In 2015, drug trafficker Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s escape from prison provoked a fan frenzy that played out in public demonstrations as well as social and mass media. In this article, I argue that this episode must be understood as symptomatic of a long-term transformation of Mexico’s public sphere. The waves of economic crisis that began in the late 1970s unmoored personal desires and aspirations from the promises of the nation-state. The public sphere filled with dispersive tendencies; fiction and fantasy began to take unpredictable directions. To grasp this unmooring, I propose the idea of crowd-texts: circulating texts that interpellate their readers as fundamentally crowd-like in their unruly flight from the narrative teleologies that had sutured the nation. The first crowd-text I examine is a 1982 issue of the comic book La Familia Burrón (The Burrón Family). Set in the year of Mexico’s most emblematic currency devaluation, the comic puts an at once ironic and utopian spin on the crisis. In the 1990s and 2000s, similar dispersive tendencies can be found in the narcocorrido, a popular ballad-form dedicated to the exploits of drug traffickers. These songs, I argue, took narrative flight into openly violent terrain, where the rising institution of the cartels could, for many, supplant the expired promises of the nation-state. By comparing comic book and narcocorridos as popular representations of Mexico’s economic and public security crises, Narrative Flight: Comics, Cartels, and Crowds Across 40 Years of Crisis in Mexico 1230 I show how these texts interpellate their publics as dispersive crowds, thus revealing a deeper crisis in the progress-oriented temporality of the Mexican nation-state and its public sphere. [

中文翻译：

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叙事飞行：墨西哥 40 年危机中的漫画、卡特尔和人群

2015 年，毒贩 Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán 越狱，在公开示威以及社交媒体和大众媒体中引发了粉丝的狂热。在本文中，我认为必须将这一事件理解为墨西哥公共领域长期转型的征兆。始于 1970 年代后期的经济危机浪潮使个人愿望和愿望从民族国家的承诺中解脱出来。充满分散倾向的公共领域；小说和幻想开始走向不可预测的方向。为了抓住这种解脱，我提出了群体文本的概念：传播文本，在他们不守规矩地逃离已经缝合了国家的叙事目的论的过程中，从根本上向他们的读者提出质疑。我检查的第一个人群文本是 1982 年发行的漫画书 La Familia Burrón（The Burrón Family）。这部漫画以墨西哥最具象征意义的货币贬值年为背景，对这场危机进行了讽刺和乌托邦式的描述。在 1990 年代和 2000 年代，类似的散播倾向可以在 narcocorrido 中找到，这是一种流行的民谣形式，专门针对毒贩的剥削。我认为，这些歌曲将叙事带入了公开的暴力领域，对许多人来说，卡特尔的崛起机构可以取代民族国家的过期承诺。通过比较漫画书和 narcocorridos 作为墨西哥经济和公共安全危机的流行表现形式，《叙事逃亡：墨西哥 1230 年危机中的漫画、卡特尔和人群》，我展示了这些文本如何将公众作为分散的人群进行盘问，从而揭示了墨西哥民族国家及其公共领域以进步为导向的时间性中更深层次的危机。[