Chronicle Book Review: Narco Media

Narco Media: Latinidad, Common Tradition, and America’s Warfare on Medication by Jason Ruiz (2023, College of Texas Press, 248 pp., $29.95 PB)

This isn’t a e-book in regards to the minutia of drug coverage. The creator, Jason Ruiz, is an affiliate professor of American Research at Notre Dame, and his subject isn’t politics and coverage however the realm of widespread tradition. In Narco Media, he zeroes in on the portrayal of Latinos and Latin People within the fictional (typically fact-based) representations which have appeared on screens large and small, from Scarface to Higher Name Saul and Narcos.

In a enjoyable and informative romp via these TV collection and flicks, Ruiz exhibits how, whereas many issues have modified in widespread tradition representations of drug points, a minimum of one factor has remained secure: the portrayal of Latinos and Latin People as an alien drive threatening the American physique politic with dope. It appeared as if no episode of Miami Vice might be full and not using a swarthy Latin villain, sometimes a drug lord carrying a white go well with and with a penchant for homicidal violence.

Or in Breaking Dangerous, a critically lauded collection a couple of white, middle-class instructor pushed by circumstance into meth manufacturing (who’s portrayed sympathetically at the same time as he descends into the brutal drug kingpin Heisenberg), it’s as soon as once more American Latinos and Mexicans who threaten our protagonists all through. And Walter White/Heisenberg’s competitor, “Hen Man” Gus Fring, is Chilean. 

Fring can also be homosexual, some extent made solely very subtly in Breaking Dangerous, however considered one of curiosity to Ruiz, who, in a queer research interlude examines the very restricted portrayals of gayness in narco media. There’s a recurring homosexual minor character in Miami Vice. Nonetheless, the extra frequent response within the style is to attenuate it, as is the case with Colombian drug queen Griselda Blanco’s lesbianism, which will get brief shrift in Queen of the South, the USA Community collection that ran from 2016 to 2021.

You may’t discuss portrayals of the drug enterprise in popular culture with out speaking about essentially the most notorious drug kingpin of all, Pablo Escobar. He’s, in any case, the topic of the unique Netflix collection Narcos, Escobar: El Patron del Mal, Escobar: Paradise Misplaced, and Loving Pablo. Regardless of (or due to) his dying by the hands of the Colombian state with the assistance of the gringos greater than 30 years in the past, the Colombian kingpin stays a supply of cultural fascination. Ruiz calls him “essentially the most alive useless man on the planet.” 

Not solely do the Escobar productions reproduce the stereotype of the violent Latin American drug lord, however additionally they sometimes observe storylines centered on white People. As an illustration, Narcos is narrated by characters primarily based on real-life DEA brokers. It appears to be an overarching function of narco media that despite the fact that the subject material is Latino or Latin American, whiteness is centered. 

This e-book is a broad survey of narco media, bearing on many extra motion pictures and TV collection than I’ve managed to say—there are fascinating discussions of Weeds and Site visitors, as an example—however Ruiz returns again and again to his important level: Narco media reinforces narratives aimed toward making white audiences comfy, together with comfy with the drug conflict established order, a minimum of partially by making the Latino/Latin American Different the locus of the drug risk. 

The intense messages however, Narco Media is a gasoline to learn, a fast-paced journey down reminiscence lane with all these of us we like to hate and worry but cannot get sufficient of. Hi there there, Tony Montana. How are you doing, Nancy Botwin? And Pablo—how can we miss you should you will not go away?