In the Province of Politics: Narrating Endemic Violence and State Crisis in the Twenty-First Century Mexican Chronicle

Abstract

Colonialism cemented an enduring political, economic, and cultural centralism in Mexico. This centralism envisioned the capital city as the locus of order and reason, and the provinces as an unruly terrain to administer. With the establishment of a nominally democratic, federalist state after the 1910 Mexican Revolution, the Mexico City-based regime came to construe itself the guiding hand of national history and the sole director of the national political agenda. This political and discursive centralism, however, becomes increasingly untenable during the last three decades, which witness the transformation of everyday life in Mexico by globalization, the re-appearance of dissident political movements in the countryside, the alarming intensification of violence related to the illicit drug trade, and the emergence of public debates concerning the viability of the Mexican state itself. This article evaluates narrative responses to these changes in the chronicle (crónica), a journalistic genre historically committed to documenting political change in the Americas at large. Identifying a perspectival shift in this traditionally urban genre, the analysis proceeds through a close reading of two recent chronicle collections: Diego Osorno’s Contra Estados Unidos: Crónicas desamparadas (2014), and Sergio González Rodríguez’s El hombre sin cabeza (2009). In these two collections, the Mexican capital loses its cohesive force upon the national unit, and instead comes to represent empty verbiage, illusory economic security, and inoperative law. By contrast, the provinces are framed as the ground zero of a national political crisis, and as the lens through which a new, transnational reality must be understood. In the contemporary chronicle, the provinces thus come to embody the contradictions of late capital, shedding light on Mexico’s uneven integration into the global market.