Anthropology Department Faculty

Research Overview

Professor Mondragón’s research explores the forms of knowledge production and circulation that emerge in contexts of generalized violence and opacity. It analyzes the psychosocial and performative effects of these forms of mediation, as well as how they constitute and unmake political authority, from statehood to empire. Her work engages with debates on the state, affect, mediation, drug warfare, criminality, and representation, and has a regional focus on Latin America.

Her first book project, Mediations of War: Statehood, Criminality, and the Politics of Knowledge in Mexico, investigates the highly mediated ways in which Mexicans engage with the “war on drug trafficking.” It analyzes how, given its persistent murkiness, Mexico’s drug war is largely apprehended in partial and oblique ways—through propaganda, fiction, conspiracy theory, rumor, and spectacle. The book project thus reframes the drug war from a military confrontation between the state and criminal organizations to a conceptual struggle around the relation between these two entities.

Through ethnographic engagements with journalists, media makers, bureaucrats, and protesters, the book theorizes how public knowledge produced on the drug war illuminates its key internal contradictions, including the state’s simultaneous indistinction from drug traffickers, through collusion and lethal violence against its citizens, and its incapacity to subjugate the drug world’s charisma and ideological authority. As it traces public discourses, affective responses, and other collective reactions to these conditions, it sheds light on the drug war’s political and psychosocial effects. Such effects bring new dimensions of criminality to the fore, particularly its mass-cultural and affective force as a fundamental threat to—or foundation of—political authority, rearranging the relation between the state and publics in contemporary Mexico.

Her second book project, Femininity and the Drug War in Mexico: Wounded Bodies and the Gendered Politics of (In)visibility, examines how feminist activists mobilize the relationship between gendered violence and its representation as part of their struggle for justice. This project is situated within the persistent increase in gendered violence throughout Mexico after a decade and a half of drug-related violence. By exploring pedagogical practices, street-level protests, and Latin American debates and forms of regional solidarity, this project traces how Mexican feminists engage in practices that include transforming the dead feminine body from a weapon of terror into a tool of resistance. In light of recent attacks to feminist political agendas in the US, this project seeks to illuminate the distinct ways in which the legacy of Latin American—and specifically, Mexican—feminism articulates to confront misogynistic violence.

Research Interests

• Knowledge production and circulation
• Drug warfare and organized crime
• Political authority
• US imperialism in Latin America
• Affect and performative politics
• Militarization
• Feminism in the Global South
• Mexico