Necro-Poetics of care: Necropolitics and the Gothic in Mexican Zombie Cinema

This essay studies Mexican zombie cinema as a critical site for theorizing what we call the necro-Gothic of care: an aesthetic formation in which necropolitical conditions reshape the meaning and practice of care. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, Judith Butler’s theorization of grievability, feminist ethics of care, Rita Segato’s notion of pedagogies of cruelty, and Cristina Rivera Garza’s necroescritura, we argue that contemporary Mexican zombie films articulate a necro-poetics of care within a globalgothic perspective — an audiovisual practice that stages relationality with the socially dead without promising restoration or redemption. Through readings of El Santo contra los zombies, Ladronas de almas, Savageland, Halley, MexZombies, and Párvulos: Children of the Apocalypse, this essay traces a shift from restorative Gothic fantasies of rescue to necro-Gothic forms of care that emerge after grievability collapses and belonging becomes possible only beyond the limits of the human. We propose that Mexican Gothic, rather than a mere transplantation of European tropes, constitutes a situated affective grammar forged under conditions of disappearance, racialized violence, and social abandonment.