ON THE GLOBALIZED BANKS OF THE FUTURE: THE REVOLUTIONS OF CIUDAD JUÁREZ

Currently ranked among the most violent cities in the world, Ciudad Juárez has been portrayed historically either as the urban center of a problematic but celebrated cultural hybridity, or as an expansive slum of extreme poverty and senseless violence, in particular with the pervasive horrors of decades of femicides and drug-related murders. Out of these two radically different interpretative poles, a common understanding is articulated: that the people of Ciudad Juárez are defiant of the late capitalist, post-industrial social order, but at the same time they are its immediate victims. Within this paradoxical conceptualization, practices of autonomous cultural agency have emerged in recent works of literature, films, theater, journalistic investigations and cultural histories from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border during the last two decades. These interventions reveal specific dynamics of power constituting local and post-national hegemonic discourses on geopolitics. This presentation analyzes key works of novelists, poets, musicians, playwrights, filmmakers, journalists and cultural historians from both the U.S. and Mexico who think of the border as a privileged space for political, historical, economic and sociological subversion and change. Drawing from an interdisciplinary conceptual framework, I study counterhegemonic representations and narrations of Ciudad Juárez and the global implications of its past and present history as models of current and future forms of resistance.

Oswaldo Zavala is Professor of contemporary Latin American literature and culture at the College of Staten Island and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Drug Cartels Do Not Exist. Narco-trafficking and Culture in Mexico (Malpaso, 2018), A Return to Modernity. Genealogies of Latin American Literature at the Fin-de-Siècle (Albatros, 2017) and Insufferable Modernity: Roberto Bolaño in the Limits of Contemporary Latin American Literature (North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 2015). His article “Imagining the US-Mexico Drug War: The Critical Limits of Narconarratives” won the 2015 Humanities Essay Award of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Mexico Section. He co-edited with Viviane Mahieux the volume Tierras de nadie: el norte en la narrativa mexicana contemporánea (2012), and with José Ramón Ruisánchez the volume Materias dispuestas: Juan Villoro ante la crítica (2011).

Free.