Abstract
Blood, clearly associated with death, can also function as a means of dramatizing Mexican bodies and sensibilities that are in a state of continuous construction and revision. These bodies form problematic unions with those whose entry into the Mexican imaginary is prohibited. As the history of death in Mexico has been thoroughly studied, I instead chart the history of blood in Mexico through an analysis of contemporary cultural artifacts in which blood plays a crucial role. I read scenes from film (specifically the Arturo Ripstein’s Principio y Fin and Profundo Carmesí), journalism, literature, and television, in which blood constitutes a material—not just a metaphorical element. That is, in these examples blood marks, signals, and even bathes Mexico’s bodies, contested alliances, taboos, and contradictions. I am particularly interested in the female body, as it is the most vulnerable to contemporary violence. While some of these appropriations of blood mark or denounce the disposability of bodies, others banalize and, worse, disarticulate and even decorporealize the female body. Blood has become a favorite material for staging Mexico’s bodily politics and, as I will demonstrate, the smallest unit of contemporary citizenship.
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Notes
- 1.
Iván Avila Dueñas includes a portion of Ripstein’s filming log in the article “Profundo carmesí: Diario de rodaje.”
- 2.
Quotations throughout are provided in English only, unless the specific wording in Spanish is relevant.
- 3.
Mariana David points out that even Diego Rivera, on his trips to Europe, contributed to this myth “by telling his audience in the Parisian cafes how walking in the streets in Mexico was like flirting with death” (2011, 18).
- 4.
The Mexican Drug War, officially declared by President Felipe Calderón on December 11, 2006, in Michoacán, is an internal conflict between the Mexican state and organized criminals who control different illegal activities, especially the trafficking of illegal drugs. The magazine Zeta has documented that some 50,490 murders related to organized crime had been committed by 2011; this figure includes those killings that the federal government labels “executions,” “confrontations,” and “homicide-attacks” (Mendoza and Navarro 2011).
- 5.
Ripstein’s comments are excerpted from the interview that Paranaguá conducted with the filmmaker in “Arturo Ripstein entre insertion obligée et renouvellement.”
- 6.
This violence has given rise to a very bloody literary subgenre, the narconovela. According to the Mexican writer Jorge Volpi, the narconovela has become a present-day equivalent of magical realism: “During the last ten years, narconovelas have flooded bookstores, sparking interest among Mexican readers and foreign critics in a new strain of Latin American exoticism and displacing magical realism as the region’s characteristic genre. In these books, Mexico is portrayed as a violent, uncontrollable, and fantastic world in contrast with the West, which consumes drugs without suffering or being scarred by the violence of the trade” (2013).
- 7.
Susana Rotker has developed the notion of “citizenships of fear,” defining the victim through a direct relationship to their fear: “The potential-victim is defined as all those who, at any moment, could be murdered for ransom, for their name-brand shoes, or because the assailant—who made a bet with his friends—shot at them. The potential-victim is middle class, upper class, lower class: they are all those who go into the street in fear, because everything is rotten and out of control, because there is no control, because no one believes in anything” (2000, 9).
- 8.
Mujeres Asesinas is an adaptation of the Argentinian series of the same name. It premiered in Mexico on June 17, 2008. Although it is an adaptation, the promotion of the Mexican series is unlike the Argentinian series due to prominence of blood.
- 9.
According to New York Times journalist Christopher McDougall, “before she vanished in 1999, Ms. Trevi had been Mexico’s most beloved star and one of Latin America’s highest-paid female performers… But in 1998, a former backup singer, Aline Hernández, published a book in which she said that she had been tortured, starved and sexually abused by Ms. Trevi and Mr. Andrade. She wasn’t the only one, Ms. Hernández wrote: dozens of girls had also been enticed and brainwashed. Ms. Hernández said that she had been 13 when Ms. Trevi lured her into the clan, and that she had to help recruit other girls before escaping at the age of 17. At first, few people believed Ms. Hernández, who was widely painted as a vindictive Trevi-wannabe. But when Ms. Hernández filed a criminal complaint in 1999, Ms. Trevi disappeared. So did Mr. Andrade and a dozen young women. It took more than a year for Interpol to track them down. By the time they were captured in Brazil in January 2000, a 14-year-old member of the clan had abandoned a newborn infant in Spain, while at least five others were pregnant by Mr. Andrade, including two teenage sisters. Ms. Trevi had given birth while on the run, but the baby girl had died in her crib” (2004).
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Guerrero, J. (2019). Profundo Carmesí: Blood Weddings in Contemporary Mexico. In: Gutiérrez Silva, M., Duno Gottberg, L. (eds) The Films of Arturo Ripstein. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22956-6_10
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