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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.

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.

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.

The brief conclusion emphasizes the universality of Mexican attitudes and approaches to death. It refutes the suppositions of post-revolutionary Mexican intellectuals who theorized a unique Mexican character. Thinkers like Samuel Ramos and Octavio Paz—, and more recently, Claudio Lomnitz—have perpetuated a myth that Mexican society can be best defined by death. I wrap up the main arguments of the study of suicide to put to rest the idea that Mexicans possess a singular death cult.

American critical reactions to Anna Sokolow’s Mexican works Wandering Frog (1940) and Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter (1941) displayed the differences between Mexican and American modernism. US critics read the dances as ethnic instead of revolutionary within an anticommunist American critical discourse of ethnic and ethnologic dance. The resonance of Sokolow’s choreography among the transnational Left in the 1930s fell flat given the United States’ wartime demonization of Communism and shift in American dance coverage from leftist to mainstream newspapers and magazines. This spectatorial mismatch ended in a loss of nuance in the public readings of her dances, but created space for dances like Kaddish (1945) to be transgressive while appearing universal. Kaddish and Mexican Retablo (1946) display Sokolow’s feminist subversion of ritual in reaction to the Holocaust. They account for a human tragedy she railed against and publicly mourned in its aftermath.

By analyzing the composition and performance processes of Carrillo’s first opera, Matilde, this chapter offers a transhistorical exploration of the production of meaning in a particular musical work. It studies the opera as a site of contested and changing imaginaries of Mexican citizenship at the moment of composition in 1910 and at the moment of its premiere in 2010.

This chapter discusses the present state of research on music in Mexican cinema and why a study is so important. Building on frameworks of nationalism and cultural identity in Mexico the author utilizes the concept of “cultural synchresis,” which draws upon sound theorist Michel Chion’s model of synchresis—the combination of synchronism and synthesis that arises when an auditory phenomenon and a visual phenomenon occur at the same time. Using this model, the author investigates how repetitions of film—as bodies of music, the moving image, and narrative working in tandem—molded diverse codes of national identity construction aimed and recognized by urban audiences. This juxtaposition of the narrative, moving image (which encompasses the costuming, setting, lighting, etc.), and sound (which includes diegetic and non-diegetic music and sound design) produced encoded messages representing specific interpretations of Mexicanidad (the cultural identity of the Mexican people) that impacted collective memory.