Introduction
1. Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
2. Adela Cedillo, “Intersections between the Dirty War and the War on Drugs in Northwestern Mexico (1969–1985),” PhD diss. (Madison: University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2019).
3. Translator’s note: The Spanish estado sin entrañas plays with the linguistic link between the terms entraña (or, entrails, insides, organs) and entrañable (or, endearing), thus creating a connection between flesh and care. The neologism visceraless is meant to similarly express both internal organs and a sense of a close, structural relationship. A visceral reaction to something is used to express not an intellectual feeling but a deeper, corporeal one. A Visceraless State is one that lacks a political acknowledgment of the human body and its individual subjectivity.
4. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).
5. Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (New York: Penguin Press, 2010).
6. Oswaldo Zavala, Los cárteles no existen: Narcotráfico y cultura en México (Barcelona: Malpaso, 2018).
7. Cavarero, Horrorism, 34.
8. Edmond Jabès, From the Desert to the Book: Dialogues with Marcel Cohen, trans. Pierre Joris (New York: Station Hill Press, 1990).
9. See, for example, Daniela Rea’s Nadie les pidió perdón (2016), Marcela Turati’s Fuego cruzado: Las víctimas atrapadas en la guerra del narco (2011), Federico Mastrogiovanni’s El asesino que no seremos (2018), and John Gibler’s I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us: An Oral History of the Attacks against the Students of Ayotzinapa (2017), and the collectively written Ayotzinapa: La travesía de las tortugas (2015).
10. Jacques Rancière, “The Intolerable Image,” in The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2011), 97.
11. Jacques Rancière, “The Paradoxes of Political Art,” in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. and ed. Steven Corcoran (London, New York: Continuum, 2010), 139.
12. Rancière, “The Misadventures of Critical Thought,” in The Emancipated Spectator, 49.
13. Rancière, “The Intolerable Image,” 103.
The Claimant
1. Luz María Dávila confronted President Felipe Calderón when he visited Ciudad Juárez on February 11, 2010. Journalist Sandra Rodríguez Nieto quoted her words in an article in El diario de Juárez, from which, in turn, I quoted them. Text in bold belongs to Luz María Dávila; text in italics to Sandra Rodríguez. The rest combines words, especially adjectives, from Ramón López Velarde’s poetry and my own writing.
The Visceraless State
1. Viviane Forrester, The Economic Horror, trans. Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1999).
War and Imagination
1. Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), 157.
2. Desai, The Inheritance of Loss, 158.
3. Andrés Molina Enríquez, Los grandes problemas nacionales (Mexico: Carranza e Hijos, 1909).
4. Francisco I. Madero, The Presidential Succession of 1910, trans. Thomas B. Davis (New York: P. Lang, 1990).
5. Mariano Azuela, The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution, trans. Sergio Waisman (New York: Penguin Classics, 2008).
6. Nellie Campobello, Cartucho. Relatos de la lucha en el norte de México (Mexico: Ediciones integrales, 1931).
7. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 62-81.
8. Susan Sontag, et. al, “Tuesday, and After,” New Yorker (September 24, 2001).
9. Alessandro Baricco, An Iliad, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Knopf, 2006).
On Diary of Pain by María Luisa Puga
1. María Luisa Puga, Diario del dolor (Mexico: Alfaguara, 2004).
2. Puga, Diario, 37.
3. Puga, Diario, 90.
4. Puga, Diario, 22.
5. Puga, Diario, 35.
6. Puga, Diario, 53–54.
7. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004).
Tragic Agency
1. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).
2. John Drakakis and Naomi Conn Liebler, eds., “Introduction,” in Tragedy (New York: Longman, 1998), 2.
3. Drakakis and Liebler, “Introduction,” 3.
4. Karl Jaspers, Tragedy Is Not Enough, trans. Harald A. T. Reiche, Harry T. Moore, and Karl W. Deutsch (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), 57.
5. Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966), 202–3.
6. Williams, Modern Tragedy, 64.
7. Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock, eds., Social Suffering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), ix.
8. Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse, ed. Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 45.
I Won’t Let Anyone Say Those Are the Best Years of Your Life
1. Paul Nizan, Aden, Arabie, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968), 59.
2. Estos últimos años en Ciudad Juárez (Santa Fe, NM: Brown Buffalo Press, 2020). Unless otherwise noted, all quoted material in this chapter cite this work, originally written in Spanish, and translated into English by the author.
On 2501 Migrants by Alejandro Santiago
1. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1884, trans. Martin Milligan (Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub. House, 1959).
2. Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 3.
3. Marx, Economic, 108.
4. Emmanuel Levinas, “The Philosopher and Death,” in Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 163.
5. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 1990).
6. Laura Velasco Ortiz, “Agentes étnicos transnacionales: Las organizaciones de indígenas migrantes en la frontera México–Estados Unidos,” Estudios Sociológicos 20, no. 2 (May–August 2002): 335–69.
What Country Is This, Agripina?
1. Juan Rulfo, “Luvina,” The Plain in Flames, trans. Ilan Stavans (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 70.
2. Rulfo, “Luvina,” 70.
3. Rulfo, “Luvina,” 73.
4. Rulfo, “Luvina,” 73.
Desiccated Mermaids
1. Bernardino de Sahagún, General History of the Things of New Spain: Florentine Codex, trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe, NM, and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and University of Utah Press, 1982), 89.
2. José Antonio Trejo Sánchez and Emilio Gerardo Arriaga, “Memoria colectiva: Vida lacustre y reserva simbólica en el Valle de Toluca, Estado de México,” Convergencia 16, no. 50 (2009): 308.
3. Trejo Sánchez and Gerardo Arriaga, “Memoria,” 313.
The War We Lost
1. Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
2. Julio Scherer García, “Proceso en la guarida de ‘El Mayo’ Zambada,” Proceso, April 3, 2010, https://www.proceso.com.mx/106967/proceso-en-la-guarida-de-el-mayo-zambada.
3. Gabriela Warkentin, “El periodista, el capo y la foto,” El País, April 8, 2010, https://elpais.com/internacional/2010/04/08/actualidad/1270677607_850215.html.
The Neo-Camelias
1. Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Queen of the South, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2004).
1. Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres Volume I, trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e]), 164.
Mourning
1. Cristina Rivera Garza, “La vida precariat,” Letras libres, October 31, 2004, https://www.letraslibres.com/mexico/libros/la-vida-precaria.
2. Javier Sicilia, “Carta abierta a políticos y criminals,” Proceso, April 3, 2011, https://www.proceso.com.mx/266990/javier-sicilia-carta-abierta-a-politicos-y-criminales.
3. Judith Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004).
4. Butler, Precarious Life, 28.
5. Butler, Precarious Life, 21–22.
6. Butler, Precarious Life, 28.
7. Butler, Precarious Life, 22.
8. Butler, Precarious Life, 49.
Writing in Migration
1. Annie Ernaux, The Years, trans. Allison L. Strayer (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2017).
2. Lina Meruane, Volverse Palestina (Barcelona: Literatura Random House, 2015).
3. José Revueltas, Human Mourning, trans. Roberto Crespi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 62–63.
4. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012), 33.
Writing against War
1. Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2000), 79.
2. Christopher Hitchens, “Introduction,” Safe Area Goražde.
1. Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History,’” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, volume 4, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Others, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 401–11.
2. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
3. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
4. Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic Is a Portal,” Financial Times, April 3, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca.