Jason Ruiz’s Narcomedia: Latinidad, Popular Culture, and America’s War on Drugs is a smart, layered pleasure to read. Within it he adopts similar methodological and argumentative approaches as found in his first book. In Americans in the Treasure House (U of Texas P, 2014), Ruiz explored archival materials and travel writings to investigate how Anglo Americans racialized Mexico and Mexicans during and after the regime of President Porfirio Díaz as well as how Mexico navigated such racialization. In Narcomedia, Ruiz retains his attention to the construction of a racial Other in the white imagination. However, this time he has shifted archives and racial categorization. Ruiz’s archive is now the popular culture that he grew up with and that surrounds us today, a subset of which Ruiz describes as “narcomedia.” Here, Ruiz is drawing upon, challenging, and expanding the work of Paul Eiss. In 2014, Eiss coined the term “narcomedia” to refer to the videos, handwritten signs, and other messages that emanated from gruesome cartel killings. Ruiz adopts and adapts the term, arguing that “narcomedia” “should be used more expansively and that it can more broadly refer to a wide variety of cultural forms that circulate in popular culture…. I understand narcomedia texts as weapons shaping public opinion about the War on Drugs and those implicated in the drug trade” (2-3). Unlike Americans in the Treasure House, Narcomedia moves beyond looking at the racialization of a specifically Mexican Other, instead turning its attention to the broader category of Latinx and particular communities within that pan-ethnic identity. In so doing Ruiz’s analysis of race, popular culture, and the War on Drugs finds that “the narratives and settings have changed, but the bad guys look and sound the same” (2). As he notes, “I want to know how things got this way and what it means that we continuously frame Latinxs and Latin Americans as our enemies in the War on Drugs” (2).
Narcomedia is so refreshing in part because it resists the often-formulaic trappings of academic writing. Ruiz is a skilled, lucid writer who weaves personal, reflective anecdotes into his writing. For example, there are moments in the text where Ruiz and his students enter the world of narcomedia as they toured the sites scarred by Colombia’s drug war. Moreover, Ruiz’s Narcomedia sourcing is impeccable, for beyond relying on his rich analysis, he interviewed writers, showrunners, and others to understand the production end of narcomedia. However, what is most striking for me is how Ruiz lays out his chapters. Many scholars would simply organize their books by text. Narcomedia does not. Ruiz lays the foundation of the book with two paired chapters on Miami—one focusing on Scarface (1983, dir. Brian De Palma) and the next focusing on the television crime drama series Miami Vice (1984-1990). But each of these chapters also elucidates key throughlines that are threaded throughout the rest of the book: The Latinization of the drug kingpin and the centering of whiteness and white innocence. From chapter three onward, Narcomedia takes on a topical and much more recursive approach. Texts and characters return again and again as characters themselves in the narrative that Ruiz weaves. For example, Ruiz offers an astute Latinx queer reading in chapter four of Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), a character from the series Breaking Bad (2008-13), and then returns to read him again through the lens of Latinx villainy in chapter five’s focus on Breaking Bad and suburban crime dramas. This recursive approach offers a richness to Ruiz’s analysis and makes Narcomedia a strong model for future writers.
Narcomedia is at its strongest when it slows down and returns back to texts and figures for deeper, more layered analysis. Pablo Escobar is an exemplar here. In chapter three, Ruiz offers an engaging comparative analysis of the media construction of Escobar’s death in US and Colombian media from tabloids to shows like El Patrón del Mal (2012) and Narcos (2015-17). Then toward the close of the book, in chapter seven, Ruiz returns to Pablo Escobar as a global media commodity that is celebrated in rap and consumer culture while the people of Colombia are still trying to grapple with the legacy of the violence.
Perhaps my personal favorite moment of analysis comes in a section of Ruiz’s readings of Breaking Bad titled “Tuco’s Grill.” Ruiz explores how the show depicts the character of Tuco Salamanca (Raymond Cruz) as an “erratic and meth-addled thug… the most important distributor in Albuquerque” (134). Building on his argument of centralized white innocence in Narcomedia, Ruiz notes that Tuco becomes the counterpoint to Walt (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse’s (Aaron Paul) whiteness in the drug business. Moreover, when Walt’s casually racist DEA agent brother-in-law Hank (Dean Norris) kills Tuco in a shootout, fellow agents encase Tuco’s grill (i.e. a form of dental jewelry) in Lucite as a trophy. At a surface level, Tuco’s death transforms Hank into a hero. However, as Ruiz notes, the shooting becomes a locus of panic attacks for Hank until he eventually tosses Tuco’s Grill into the symbolically charged Río Grande. Through these panic attacks, Ruiz gestures toward two possible readings: Hank may be seeing “Tuco as something other than just another soulless agent of the drug war” (136) or “Hank’s guilty panic attacks only serve to further deepen a white character who is increasingly complex as the story unfolds” (137). That is, the panic attacks serve to mark the humanization of the Latino villain in the eyes of the white character or to humanize the white character in the eyes of the audience. Of course, these are not mutually exclusive. In this way, Latinx villainy does not just mark the bounds of white heroes but also the depths of white humanity. If Ruiz recognizes this about the construction of Latinx villains in Breaking Bad, there may have also been an opportunity lost in the reading of the shows fifth season. Unlike the first four seasons, the final season pitted Walt against a neo-Nazi gang. Gone are the Latinx villains; this time replaced by bad whites. It would have been interesting to see Ruiz, having traced Walt’s descent into his alter-ego “Heisenberg” against Latino villains make sense of some sort of redemption vis-à-vis a battle against villainous, potentially unredeemable whites.
I cannot recommend Jason Ruiz’s Narcomedia highly enough. Well-researched and well-written, it will be a welcome addition to many classrooms, particularly those in Latina/o/x studies, American studies, and Film and Media studies at the undergraduate and graduate levels. If you know someone who is putting together an examination list, wants an enthralling read, or is about to start revising a book and wants a model, tell them about Ruiz’s Narcomedia: Latinidad, Popular Culture, and America’s War on Drugs.
Reviewer Bio: Earning his doctorate from Purdue University’s Program in American Studies, Lee Bebout is a professor of English at ASU, where he is affiliate faculty with the School of Transborder Studies and the Program in American Studies. His articles have appeared in Aztlán, MELUS, Latino Studies, and other scholarly journals. His book, Mythohistorical Interventions: The Chicano Movement and Its Legacies (Minnesota 2011), examines how narratives of myth and history were deployed to articulate political identity in the Chicano movement and postmovement era. His second book, Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the US Racial Imagination in Brown and White (NYU 2016), examines how representations of Mexico, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans have been used to foster whiteness and Americanness, or more accurately whiteness as Americanness.