The national narco-thriller in Silver Bullets by Elmer Mendoza

Abstract

In Elmer Mendoza's fiction the legitimate status of the 19th-century Mexican national "imagined community" disappears, giving room to new forms of power where violence is not controlled by the State anymore. Mendoza reflects in Balas de Plata (2008, Silver Bullets) on a hybrid Mexico, derived from mixed socio-political practices. These practices contributed to the formation of a nation with institutions in constant crisis and whose imperfect modernity is the result of pre-modern and modern forms of government. For Mendoza, representation of violence implies the symbolic and literal negotiation between the official and the criminal worlds from the perspective of its participants.