Listening to Sicarios presents new insights into the lives of paid assassins of Mexico's drug trafficking syndicates from the perspectives of the assassins themselves. Based on an extraordinary series of ethnographic interviews carried out in the wake of the record levels of narcoviolence experienced in Ciudad Juarez between 2008 and 2012, this study analyzes the ways in which these young men interpret their actions across four key thematic axes: border infrastructures, youth and responsibility, masculinity and sentiment, and ethics: good vs. evil. It argues that sicarios follow a career path within a criminal corporate infrastructure that is especially robust in Mexican border cities. It also explores how sicarios understand youthful innocence in relation to adult accountability in the realm of violence that is frequently meted out by young men on other young men. It then analyzes sicarios' expressions of feelings of power that may boost their sense of virility, as well as feelings of fear and regret that imply weakness. Finally, it examines how sicarios defend their personal integrity in the face of a public discourse that views their acts as savage.

The first of its kind and a powerful challenge to customary views of gender and sexuality in the life and literature of Mexico, this book traces literary representations of masculinity in Mexico from independence in 1810 to the 1960s, and shows how these intersect with the constructions of nation and nationality. The rhetoric of "Mexicanness" makes constant use of images of masculinity, though it does so in shifting and often contradictory ways. Robert McKee Irwin's work follows these shifts from the male homosocial bonding that was central to notions of national integration in the nineteenth century, to questioning of gender norms stirred by science and scandals at the turn of the century, to the virulent reaction against gender chaos after the Mexican revolution, to the association of Mexicanness with machismo and homophobia in the literature of the 1940s and 1950s--even as male homosexuality was established as an integral part of national culture. As the first historical study of how masculinity and, particularly, homosexuality were understood in Mexico in the national era, this book not only provides "queer readings" of most major canonical texts of the period in question, but also uncovers a variety of unknown texts from queer Mexican history, including the 1906 novel Los 41, which reenacts the scandal of a turn-of-the-century transvestite ball that launched modern discussion of homosexuality in Mexico. It is a radical undermining of the simple hetero/homosexual and masculine/feminine oppositions that have for so long informed views of the country's national character.

"This book is an essential reference for scholars and students from a wide array of fields represented by Latin American and cultural studies. It provides highly authoritative entries on most of the major topics of the day."--Ignacio M. Sanchez Prado, author of "Naciones Intelectuales"

"This text represents a fantastic resource as well as an excellent pedagogical tool for the diffusion of the main tenets of cultural studies among students and among scholars who are not specialists in Latin American cultural studies."--Ana Del Sarto, coeditor of "Latin American Cultural Studies Reader"

"A dictionary is a book to ask questions of. Not only what each word means, but also why some are present and others are absent, and how the presences and the absences are connected. Irwin and Szurmuk's "Dictionary" exhaustively registers the sources and lines of development of the studies of culture in Latin America."--Nestor Garcia Canclini, writing in "En torno a los estudios culturales"

The "Dictionary of Latin American Cultural Studies" is a fundamental reference for students, pedagogues, and investigators interested in understanding the terminology of the field.
This comprehensive volume explains and contextualizes fifty-four key terms and theories, including some general concepts in cultural studies (e.g., body, deconstruction, ideology, postmodernism, power, queer theory) as they relate to research in Latin America, and some specific to the field of Latin American studies (e.g., anthropophagy, deterritorialization, lettered city). Each entry defines the term in question, explains its usages, discusses its etymology and the intellectuals who have made relevant contributions, and provides a bibliography of essential sources.
Uniquely suited to the student or scholar struggling with translating cultural studies terminology into non-English language topics of study, originally published in Spanish, and with contributions by many of the field's foremost authorities, this dictionary is poised to become a defining text for Latin American cultural studies.

"Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints" investigates cultural icons of the late nineteenth century from Mexico's largely unstudied northwest borderlands, present-day Sonora, Baja California, and western Chihuahua. Robert McKee Irwin looks at popular figures such as Joaquin Murrieta, the gold rush social bandit; Lola Casanova, the anti-Malinche, whose marriage to a Seri Indian symbolized a forbidden form of "mestizaje;" and la Santa de Cabora, a young faith healer who inspired armed insurgencies and was exiled to Arizona.
Cultural icons such as Murrieta, Lola Casanova, and la Santa de Cabora are products of intercultural dialogue, Irwin reveals, and their characterizations are unstable. They remain relevant for generations because there is no consensus regarding their meanings, and they are weapons in struggles of representation in the borderlands. The figures studied here are especially malleable, he argues, because they are marginalized from the mainstream of historiography.
A timely analysis, "Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints "challenges current paradigms of border studies and presents a rich understanding of the ways in which cultural icons influence people's minds and lives.
Robert McKee Irwin is associate professor of Spanish at the University of California, Davis, and the author of Mexican Masculinities (Minnesota, 2003).

A man masquerading as a lesbian in Spain's Golden Age fiction. A hermaphrodite's encounters with the Spanish Inquisition. Debates about virility in the national literature of postrevolutionary Mexico. The work of contemporary artists Reinaldo Arenas, Severo Sarduy, and Maria Luisa Bemberg. The public persona of Pedro Zamora, former star of MTV's The Real World. Despite an enduring queer presence in Hispanic literatures and cultures, most scholars have avoided the specter of sexual dissidence in the Spanish-speaking world. In Hispanisms and Homosexualities, editors Sylvia Molloy and Robert Irwin bring together a group of essays that advance Hispanic studies and gay and lesbian studies by calling into question what is meant by the words Hispanic and homosexual. The fourteen contributors to this volume not only offer queer readings of Spanish and Latin American texts and performances, they also undermine a univocal sense of homosexual identities and practices. Taking on formations of national identity and sexuality; the politics of visibility and outing; the intersections of race, sexuality, and imperial discourse; the status of transvestism and posing; and a postmodern aesthetic of camp and kitsch, these essays from both established and emerging scholars provide a more complex and nuanced view of related issues involving nationality, ethnicity, and sexuality in the Hispanic world. Hispanisms and Homosexualities offers the most sophisticated critical and theoretical work to date in Hispanic and queer studies. It will be an essential text for all those engaged with the complexities of ethnic, cultural, and sexual subjectivities.Contributors. Daniel Balderston, Emilie Bergmann, Israel Burshatin, Brad Epps, Mary S. Gossy, Robert Irwin, Agnes I. Lugo-Ortiz, Sylvia Molloy, Oscar Montero, Jose Esteban Munoz, Jose Quiroga, Ruben Rios Avila, B. Sifuentes Jauregui, Paul Julian Smith