Violence, between Realism and Tragedy in Auteur Mexican Cinema: Sin señas particulares (2020) by Fernanda Valadez

Sin señas particulares (Mexico City, 2020), directed by Fernanda Valadez, situates contemporary violence in Mexico within the framework of tragedy. The film follows a mother’s harrowing journey to the northern border of Mexico, as she searches for her teenage son, who vanishes during his attempt to migrate to Arizona. Magdalena’s expedition unfolds across a sinister landscape that captures the estranged and fractured atmosphere of the War on Drugs—declared by former President Felipe Calderón in 2006—and the ensuing militarization of public security. The militarist agenda persists today, despite mounting evidence of its failure, even by its own metrics. What was intended as a decisive and necessary intervention has not only failed to curb the drug trade but has also exacerbated violent conflict after decades of steady decline. What it has achieved, however, is the constant expansion of new territories for extractivism and privatization, through terror and displacement. Rooted in the hazy figure of the narco (drug dealer) in the collective imagination as an existential menace to the state and its citizens, narconarrativa has become an explanatory habitus that sustains the Drug War. This framework is constantly reinforced by a growing archive of written and audiovisual productions grounded in realism as a narrative strategy—an aesthetic sensibility that, numbed by repetition and accustomed to the war’s normality, has exhausted its denunciatory potential. This article argues that the film activates the ideological category of narco to gradually unravel it until it reveals its hollow core. Sin señas particulares explores a historical sense of tragedy in the face of the exhaustion of drug-war realism as a set of conventions and effects to signify and understand normalized violence in post-2006 Mexico.