Resumen de Cartel mapping, narco-panopticism, and ecology in contemporary mexican narratives of drug trafficking and violence
In this essay, I read the discourse of territorial control, population surveillance, and border security from a fundamentally ecological perspective. I have selected three novels and one short story as the textual basis for the following analysis. All of these works are structured around a single character, either a paid assassin or a drug smuggler, and all four imagine the open spaces of northern Mexico as places of both transit and surveillance. Although organized crime and drug cartels bring to mind large networks of individuals working in consort, the works of narconarrative studied here feature individuals existing in isolation from both their cohorts and the larger society. In their efforts to stalk a victim or evade detection, both the sicario and the smuggler produce much of the genre's dramatic force. The depiction of these characters also contributes to the literary formation of landscapes of surveillance and counter surveillance resulting in an image of both human society and the natural environment under constant observation by the military, police and cartels. In the process, these works also reveal the influence of semiotic practices typically found in contemporary journalism. One element in particular, the cartel map, has become a common visual tool to illustrate the regions of Mexico that have fallen under the control of organized crime. The mapping of cartels in order to construct geographical spaces of power, mobility and surveillance informs a type of narco-panoptic literary discourse that I analyze in the following pages of this essay. After surveying works by Elmer Mendoza and Bernardo Fernandez, I will conclude this essay with an extended analysis of Eduardo Antonio Parra's novel, Nostalgia de la sombra, a work of narrative fiction exceptionally rich in its integration of violence, surveillance and ecology
