Abstract
The title of Hector Amaya's book does not do justice to the strong communicative dimension that it has, focussing on the public discourse and the public sphere. As the author explains, Trafficking: Narcoculture in Mexico and the United States is ‘an inquiry into the way Mexico's criminal drug violence and media technologies structure publicity, or publicness’ (p. 2). Amaya defines publicness as ‘the communicative processes of criticism that bring together different social groups to attend, to influence, and/or shape the social collective’ (p. 3). He reminds us that it is a foundational concept linked to other key ideas such as the public sphere, public culture, and public opinion. As Amaya points out ‘as a concept, publicness is as old as democratic theory itself and has deeply influenced disciplines attentive to expressive culture and communicative practices’ (p. 3). At the heart of his book is an attempt to explain how criminal violence ‘becomes historicized and made public; how it becomes talk, symbols, and meaning; how it becomes memorialized in expressive culture; and how it is embedded in narratives of institutions and practices, which give violence philosophical power, temporality, and specificity’ (p. 19). The book is split into Introduction, six substantive chapters and Conclusion. The substantive chapters explore the history of the recent violence in Mexico and how this topic has been treated in the public sphere; the public debate in print and digital resources in the USA and Mexico ‘on whether Mexico is at risk of becoming a failed state’; the musical genre of narcocorridos; the citizen journalism blogosphere in Mexico and the famous Mexican website El Blog del Narco ‘as symptomatic of the type of publicity common in contemporary Mexico and the way violence has structured the citizen journalism sector of the Mexican blogosphere’ (p. 23). All in all, this is a fascinating book, which albeit focussing on a specific context, is well worth a read by scholars from around the world.