From Artistic Artillery to Fully Automated Cultural Production

Abstract

From Artistic Artillery to Fully Automated Cultural Production Andrew Bentley Esch, Shopie. Modernity at Gunpoint: Firearms, Politics, and Culture in Mexico and Central America. U of Pittsburgh P, 2018. 284 pp. ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6538-1. Sophie Esch’s excellent study offers an unparalleled approach to weapons to confront modernity and, more generally, culture, across a variety of cultural production and national experiences. With the firearm as an analytical trope, Esch seeks to understand cultural responses to political violence, focusing mostly on Mexico and Nicaragua in the periods of 1910–1920, 1979–1990, and the present day, which mark the Mexican and Sandinista Revolutions and their respective legacies in the twenty-first century. Through copious interpretations of literature, music, art, and photography, her study proves to be an engaging read of the symbolic dimensions of weaponry in contemporary Mexican and Central American cultural production. As Esch does well to point out, narratives of war and revolution largely center on people, dates, and cultural histories of places, rather than weapons as the focal point of the modernity enterprise. This occurs both in terms of the development of the nation-state and the neoliberal logic of today’s market economies, such as those that govern narcotrafficking. Thus, her mission is to highlight the firearm’s functional value in violent acts, its commodification and economic value, and, perhaps most importantly, its traumatic echoes. The lucid introduction details the history of the firearm, offering an exhaustive overview of the links between human development and war technology. Esch persuasively challenges the mere categorization of the functional value of firearms to harm and kill, extending her look to their performative significance and firmly situating the discussion of weaponry in the realm of the humanities. Aside from providing an intricate history of arms distribution in Latin America, with weapons from Germany, the Soviet Union, the United States, and later Cuba figuring significantly into the social landscape, she highlights the advent of trains and urban development as other key features of modernity in the region. Further technological advancement and the later introduction of the AK-47, of course, distinguishes the Mexican and Sandinista Revolutions, as well as the Central American armed conflicts, which reached their zeniths in the 1980s. Nevertheless, she lays bare the intrinsic links between Mexico and Central America, which, aside from their proximity [End Page 171] to the United States and each other, are manifested in the fact that guerrilla fighters from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua fled to Mexico in large numbers. Furthermore, leftover weapons from these Central American countries are now props in the Mexican drug war, which shows how “the region still operates under the sign of the rifle” (14), even as Cold War politics recede further into the past. Additionally, Esch resists the Spivakian notion that the subaltern cannot speak, arguing that they do speak when they carry the rifle, even more so when their narratives circulate through cultural production, thus solidifying their images in history. Esch opens the first chapter of her book with a discussion of how men became visible in the political arena of the Mexican Revolution, with the firearm constituting “the prosthesis for citizenship, not de jure but de facto” (48). She also delves into an in-depth analysis of feminine perspectives on the Revolution, as evidenced by Nellie Campobello’s semi-autobiographical 1931 short novel Cartucho. While weaponry is at the fore of the novel set in Chihuahua, Esch also reflects upon such scenes as a dead body left to rot in front of the girl’s home as exemplary of the humanization of war victims, in addition to infantile and maternal gazes on the revolution. Chapter Two displays a symmetry with the first in that it continues the discussion of the Mexican Revolution, this time from the viewpoints of a letrado protagonist and the rebel leader Pancho Villa in an earlier text. The author contrasts sharply with existing criticism of Martín Luis Guzmán’s 1928 novel El águila y la serpiente, which often argues that the novel enforces the civilization/barbarism dichotomy so prevalent in Latin American cultural thought, opining that it documents the implosion of this binary. This notion is...