Narcomedia

Latinidad, Popular Culture, and America's War on Drugs

Jason Ruiz

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2023
• ISBN:
  9781477328217
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Exploring representations of Latinx people from Scarface to Narcos, this book examines how pop culture has framed Latin America as the villain in America's long and ineffectual War on Drugs.

If there is an enemy in the War on Drugs, it is people of color. That is the lesson of forty years of cultural production in the United States. Popular culture, from Scarface and Miami Vice to Narcos and Better Call Saul, has continually positioned Latinos as an alien people who threaten the US body politic with drugs. Jason Ruiz explores the creation and endurance of this trope, its effects on Latin Americans and Latinx people, and its role in the cultural politics of the War on Drugs.

Even as the focus of drug anxiety has shifted over the years from cocaine to crack and from methamphetamines to opioids, and even as significant strides have been made in representational politics in many areas of pop culture, Latinx people remain an unshakeable fixture in stories narrating the production, distribution, and sale of narcotics. Narcomedia argues that such representations of Latinx people, regardless of the intentions of their creators, are best understood as a cultural front in the War on Drugs. Latinos and Latin Americans are not actually America's drug problem, yet many Americans think otherwise—and that is in no small part because popular culture has largely refused to imagine the drug trade any other way.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. “Say Goodnight to the Bad Guy”: South Florida, Cocaine, and the Many Faces of Scarface
• Chapter 2. Miami Vices: Whiteness and Otherness in Representing the Criminalized City
• Chapter 3. “The Most Alive Dead Man in the World”: Plotting the Death of Pablo Escobar
• Chapter 4. Dancing Toward Revenge: Queer Representation and What It Means to Be Seen in Narcomedia
• Chapter 5. Dark Matters: Breaking Bad and the Suburban Crime Drama
• Chapter 6. Bad Hombres: Narcomedia at the US-Mexico Border
• Chapter 7. From Public Enemy to Global Media Commodity: Pablo Escobar Transformed
• Epilogue. “It’s Time for a White Man to Leave the Building”: Centering Latinidad in Narcomedia
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Select Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index