CHAIR: Cynthia Miller

Marco Antonio Carranza Rios 

The Victims in the Center: Exploring the Memory Processes of Narco-Violence Discourse in Netflix’ Somos.

In recent years, Netflix’s expansion strategy has included the exploitation of narratives that adjust to intramedial dynamics in the global market. One of them, that of “narco-violence”, has proven to be profitable for the platform. As part of this agenda, Netflix released Somos. (James Schamus, 2021), a story in series format, which adapts to fiction the “Allende massacre”, an important number of homicides perpetrated against the civilian population in Coahuila, Mexico, in 2011, and which were carried out by drug traffickers with the objective of punishing the betrayal of the town of Allende to the group that owns the “plaza”. The series was presented as a turn in the discourse of violence, because it sought to replace the frivolous approach centered on the perpetrators with a “realistic” story focused on the victims, therefore managing the testimonial archives of the survivors to focus on the affective experience of the event. I propose to evaluate these memory processes based on the theoric works of Astrid Erll, and thus show how this cultural product configures a remembrance that, contrary to its original pretensions to criticize the dominant narratives, complements the premises of the type of discourses to which it wanted to oppose. Thus, I pretend to analyze how the narrative composition and the media features of Somos. feed a collection of re-mediations that outline how conflictive environments should be perceived, felt, and faced –without leaving the margins of the transnational market and the hegemonic narratives of the violence.

Fernando Mino

Flames in the Dark. Remediations of the “Failed State” in Contemporary Mexican Cinema

During the last fifteen years, Mexican cinema has proposed, through a wide list of films with global resonance, narratives around drug trafficking violence and its effects on national society. Its acceptance in the transnational cinematographic market, mainly, has encouraged new filmmakers to take a look at this type of representation and has given the subject a growing resonance in the national public discussion. This corpus of films is nourished by a rhetoric of collective memory that, at the same time, observes and constructs a reality, mostly from an antagonistic perspective in which the State is permanently questioned and pointed out as deficient, omitted, or complicit in violence. Based on the review of the discourses of a series of films and the discussions that they have generated in their transnational and local reception, based on Erll's (2005, 2011) theoretical proposal, I propose to review the pluri-medial contexts in which this kind of film has been developed thematic trend of contemporary Mexican cinema and the ways in which it is constituted in a memory archive.

Janny Amaya Trujillo and Adrien Charlois Allende 

Archive Resonances. Plurimedial Dynamics of Fiction About Drug Trafficking in Mexico

Since the opening of transnational audiovisual markets, the expansion of Latin American fiction production has been anchored in formats that narrate the violence generated by drug trafficking. They began in Colombia, were exported to the region and their success served as a foundation for productions of the same type in Mexico and the United States. In this context, Netflix developed an expansion strategy based on original productions of this type, such as Narcos (2015) and Narcos: Mexico (2018). This success was accompanied by diverse resonances, associated with the sensitivities and positionings aroused by the archives of the experiences of violence represented by such fictions. These positions were based on two main perspectives: those that consider this type of products as apologies of drug trafficking and its associated lifestyle, and others that defend the representation of a violent reality, from which cultural production cannot be abstracted. In this paper we intend to approach a pluri-medial analysis (Erll, 2011) of fiction about drug trafficking, specifically the series Narcos: Mexico (2018). To do so, we will resort to an analysis of journalistic and political discourses, mobilized around the series, as an articulating axis of those positionings.