The Transmedia Lives of the Female Narcotrafficker

• In Event: Mediating the Mexican Drug War: Narcos, Culture, Media, and Violence

Abstract

In the recent saturation of drug war imagery, the archetypal narcotrafficker tends to be an overly violent, boisterous male. Yet actual drug cartels include plenty of women (Carey, 2014). The proliferation of fictional female drug traffickers provide a corrective to this imbalance, but these contradictory figures often further the essentially masculinized ethos of the drug wars even as they offer new gender dynamics in their fictions.

In this presentation, I examine the discursive and performative work of the figure of the female narcotrafficker in her multiple mediated contexts by considering three distinct examples: Elena Sanchez in the Hollywood film Savages (2012), Teresa Mendoza in the telenovela La Reina del Sur (2011), and “La Güera” Mendoza in the straight-to-video La Güera Mendoza (2005). These characters simultaneously build upon the characteristics of real life traffickers, depict varying archetypes of female roles (seductress, femme fatale, grieving mother), and represent contradictory ideals about gender empowerment (woman succeeding in a man’s world yet betrayed by her emotions or familial duties). The star appeal that each actress — Salma Hayek, Kate del Castillo, Alicia Encinas — holds in her respective industrial context bestows their roles with a popular appeal that exceeds the constraints of the drug trafficker character, making her alluring to audiences not usually included in narcomedia. Though fictional, these figures embody both the real life violence women constantly suffer under narcotrafficking as well as the emancipatory potential that a life of drug dealing promises for women of certain social classes. Accounting for the paradoxes personified by these figures provides valuable insights on the politicized intersections between gender, class, culture, and the contemporary drug wars in Mexico.

Author

• Juan Llamas-Rodriguez