwin bring together a group of essays that advance Hispanic studies and gay and lesbian studies by calling into question what is meant by the words Hispanic and homosexual. The fourteen contributors to this volume not only offer queer readings of Spanish and Latin American texts and performances, they also undermine a univocal sense of homosexual identities and practices. Taking on formations of national identity and sexuality; the politics of visibility and outing; the intersections of race, sexuality, and imperial discourse; the status of transvestism and posing; and a postmodern aesthetic of camp and kitsch, these essays from both established and emerging scholars provide a more complex and nuanced view of related issues involving nationality, ethnicity, and sexuality in the Hispanic world. Hispanisms and Homosexualities offers the most sophisticated critical and theoretical work to date in Hispanic and queer studies. It will be an essential text for all those engaged with the complexities of ethnic, cultural, and sexual subjectivities. Contributors. Daniel Balderston, Emilie Bergmann, Israel Burshatin, Brad Epps, Mary S. Gossy, Robert Irwin, Agnes I. Lugo-Ortiz, Sylvia Molloy, Oscar Montero, José Esteban Muñoz, José Quiroga, Rubén Ríos Avila, B. Sifuentes Jáuregui, Paul Julian Smith

Robert McKee Irwin

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