Mexican Victims, or Against the Ordinariness of Violence

• In Event: Crimen, inseguridad y política en México (parte I)

Abstract

This paper analyzes Mexican violence as portrayed in literary fictions from the perspective of women and youths as victims. The scope is to cast light on textual representations that adopt innovative rhetorical elements to narrate phenomena of violence in Mexico from the victim’s perspective. I examine three features common to three such novels: how these two social groups of women and youths simultaneously embody the protagonists and the sufferers of these narratives; how they experience violence in a direct or indirect way; and how they interrogate themselves on the reasons behind violent acts to which they are subject. The novels analyzed in this paper—Élmer Mendoza’s El amante de Janis Joplin, Sara Uribe’s Antígona Gonzalez, and Fernanda Melchor’s Falsa liebre─tackle everyday violence in Mexico by employing rhetorical and narratological strategies like imaginary voices, echoes from the past, and oneiric representations, to name but a few. But by combining women and youths as subjects-narrators-victims with these strategies of unconventional languages, these novels stand out from the plethora of literary works that deal with Mexican violence in more conventional ways.
I draw two significant conclusions from the analysis of these novels. First, they give voice to women and youngsters─the main victims of Mexico’s everyday violence who are, at the same time, often absent or secondary in narratives of violence. Second, these literary works emphasize the urgency of finding new ways to talk about these phenomena in order to combat the sense of habit to which widespread Mexican violence seems to be condemned.

Author

• Matteo Cantarello, College of William and Mary