Asesinos fronterizos: Performance de transgresión de los derechos humanos en el imaginario social del norte y sur de México

Abstract

This dissertation considers the portrayal of killers in contemporary fiction, drama, and film set on Mexico's northern and southern borders, in light of the transformations wrought by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This study goes beyond the victim-oppressor dichotomy to highlight areas of moral ambiguity in the social construction of murderer figures in these societies in flux. These discomfiting representations expose a gulf between the theory and practice of human rights in the country's border regions, where paeans to universal values often mask daily deprivations of the most fundamental human rights, including the right to life. This dissertation focuses on narratives that explore the cynical perspective of the murderer, and that often justify murder by replicating officially sanctioned negative tropes about women, prostitutes, gangs, and indigenous groups. Repeatedly in contemporary narratives of Mexico's borders, transgressors of basic human rights who commit heinous acts paradoxically see themselves as victims and oppressors at the same time. This occurs in Héctor Cortés Mandujano's play Acteal Guadaña para 45 (2005) and Antonio Malpica's Mujer on the border (El llanto del Verdugo) (2005). The criminal characters in these plays rearticulate the normative violence involved in the performance of capital punishment in the Mexico-US border region. This dichotomy is further problematized by the murderers' performance of gender identity in the quotidian relations of power on the Mexico-Guatemala border in Nadia Villafuerte's narrative ¿Te gusta el látex, cielo? (2008) and Cary Fukunaga's film Sin nombre (2009). Broader transgressions of the victim-oppressor structure translocate the border space in Vicente Alfonso's novel Partitura para mujer muerta (2008) and Carlos Carrera's film Backyard/El traspatio (2009). The viewpoint of the murderers in these last two pieces demystifies preconceptions about perpetrators of feminicide: the marginal border becomes central as a new site of a burgeoning transnational social imaginary when the performative violence of the border is reproduced beyond its physical limits. This dissertation's analysis of fictional killers demonstrates that murderers' identities are socially constructed and thereby functions as a discursive tool to explain the contradiction between avowed support for human rights and oppression of marginal groups in modern Mexico.