Falling to My Death: Vertical Rhetorics in Neoliberal Mexico - Hardcover

In
a book that combines memoir and cultural criticism of visual media, public
rhetoric, and memory texts, José Ángel Maldonado reflects on the subjectivities
he embodies--mestizo, epileptic, and exile--while engaging in a critique of the
various popular texts he encounters while travelling through Mexico after
living in the United States as an undocumented immigrant. Using the suffix -cide
(from the Latin caedere, "to fall," and "to die") as a guide for a
discussion of modes of dying in contemporary Mexico, he creates a constellation
of terms like suicide, magnicide, genocide, and feminicide, as metaphors for
falling that define quotidian life in Mexico. This exercise uncloaks what he
terms the "rhetorics of verticality" that many deploy when navigating dangerous
situations throughout violent, militarized Mexico. Trained as a cultural critic
who uses rhetorical theory to deconstruct discourse, he combines a confessional
style with an accessible academic voice to demonstrate how everyday texts
inform and shape reality in order to anticipate, rather than react to, the
inevitability of violence.