“Only Versace”: Knock-Offs, Ostentation, and Desire amid the Mexican War on Drugs.

ince the war on drugs began in 2007, Mexico has accumulated more than 250,000 murders and 70,000 disappearances. A complex landscape of criminal organisations has been shaping the violent conditions in the country, accompanied by an imaginary that projects their presence in multiple forms. We can identify a dire example with the bodies found in mass graves that are still wearing their clothes, often designer knock-offs inspired by the wardrobes of drug lords. In this scenario, I argue that an overlap exists between two underground economies: drug trafficking and counterfeit clothing. To understand this relation and its connection to criminal power, my analysis focuses on one of the basic aspects of organised crime: governance, especially its symbolic vein as well as its interpretation and dissemination through media outlets. The names of my interlocutors have been changed in order to protect their security.

The US–Mexican War

Usually thought of as a two-year-long conflict between the United States and Mexico, the US–Mexican War (1846–1848) represents the culmination of a much longer struggle over the control of what became the American Southwest. Years before Mexico declared its independence, early citizens of the United States resolved to seize Spain’s North American possessions. Devastated by a decade of revolt, Mexico lacked the unity needed to halt American efforts to acquire land at its expense. The US–Mexican War revealed an important divide among Mexicans over the issue of federalism. In the end, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo defined the modern political boundary between the two nations. Far from bringing peace to either nation, though, the war generated internal strife for both the United States and Mexico. The historic conflict still affects the relationship between the two nations.

The Formation of Historiography and Public Opinion in Mexico in the 19th Century

В статье анализируется становление мексиканской историографии в XIX веке. Автор отмечает существенное влияние на формирование мексиканской исторической и общественной мысли таких ключевых событий независимой истории молодого мексиканского государства, как Война за независимость, борьба за сохранение территориальной целостности страны, либеральные реформы, гражданская война 1854–1860 годов и буржуазно-демократическая революция 1910–1917 годов. Эти проблемы прежде всего нашли отражение в первых исторических национальных исследованиях. Будучи важными государственными и общественными деятелями, первые мексиканские историки не ограничивались хронологическим описанием исторических событий страны, а стремились к формированию концепций мексиканской истории с учетом особенностей ее развития и значения автохтонных традиций. The article analyzes the development of Mexican historiography in the 19thcentury. The author underlines that the Mexican War of Independence, Mexican liberal reforms, the civil war of 1854–1870, and the bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1910–1917 are key events whose influence on the formation of Mexican history and public opinion cannot be underestimated. The above mentioned milestones of Mexican history were investigated by the pioneers of Mexican historiography. Being prominent political and public figures, the pioneers of Mexican historiography did not only describe the chronology of historical events, but sought to develop a concept of Mexican history that would rest on Mexican traditions and peculiarities of the country’s development.

Gender and the Wars of Nation-Building and Nation-Keeping in the Americas, 1830s–1870s

The middle decades of the nineteenth century in the Americas were marked by dramatic warfare in the name of nationalism. The two most important conflicts were the US–Mexican War and the American Civil War. Both participants and observers interpreted the causes and outcomes of these most important conflicts as crucial to gender relations. As this chapter demonstrates, war and martial masculinity were often mutually reinforcing during wartime, while more restrained practices of manhood gained precedence after war’s end. Practices of womanhood were also shaped by the demands of war, leading in many cases to short-term increases in female autonomy and authority. In the long term, however, women rarely benefitted from the larger equation that citizenship was grounded in military sacrifice. Female subservience was ensured by a widespread division between public and private that granted authority and the right to privacy to male heads of households within their domains.

Mexico’s Chinaco Guerrillas During the French Intervention

Chinacos were mounted guerrillas of the War of the Reform and the French Intervention (1857–1860, 1862–1867) who fought on the liberal republican side, operated out of central Mexican regions, and were known for their wide-brimmed sombreros and battle lances. What is known about them is largely the product of popular perception shaped by print depictions, some of which were created long afterward. They first appeared in the press when the War of the Reform was winding down and the victorious Juárez government, in carriage and on horseback, prepared to enter Mexico City in January of 1861. Before the French invasion that began in October of 1861 with the naval landing at Veracruz, the “chinaco” designation applied to irregular fighters. The newspaper and propaganda organ La Chinaca gave such fighters an image and narrative that endures to the present day. Still known among many Mexicans, their appearance in print media resulted from times of crisis as Mexico, after a military defeat by the United States and a major loss of territory, encountered the French Intervention in the 1860s. Chinacos as symbolic figures on horseback exemplify a historic pattern of guerrilla warfare in Mexico, dating at least to the US-Mexican War. There are different versions of the label chinaco, although there is strong evidence that it has roots in the chino designation assigned to Afro-Mexicans during the colonial era. It is also linked to “china,” or rural women known for their distinctive attire as depicted in popular reading.

Sentimental Diplomacy

Chapter 3 explores instances of “sentimental diplomacy” in the literary aftermath of the US–Mexican War and Indian Removal. It opens by arguing that the heroines of María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885)—who seek to counter the violence and dispossession of late-nineteenth-century Californios—stand as unrecognized heirs to the women in John Rollin Ridge’s 1854 novel of Mexican banditry, Joaquín Murieta. Amidst the sensational violence of Joaquín Murieta, the first Native American novel, Mexican and Anglo-American women engage in a sentimental diplomacy that resists rampant racialized violence. In both The Squatter and the Don and Joaquín Murieta, sentimental diplomacy offers local possibilities for peace, but in neither novel can it overcome the war’s brutal legacy or the racism and systemic corruption that followed.