Moving Media in the Americas

Mediating Violence and Precarity in Mexico and Chicano Communities

Saturday December 6, 2025 | 1:45PM-3:30PM

LBC 208 Korach

Presenters

  • Gabrielle Corona (Princeton University), “State Surveillance and Historical Erasure in Los Tigres Del Norte at Folsom Prison (2019)”

“Como Johnny Cash, venimos aquí para traer luz a este lugar oscuro,”1 a member of Los Tigres Del Norte reflected in Los Tigres Del Norte at Folsom Prison, a documentary film covering their 2018 tribute to Cash’s performance at California’s Folsom Prison in 1968. In the five decades between these two concerts, the amount of new prisons in the United States rose to unprecedented levels, prison rebellions swept the nation, and an influx of Latin American immigrants came to the U.S. amidst increasing state violence at the Southwestern border. The documentary opens and closes with references to Cash’s 1968 concert without mentioning that Los Tigres performed their first U.S. concert at California’s Soledad Prison that same year. This paper argues that Los Tigres Del Norte at Folsom Prison is a carefully crafted form of propaganda that improves public relations for California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. In service of constructing a tribute and emphasizing the prisoner demographic change between 1968 from majority white American to almost half Latinx in 2018, the film marginalizes the history it purports to elucidate. I historicize this film by turning to archives from the 1960s Chicano Movement era to document how prisoners and their outside co-strugglers sought to build solidarity with one another through their musical engagements. I discuss the interconnected themes of migration, censorship, social movements, and cultural production through an analysis of the papers of Raúl Salinas, newspaper coverage, and the film, in dialogue with literature from documentary studies, sound studies, and Latinx history.

  • Jacqueline Avila (University of Texas at Austin), “Los sonidos de medianoche: Music, Soundscape, and Familial Drama in Apple TV+’s Familia de medianoche (2023)”

 Based on the 2019 documentary of the same name, Apple TV+’s Familia de medianoche provides an alarming glimpse into Mexico’s healthcare system, using the Tamayo family as a conduit for this exploration. The Tamayos run a private, for-profit ambulance, operating predominately in the evenings and competing with other for-profit ambulances in the quest to not only help people, but to also survive as a working-class family. The series is narrated by Marigaby (Renata Vaca), a member of the Tamayo family who is a paramedic and UNAM medical student. Marigaby guides the audience through the turbulent nights of working as a paramedic and how this work both impacts her family life and her future career as an emergency room doctor. Music and sound design aid considerably through these moments. As the family move around several neighborhoods, the soundscape abruptly changes, functioning both as a musical accompaniment to their movements and experiences and also a commentary on the sonic landscape of the city. Intriguingly, the music and sound design for the series borrows strategies from the Latin American road film, offering audiences a more nuanced and intricate construction of Mexico City and to the communities who live there. This paper explores the eclectic and complex soundscapes constructed in selected sequences from this ten-episode series, where one of Mexico City’s untold stories is played out and musicalized, highlighting the diversity of the city and the multitudes of struggles faced by its residents.

  • Agnès Mondragón Celis (University of Rochester), “Crime Talk, Extraterritorial ‘Justice,’ and the Politics of Mediation in the Drug War” 

Every year, about a dozen Mexican nationals are extradited to the US on charges related to drug trafficking. While extradition is often spoken of as a remedy to Mexico’s collapsed judicial system and its near absolute impunity, I argue that this judicial processing is partial and selective, marked as much by erasure as by the production of ‘truth.’ As extradited individuals are taken before the US judicial system to respond for crimes allegedly committed on US soil—usually the trafficking of drugs—those that are perpetrated on Mexican territory—often murder and disappearance—are left unspoken and unresolved. This paper follows the cases of two Mexican nationals in US courts through ethnographic and archival work. It critically compares the knowledge produced around each case by and for the US state—through court hearings, press releases, and other official discourse—and the forms of epistemic erasure (despite different actors’ attempts) on facts and accounts that would serve the interest of Mexican victims, which then circulate in more speculatory forms (as a transnational form of ‘crime talk’). I argue that the differential valuation of these kinds of knowledge and their purposes instantiates the imperial power underlying the US’s war on drugs, not only by illuminating the extraterritorial reach of the US’s judicial apparatus, but also by revealing the unequal value ascribed to the lives of US and Mexican citizens at the heart of this transnational project.