Trafficking: Narcoculture in Mexico and the United States by Hector Amaya (review)

Reviewed by: Trafficking: Narcoculture in Mexico and the United States by Hector Amaya Carlos Alberto Sánchez Trafficking: Narcoculture in Mexico and the United States. By Hector Amaya. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020, p. 265, 27. 95. In the US, Mexican narcoculture has occasioned a number of richly meditative studies over the past 5 years from academics in very different fields, including cultural studies (Oswaldo Zavala's Drug Cartels Do Not Exist, Vanderbilt 2022), criminal justice (Gabriel Ferreyra's Drug Trafficking in Mexico and the United States, Lexington 2020), investigative journalism (Ioan Grillo's Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and Cartels, Bloomsbury 2023), and, even, philosophy (Carlos Alberto Sánchez's A Sense of Brutality: Philosophy After Narco-Culture, Amherst 2020). Approaching the topic from media and communication studies, Amaya's Trafficking fits perfectly into this discussion and does a much better job at highlighting the multiple normative dimensions of the phenomenon. In the Introduction, Amaya summarizes the three ideas that guide his investigation: (1) the nature of narcoviolence's public visibility; (2) the way in which narcoviolence effects the public sphere; and (3) the role of media technologies in the placement and displacement of narcoviolence (how narcoviolence is "trafficked"). Of course, there's much more that happens in this fascinating book, including a very developed historical account of publicness and publicity theory that involves Hobbes, Locke, Hannah Arendt, Jurgen Habermas, and a slew of other modern theorists. In fact, the theoretical discussion of publicity theory is foundational to the text, serving as a skeleton onto which the discussion of Mexican narcoviolence is brilliantly attached. Because publicness is the space of the production and reproduction of modern sociality, where we get to talk about it and shape it, the incursion of conversations about excessive violence must be addressed, as these have the potential to derail our public futures. And this is what Amaya does. This incursion, or "trafficking, " of excessive violence by means of modern media come to test the limits of our modern theories of publicness. The anonymity that these technologies offer, moreover, undermines that on which these theories depend: open debate in a safe and trusted "public square" where people meet to think about their social arrangement free of violence. However, the trafficking of violence into our public discussions challenges this schema by reminding us that we states are possible because of it. The last sentence of his book summarizes this well: "Violence is a structural force of the talking field, and we must recognize it as such. " Ultimately, this book gives us a panoramic look at the Mexican drug war but focuses on the ways and means of that which makes Mexican narcoculture particularly troubling: that excessive violence that defines. End Page 167 The trafficking of this excessive, terrifying, violence via modern technologies makes it visible and consumable—it is commodified (narcocorridos, blogs, and so on). But the public sphere as we know it is not prepared for such incursions. Amaya wonders about what this means for state sovereignty and the construction of citizens, especially when these conversations about excessive violence are held anonymously and in the shadows of publicness. Indeed, the heart of the book is a critique of publicness and a call to reconsider how it can accommodate such conversations. The question becomes: to what extent do modern technologies trafficking in excessive violence effect publicness and the constitution of the modern citizen? Amaya is a brilliant historian of ideas, and the reader will learn much about the history of and trouble with taken-for-granted concepts such as citizenship, sociality, publicness, and the origins of the state. Somewhat marginal to Amaya's analysis is a critique of US media, who reproduce and regurgitate the same idea about Mexican narco-violence: that it represents the failure of the Mexican state. Amaya points out, however, that what the current failed-state narrative ignores, or has forgotten, is that violence is at the heart of state construction; it is naïve to believe that violence disappears once the state has "succeeded" at its tasks. Its continual success depends on violence—it deters and fosters it. This is true of Mexico as it is true everywhere else. . .