Keywords
How to Cite
Abstract
The present article explores the ways in which the annihilations and overall spoils of extractive capitalism upon the territories of Veracruz—a region historically marked by the extractive infrastructures of oil—are given expression in the non-fictional pieces compiled in Fernanda Melchor’s Aquí no es Miami (2013). Through a close reading of the material conditions that structure Melchor’s crime crónicas –mainly, the failures and crude residues of “la petrolización” and the spoilation of agricultural terrains in the landscapes of the Veracruzean tropic– this article suggests that the use of noir environments and devices reconfigured (such as the port city setting and the expressions of urban darkness), attempts to reveal the nexus between energy-driven interests and the territorial predations of the post-NAFTA era. Furthermore, the article seeks to map new directions in the crime crónica, and especially its turn towards the Mexican southern provinces, which, functioning predominantly as special economic zones or logistical corridors, appear in these texts as spaces ruptured by the concentrated unevenness, traumatic dispossession and exploitation enabled by neoliberal structural adjustment programs. Framing this perspectival shift at work in recent crónicas in correlation to the extractive thrusts of NAFTA, the article suggest that the destabilizing of the generic tropes and settings of noir within crime non-fictional writing allows the crónica to lay bare the brutal management of nature and labour in capitalism’s extractive peripheries, and, in this way, render visible the hidden operations of capital that have led to the catastrophic transformation of the port city of Veracruz into one of the ground zeroes of violence and neoliberal predation.
References
Aguirre, J. C. (2016). In the Province of Politics: Narrating Endemic Violence and State Crisis in the Twenty-First Century Mexican Chronicle. The Global South, 10, 1, 9-39.
–––––––. (2015). Violencia en términos inciertos: anécdota y anonimato en la nueva crónica mexicana. Textos Híbridos. Revista de Estudios sobre Crónica y Periodismo Narrativo, 4, 1, 56-87.
Anderson, M. (2016). The Grounds of Crisis and the Geopolitics of Depth. En Anderson, M. y Bora, Z.M., Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America (pp. 99-124). Lanham: Lexington Books
Bencomo, A. (2016). Acapulco: del tropicalismo a la distopía urbana. Telar: Revista del Instituto Interdisciplinario de Estudios Lationamericanos, 11, 17, 25-37.
Braham, P. (2004). Crimes Against the State, Crimes Against Persons: Detective Fiction in Cuba and Mexico. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Carballo, K. (2019). Mala hora. XVIII Bienal de Fotografía.
Carroll, A.S. (2016). REMEX: Toward an Art History of the NAFTA Era. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Casanova-Vizcaíno, S y Ordiz, I. (2018). Latin American gothic in literature and culture.
New York-London: Routledge.
Cowen, D. (2014). The deadly life of logistics: Mapping violence in global trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Davis, M. (1990). City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York: Verso.
Deckard, S. y Shapiro, S. (2016). World Literature, Neoliberalism and the Culture of Discontent. London: Palgrave.
Dove, P. (2012). Literary Futures: Crime Fiction, Global Capitalism and the History of the Present in Ricardo Piglia. A Contracorriente, 10, 1, 18-36.
Espinosa Estrada, G. (2013). Un OVNI como excusa de lo real. Letras Explícitas.
Recuperado de http://letrasexplicitas.mx/un-ovni-como-excusa-de-lo-real/. Fecha de consulta: [3/06/20].
Gordon, A. (2008). Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Grayson, G. (2004). Mexico’s Semicorporatist Regime. En Wiardia, H.J., Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America-Revisited. Miami: University Press Florida.
Harvey, D. (2013). Ciudades rebeldes: Del derecho a la ciudad a la revolución urbana. Madrid: Ediciones Akal.
Hiskey, J. (2003). Political Entrepreneurs and Neoliberal Reform in Mexico: The Salinas Requisa of the Port of Veracruz. Latin American Politics and Society, 45, 2, 105-132.
Jörgensen, B. (2011). Documents in Crisis: Nonfiction Literatures in Twentieth-Century Mexico. New
York: SUNY Press.
Lazzarato, M. (2011). The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Lucas, Julian. (2020). A Mexican Novel Conjures a World Tinged with Beauty. New York Times.
Recuperado de: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/books/review/hurricane-season-fernandamelchor.html. Fecha de consulta: [21/09/2020].
Luna Sellés, C. (2020). Moronga by Horacio Castellanos Moya and the Divergence of Latin
American Noir. Forum for Modern Language Studies, 56, 3, 347-365.
Majstorovic, G. (2021). Global South Modernities: Modernist Literature and the Avant-Garde in
Latin America. Maryland: Lexington Books.
Melchor, F. (2013). Aquí no es Miami. Ciudad de México: Almadía.
––––––––. (2017). Temporada de huracanes. Ciudad de México: Random House.
––––––––. (2018). Aquí no es Miami. Segunda edición. Ciudad de México: Random House.
Mezzadra, S. y Neilson, B. (2017). La frontera como método. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños.
Miklos, A. (2020). Noir Geographies in Chronicles of Central Americans Crossing Mexico:
Los migrantes que no importan by Óscar Martínez. Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 54, 1, 25-48.
Noah, Will. (2020). The Part About the Crimes. The Baffler. Recuperado de https://thebaffler.com/latest/thepart-about-the-crimes-noah. Fecha de consulta: [3/11/20].
Oloff, K. (2016). The “Monstruous Head” and the “Mouth of Hell”: the Gothic Ecologies
of the “Mexican Miracle”. En Anderson, M. y Bora, Z.M., Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America (pp. 79-98). Lanham: Lexington Books.
Ortuño, A. (2020). “Aún hay mucho que decir sobre el trópico negro”: Entrevista con Fernanda Melchor. Revista Universidad. Recuperado de: https://www.revistadelauniversidad.mx/articles/0abac055-4672-4847-8781-5f55b462d42c/aun-habia-mucho-que-decir-del-tropico-negro. Fecha de consulta: [5/06/21].
Palmer, B. D. (1997). Night in the Capitalist, Cold War City: Noir and the Cultural Politics of Darkness. Left History 5, 2, 57-76.
Poblete Alday, P. (2018). Fantasmas y muertos vivientes en la crónica latinoamericana
contemporánea: de la ficción fantástica a la necropolítica. En Mazzotti, J.A., Cornejo multipolar: Antonio Cornejo Polar y la crítica latinoamericana(pp. 219-234).. Boston; Salem; Lima:RCLL; Axiara y Amle.
––––––––. (2019). Crónica narrativa latinoamericana actual: los límites de lo real. Litertura y
Lingü.stica, 40, 95-112.
––––––––. (2020). Crónica narrativa contemporánea: enfoques, deslindes y desafíos metodológicos. Literatura Mexicana, 31, 133-153.
Peregalli, Al. (2020). Finance, Extraction and Logistics as Axes of the Third Neoliberal Moment in Latin America. Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation,13, 1, 47-78.
Polit-Dueñas, G. (2019). Unwanted Witnesses. Journalists and Conflict in Contemporary Latin America. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press.
Pitt-Scott, H. (2020). Offshore Mysteries, Narrative Infrastructure: Oil, Noir, and the World- Ocean. Humanities, 9, 3, 1-15.
Ramírez-Pimienta, J.C. y Villalobos, J.P. (2010). Detección pública/detección privada: El periodista como detective en la narrativa policiaca norfronteriza. Revista Iberoamericana, 26, 231, 377-391
Rinaudo, C. (2014). Mestizaje and Ethnicity in the City of Veracruz, Mexico. En Cunin, E. y Hoffman, O., Blackness and Mestizaje in Mexico and Central America. Toronto: Africa World Press.
Sánchez Prado, I. (2020). Fernanda Melchor’s “Hurricane Season”: A literary triumph on the failures of Mexican modernization. Words Without Borders. Recuperado de: https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/fernanda-melchors-hurricane-season-aliterary-triumph-ignacio-m-sanchez-pra. Fecha de consulta: [21/09/20].
Sierra, M. (2017). Spectral Spaces: Haunting in the Latin American City. En González, J.E., y Robins, T.A., Urban Spaces in Contemporary Latin American Literature. London: Palgrave.
Sheridan, T. E. y McGuire, R. H. (2019). The Border and its Bodies: The Embodiment of Risk along the U.S.- México Line. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.
Tovar Cabañas, R. 2009. La idea del desastre en los medios masivos de comunicación. Espacios Públicos, 12, 24, 176-188.
Trela, B. (2020). Blowin’ in the Wind. On Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season. The Brooklyn
Rail. Recuperado de https://brooklynrail.org/2020/05/books/Blowin-in-the-Wind-
On-Fernanda-Melchors-Hurricane-Season. Fecha de consulta: 23/09/20].
Vidler, A. (1992). The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, Mas: MIT Press.
Wallace, M. and Boullosa, C. (2015). A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico jointly created the Mexican Drug War. New York: OR Books.
Whittle, C. (2016). Mexican Noir: Death in Veracruz. Reading in Translation. Recuperado de https://readingintranslation.com/2016/02/17/mexican-noir-death-in279
veracruz-by-hector-aguilar-camin-translated-by-chandler-thompson/. Fecha de consulta: 18/01/21].
Wood, T. (2021). AMLO’s Austerity. New Left Review. Recuperado de https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/amlos-austerity. Fecha de consulta: [25/01/21].
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright (c) 2023 Lya Morales Hernández