Mexican fiction turns drug kingpins into vicious vampires

Ideas53:59Mexico's Gothic Turn

Horror and noir stories are taking off in the Mexican literary world, and they come with a twist — setting them amid the recent violence plaguing the country.

"The figure of the monster always emerges in literature when things in society are bumpy," said recent University of Toronto PhD graduate Alejandro Soifer. 

He calls his thesis "Mexican Gothic: Narco Narratives, Necro Markets and Vampires with Machine Guns." It explores dozens of recent gothic, horror and crime fiction novels.

"The monstrous figure allows us to think about things that are horrible and try to process them, and make them more digestible," said Soifer, noting it's not surprising that this style of fiction is trending. 

The homicide rate in Mexico has tripled since 2006, when the Mexican government officially set out to eradicate drug-related activity in line with the U.S.-backed 'war on drugs' policy. 

The Mexican homicide rate is now 15 times higher than Canada's. And the Mexican government estimates about half the murders are directly linked to drug cartel violence. 

The Council on Foreign Relations reports more than 79,000 Mexicans have disappeared since 2006. The report primarily blames criminal organizations, with government forces also playing a role. 

Mexican vampires and colonialism

Soifer points to the work of Canadian-Mexican author Silvia Moreno-Garcia as a good example of contemporary Gothic fiction that addresses the complexity of violence in Mexico. Her 2016 novel Certain Dark Things merges fantastical horror with the rise of violence in the country. It's a story about narco-vampire turf wars in northern Mexico that have spilled into Mexico City.

"The [vampires] are a way for me to sublimate some of my fears," said Moreno-Garcia, who creates vampire clans in the novel to reflect real-world themes of ethnicity, colonialism, and international influence in drug trafficking.

"I'm taking a pretty fantastical approach to it," she said. "But essentially the problem that has been happening for a really long time because of the drug trade, it's not an issue created solely by Mexico. It's deeply, deeply connected to forces in the United States and in other parts of the world wanting these drugs, providing weapons, providing spaces for this trade to take place."

Moreno-Garcia addresses the enduring influence of colonization in Mexico's history, and the lingering social damage caused by European-based attitudes and resource extraction. Her most recent best-seller is aptly titled "Mexican Gothic."

"In fiction, you are able to explore trauma in ways that are more effective. And speculative fiction opens the gate to colouring outside of the borders of reality to draw upon some elements that you can't when you are just trying to do a photographic representation of the world."

For Soifer, Moreno-Garcia's use of traditional Gothic fiction tropes such as vampires, creepy castles, and an atmosphere of the uncanny fits into a wider trend.

"All the houses, all the manors, all these things you will find in a typical Gothic fiction from the 19th century of Europe, are being written in contemporary Mexico," said Soifer. "I thought, this is something weird! Why is this happening?"

His answer to this question depends on a controversial view of the fight against drug-related violence in Mexico. 

'Drug Cartels Do Not Exist'

The increase in popular fiction — from the popular Netflix series Narcos to more obscure low-budget horror films like El Gigante — amplifies the interests of government agencies, whose policies drive the violence rather than quelling it, argues Oswaldo Zavala, professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at the City University of New York.

"In order to accept that there is such a thing as the war on drugs, there'd better be an enemy worth it," said Zavala, author of Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in U.S. and Mexican Culture.

While he acknowledges the increase in drug-related violence, he warns we need to be critical of the way cartels are depicted.

"The idea being that drug cartels are pyramidal, powerful structures with extraordinary capabilities, military and financial, that can not only challenge state structures in Mexico or Colombia or even the U.S. and Europe, but can actually surpass state structures, agencies, police agencies," said Zavala. 

"What I argue instead is that the idea of a cartel is a concept designed to legitimize a very violent and radical view of anti-drug legislation that evolved using the military, and that has gradually militarized entire regions of Mexico and other parts of Latin America with a terrible, disastrous result, which is, of course, not only homicidal violence, but just a general decay in living standards for Mexican citizens."

Fiction shaping reality, reality shaping fiction

Fiction writers are part of the broader ideological landscape, reflecting and reinforcing certain ideas, points out Susan Antebi, professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Toronto.

"The texts are both producing and shaping that violence and are produced and shaped by it. It goes both ways."

Antebi supervised Soifer's project linking recent Mexican literature to a broader unease surrounding the true causes of violence in the country. She believes he offers a key new insight by pointing out how uncertainty clouds what is real or fake within the horror narratives. It's a subtle but crucial aspect of the wider social anxiety gripping the country.

"That uncertainty plays into a way of reading these texts as not just a reflection of drug culture and violence that's happening now," Antebi said, "but to do with shaping a national perception about where the violence is coming from."

Guests in this episode:

Alejandro Soifer is an author and post-doctoral student in Latin American Literature at the University of Toronto.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a Canadian-Mexican author of numerous works of fiction, including Mexican Gothic and Certain Dark Things.

Yuri Herrera is an author of the novel Kingdom Cons and the story collection Ten Planets, among other works. He is an associate professor in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Oswaldo Zavala is a professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at City University of New York. His books include Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in U.S. and Mexican.

Susan Antebi is a professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Toronto, and the author of Carnal Inscriptions: Spanish American Narratives of Corporeal Difference and Disability, among other works.

*This episode is part of our on-going series. IDEAS from the Trenches, produced by Nicola Luksic and Tom Howell.