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3 Mexico: the cinema of Fernando Méndez On 4 October 1957 the cinema Palacio Chino in Mexico City showed El vampiro / The Vampire, a new A-certificate release directed by Fernando Méndez. It was reviewed two days later in the weekly El Redondel by Alfonso de Icaza, who observed that ‘in Mexico the mystery or, rather, the horror film has many supporters, and it is from among these that this film is acquiring a big following’ (quoted in De La Vega Alfaro 1995b: 198). The film played at the Palacio Chino for four weeks (García Riera 1994: 62). In November of the
9 Dangerous corpses in Mexico’s drug war Regnar Kristensen On 16 December 2009, 400 heavily armed soldiers from the Mexican marine forces entered an enclosed residential zone in the city of Cuernavaca to arrest the drug baron Beltrán Leyva, leader of the Mexican drug cartel of the same name. He was classified as the most violent drug cartel leader on the planet by the American Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and as an extremely dangerous enemy of the fatherland by the Mexican president, Felipe Calderón. For several hours, the marines were engaged in heavy
Introduction Extensive asymmetries, geographical distance and limited interdependence define the context of the bilateral relationship between the EU and Mexico. None the less, both parties have sought to develop practices and institutions to increase their political and economic interconnections. Since the early 1990s the EU and Mexico have dealt with the changing global contexts and adapted their relationship to the new circumstances. Two salient moments have defined the relationship in the past three decades. The first
On November 13, 1910, Mexican President Porfirio Díaz, then three decades into a seven-term presidency on the very brink of its demise, sent a telegram to U.S. President William Taft. It thanked Taft for his promise to “investigate the incident of the burning at the stake of the Mexican Rodriguez in Texas.” 1 Ten days earlier, twenty-year-old Antonio Rodriguez had been taken from the jail in the town of Rock Springs by a mob of Texans who substituted a mesquite pyre and gasoline for a trial
In February 1951 the Mexican newspaper El Universal published an anonymous editorial titled ‘La industria fílmica mexicana’ (The Mexican film industry), which characterised the national cinema as decadent (Anon., 1951 ). The editorial attributed the decadent state of the Mexican film industry to a ‘group of adventurous businessmen’, claiming that these ‘millionaires’ had ‘monopolised movie
1 60 Common spaces of urban emancipation 7 Commoning neighborhoods: building autonomy in Mexico City Self-managed housing and emancipating inventiveness The housing question in Mexico (and probably in most Latin American metropolises) is directly connected to major challenges to the dominant urban order. Socially marginalized or excluded populations face not only chronic joblessness but also extremely precarious housing conditions. Usually forced to the peripheries of megacities, such populations are either dependent upon ruthless landlords, who charge
Fernández has generated a considerable amount of interest, both in Mexico and abroad, in the form of book-length studies or articles. Most, as we would expect from studies on an individual director, offer differing forms of auteur criticism. There are several director-as-personality/biographical approaches to his work including: a long interview with Fernández (Tuñón, 1988 ); a biographical account by his daughter Adela
COVID-19 has reinstated the sovereign enclosures of corpse management that mothers of the disappeared had so successfully challenged in the past decade. To explore how moral duties toward the dead are being renegotiated due to COVID-19, this article puts forward the notion of biorecuperation, understood as an individualised form of forensic care for the dead made possible by the recovery of biological material. Public health imperatives that forbid direct contact with corpses due to the pandemic, interrupt the logics of biorecuperation. Our analysis is based on ten years of experience working with families of the disappeared in Mexico, ethnographic research within Mexico’s forensic science system and online interviews conducted with medics and forensic scientists working at the forefront of Mexico City’s pandemic. In the face of increasing risks of viral contagion and death, this article analyses old and new techniques designed to bypass the prohibitions imposed by the state and its monopoly over corpse management and identification.
7 Alfonso Cuarón’s first films in Mexico and the USA Sólo con tu pareja: bringing the middle classes back to Mexican cinemas Alfonso Cuarón’s filmmaking career has many parallels to that of Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu. All have made a first film in Mexico, before consolidating their careers in the USA. The difference between Cuarón’s trajectory and that of the other two directors is that he is the only one who has returned to Mexico to make a film – Y tu mamá también (2001) – and this transnational nationally successful film came after
The article will present the findings of ethnographic research into the Colombian and Mexican forensic systems, introducing the first citizen-led exhumation project made possible through the cooperation of scholars, forensic specialists and interested citizens in Mexico. The coupling evolution and mutual re-constitution of forensic science will be explored, including new forms of citizenship and nation building projects – all approached as lived experience – in two of Latin America‘s most complex contexts: organised crime and mass death.