Performing Mexicanidad I

This chapter takes as its focus the intersection of the discourses of Mexican criminology (based on international narratives) and those of lucha libre (Mexican wrestling) spectacle. The analysis focuses on the merging of personas—the serial killer disguised as a nurse and that of La Dama del Silencio, the wrestler persona adopted by Juana Barraza, that various accounts used as evidence that she, Barraza, was indeed the serial killer. These discourses have served to criminalize La Dama del Silencio, the wrestler, more so than Juana Barraza, the woman. This chapter shows how discourses of criminality and the spectacle of lucha libre intersect to regulate and perform the parameters of mexicanidad, reinforcing the limits of Mexican masculinity and femininity, but also revealing these limits as subject to redefinition. The gendered, sexed and classed police and criminological accounts, that interpret Barraza’s wrestling practice, with “masculine” features, and “muscular” body, as proof that Barraza was “evil”, and therefore capable of killing “without remorse” are interrogated. The chapter concludes with an analysis of how this merging of personas, the serial killer and the wrestler, circulates in different popular cultural forms, including a cumbia music video, a novel, and a police video.

The Look of the Serial Killer

This chapter concentrates on the visual material police and criminologists used in their search to identify El/La Mataviejitas, most especially: (1) the sketches police used to identify the male El Mataviejitas before the killer's gender became more complicated, 2) a three-dimensional bust, molded based on witnesses’ accounts of the Mataviejitas, and (3) the photographs of Juana Barraza taken by a police criminologist after her arrest. The analysis of these visuals is juxtaposed to the text that accompanies them. The sexed, gendered, classed, and skin-tone-based tensions between the sketches used by the police, the media's narrations of the Mataviejitas case, and the official discourses of what a criminal stereotypically “looks” like are highlighted. Particular attention is paid to CaraMex, the criminal identification software used in Mexico and, finally, the set of photographs of Juana Barraza’s “gaze” taken as confirmation that she is (and has always been) La Mataviejitas.

Framing the Serial Killer

This chapter focuses on the difficulties the Mexican police, press, and public had in conceptualizing a serial killer, and how this affected the search for El/La Mataviejitas. It opens with a discussion of Mexico’s cultural beliefs concerning serial killing—that it is a product of anomie; it can happen only in a society deficient in moral values. The chapter then shows how from official discourses to popular culture, Mexicans conceive of their society as strongly grounded in traditional family values and how this belief influenced the search for a serial killer. The chapter closes with an analysis of the construction of "infamous" serial killers internationally and the impact of these constructions on the conceptualization of El/La Mataviejitas. The analysis focuses on the police assumption that the serial killer of elderly women must be a man, based on international patterns. This stereotype of the serial killer took on a distinctly local flavor once the police authorities modified their belief that El Mataviejitas was a “he” to include the possibility that he was a “travesti”—a local gendered identity linked to sex work, which police equated with sexual perversion and upon which it is culturally easy to build criminality.

Introduction

The introduction provides an overview of the case and an outline of the methodological frameworks that will serve as the analytic anchor points of the text. After describing my visit to see Juana Barraza in prison, the introduction (1) contextualizes the story of the Mataviejitas by providing a brief history of criminality and serial killing in Mexico, (2) introduces the political concerns and long-standing rift between the government of Mexico City and the governing party of Mexico, and (3) lays out the main methodological tools I will use, mexicanidad and pigmentocracy.

Conclusion

The book concludes by trying to answer the questions that guided its research: Who counts as a victim and how is a criminal constructed in Mexico in relation to official criminality discourses and their intersections with notions of mexicanidad? This last part of the book explores the tensions between pivotal figures in the construction of mexicanidad such as La Virgin de Guadalupe, La Malinche, and La Llorona and how they contrast with the actual lives of the historical Malitzin, Juana Barraza, and the victims of feminicides. In this discussion, challenges are raised in regard to the figure of the macho and the notion of machismo in the everyday lives of Mexican men and women.

Performing Mexicanidad II

This chapter analyzes the notion of mexicanidad in terms of its underlying religious associations and their relation to official discourses on criminality. The construction of what constitutes a “morally good” Mexican versus an “evil” one, based on religious beliefs—such as an adoration of La Santa Muerte (The Holy Death) and —was used in official discourses to pathologize Barraza’s beliefs as those of a lower-class Mexican who was “evil” by nature. Her beliefs, along with her socioeconomic class, were exploited in media coverage to link her to criminality and serve as evidence that she was indeed a serial killer. Popular adoration of La Santa Muerte (and the associated figure of Jesús Malaverde) is contrasted with that of figures with whom she shares many characteristics, but which are deemed much more acceptable within the discourses of mexicanidad: La Virgen de Guadalupe and La Catrina. The chapter also explores the figure of the macho and the notion of machismo in the everyday lives of Mexican men and women.