Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes: Violent Myths of the U.S.-Mexico Frontier by Rafael Acosta Morales

Abstract

Reviewed by: Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes: Violent Myths of the U.S.-Mexico Frontier by Rafael Acosta Morales Cordelia E. Barrera Rafael Acosta Morales, Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes: Violent Myths of the U.S.-Mexico Frontier. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 2021. 246 pp. Hardcover, $55; e-book, $43.99. In Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes Rafael Acosta Morales argues for the impossibility of displacing affect from fictional and historical representations of cowboys, bandits, and desperadoes, “cultural heroes” that shape narratives of political violence on the US–Mexico frontier. In so doing, he probes the discourses and systems embedded in these archetypes alongside the unrecognized, nonconscious experiences of readers and audiences. Expanding on the work of noted scholars of affect, he proposes the notion of “affective assemblage” to examine the paradoxical persistence of these archetypes. The paradox lies in the gap between the immaterial structure of the narrative traditions themselves and the material forms they produce and replicate. These stories, bound by promises of regeneration through violence, redistributive justice, and the weaponization of historical trauma not merely disenfranchise entire segments of the population, they put into question the perverse sense of innocence that justifies the use of violence for national ends. The book is comprised of an introduction, three long body chapters, and an afterword. In alternating between US–Mexico and Mexico–US, the author illustrates interrelationships between fictional and historical representations of cultural heroes in a shifting territory. Because the frontier signifies a space where these icons belie dominant narratives of US political schema, Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes expands the frontier’s role in narratives of Mexican history. This is illustrated in chapter 1, “Drug Lords,” wherein Acosta Morales interprets banditry as a form of resistance to strategies of exclusion and excess capitalization shaped by modernity. Just as nineteenth-century corridos foreground historical [End Page 199] figures who oppose unequal distribution of capital, so too do novels like Luis G. Inclán’s Astucia (1865) and Yuri Herrera’s 2010 narco novel, Trabajos del reino, divulge how social banditry forms an affective loop that recreates the same adversarial system it seeks to topple. In further analyzing the struggle for legitimacy of contemporary drug lords in Mexico, Acosta Morales shows how affective assemblages shape models of behavior. In chapter 2 the cowboy is a point of departure for ideas about how legitimacy and violence are packaged for entertainment as well as how cowboy narratives justify violence and weaponize trauma. To uncover relationships among trauma, states of exception, violence, and subjectivity, the author looks to films like John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter (1973) and Unforgiven (1992), and Cormac McCarthy’s epic novel of westward expansion, Blood Meridian (1985). A focus on affect reveals how these narratives bring neither regeneration nor judicial or bodily protection for those who require it most: women and sufferers of colonial conquest. Affect factors into the naturalization of the cowboy as a force of good. As such, it steers the preservation of a nostalgic past and an uncritical view of history within these narratives as well as influences action. Even revisionist Westerns like Unforgiven and the television series Justified, which question histories of oppression or turn the cowboy myth on its head, gloss over the “original sin” of colonial barbarism (149). As such, these stories retain the capacity to absorb violence, a quality of affect that instills a state of exception—for the white cowboy. Chapter 3, “Desperadoes,” examines stories of “icons of bandit-ry” (163) found in historical corridos that detail the exploits of cultural heroes like Gregorio Cortez and Joaquin Murrieta to illume how Mexican Americans experienced US law though an “applied and designed otherness” based in ingrained affective assemblages that inherently transmit a biased system of attitudes and laws (153). A close reading of Rolando Hinojosa’s fictional Belken County coalesces the ways that affect becomes a condition of thought produced by material circumstances continually responsive to them. The accounts of drug lords, cowboys, and desperadoes Acosta Morales surveys offer solutions that have already been accepted [End Page 200] by readers or viewers. As such, a focus on affect reveals how the...