Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes: Violent Myths of the U.S.-Mexico Frontier

By Rafael Acosta Morales

Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes examines how historical archetypes in violent narratives on the Mexican American frontier have resulted in political discourse that feeds back into real violence.

The drug battles, outlaw culture, and violence that permeate the U.S.-Mexican frontier serve as scenery and motivation for a wide swath of North American culture. In this innovative study, Rafael Acosta Morales ties the pride that many communities felt for heroic tales of banditry and rebels to the darker repercussions of the violence inflicted by the representatives of the law or the state. Narratives on bandits, cowboys, and desperadoes promise redistribution, regeneration, and community, but they often bring about the very opposite of those goals. This paradox is at the heart of Acosta Morales’s book.

Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes examines the relationship between affect, narrative, and violence surrounding three historical archetypes—social bandits (often associated with the drug trade), cowboys, and desperadoes—and how these narratives create affective loops that recreate violent structures in the Mexican American frontier. Acosta Morales analyzes narrative in literary, cinematic, and musical form, examining works by Américo Paredes, Luis G. Inclán, Clint Eastwood, Rolando Hinojosa, Yuri Herrera, and Cormac McCarthy. The book focuses on how narratives of Mexican social banditry become incorporated into the social order that bandits rose against and how representations of violence in the U.S. weaponize narratives of trauma in order to justify and expand the violence that cowboys commit. Finally, it explains the usage of universality under the law as a means of criminalizing minorities by reading the stories of Mexican American men who were turned into desperadoes by the criminal law system.

Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes demonstrates how these stories led to recreated violence and criminalization of minorities, a conversation especially important during this time of recognizing social inequality and social injustices. The book is part of a growing body of scholarship that applies theoretical approaches to borderlands studies, and it will be of interest to students and scholars in American and Mexican history and literature, border studies, literary criticism, cultural criticism, and related fields.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780268200770

Rafael Acosta Morales

Rafael Acosta Morales is assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Kansas and a contributor to Modern Mexican Culture.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Affective Assemblages

People and the Stories We Love

Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes is a study of the relationship between affect, narrative, and violence on the Mexico-U.S. frontier. I choose the term frontier instead of border as I do not mean to focus on a single line drawn on a map but on a territory conceived of as the end of civilization and not quite incorporated into the nation-state. The book studies three transhistorical narratives of violence and their underlying affective structures: narratives on social bandits in the Mexican countryside, including drug dealers; narratives on desperadoes in the territories ceded by Mexico to the United States under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; and narratives on cowboys, who waged war on Native Americans across the shifting U.S. frontier. These characters are relevant because the stories that are told about them have had lasting traditions, affecting their target population and sometimes beyond. These archetypes have produced narratives that have continued to operate within a structure, even while single icons might have become outdated and forgotten. These affective structures are generally transhistorical and prove very resilient to obsolescence while being flexible enough to be applied to historical narratives in much the same way as to fiction. In order to better explain these structures’ persistence and flexibility, the book brings to bear the role of enjoyment and affect in popular narratives that package political violence for entertainment, and in doing so, it also explains how these influential narratives have become a model for behavior in that they produce certain types of affect among people who consume them.

Narratives about social bandits, desperadoes, and cowboys have already received considerable critical attention, ranging from Richard Slotkin’s (1972) structural analysis of the mythical figure of the cowboy to Paul Vanderwood’s (1981) historical study of asocial bandits during Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship in Mexico or Américo Paredes’s (1988) retelling of Walter Prescott Webb’s The Texas Rangers. More recently, scholars such as Steven Shaviro (1993) and Daniel Davis Wood (2016) have studied the cowboy genre from the dystopia that was brought forward by Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian ([1985] 1992). Scholars like Juan Pablo Dabove (2007) have delved into how banditry represented a countermovement to the dispossession of Latin Americans during the modernizing movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And scholars like Raúl Coronado (2013) have developed the subject of how Mexican Americans became excluded from supposedly universal access to a democratic system by the construction of a system that precluded their equal participation in politics. Generally speaking, then, the study of the narratives surrounding these archetypal figures has focused on either establishing a set of facts surrounding their actions and the historical environment in which they lived or studying the influence of their actions and/or stories on the creation of a national identity, or spirit.

To further develop the discussion, my book turns to affect in order to frame the play between narratives and political actions. Affect allows us to think of psychological drives in virtual terms—that is, in potential terms. The notion of virtuality helps us understand the assemblage enabling the material existence of violence, because it recognizes the reality of structures even though they have not been actualized. This is like recognizing the reality of a dream that influences people to act, thus producing real effects, even if the dream is not material. At the same time, the concept provides a flexible structure to describe how the stories’ material existence influences narratives. By looking at narratives of social bandits, desperadoes, and cowboys as virtual structures for the flow of affect, we can draw a clearer connection between myth and reality. We can better understand how we use narratives to make sense of facts and how myths become performative.

This affect-based approach offers to existing scholarship a more complex account of bandits, cowboys, and desperadoes as social phenomena. A brief reexamination of Vanderwood’s classic study of social bandits from an affect-based perspective provides a good example of what this renewed perspective may yield. In his book Disorder and Progress (1981), Vanderwood argues against Eric J. Hobsbawm’s (1959) idea of banditry as a socially conscious rebellion of premodern inspiration. Breaking with Hobsbawm’s conception of the bandit as a Robin Hood figure, Vanderwood studies the bandits who actually existed in Mexico during the Porfiriato (1876–1910). His conclusion is that there were no such Robin Hoods and that those who took up banditry did so in order to inscribe themselves in the oppressive dynamics of the regime. According to Vanderwood, these men became Rurales (Porfirio Díaz’s personal army, which kept order and killed those who opposed him) or otherwise attached themselves to local landlords and political bosses. While an important step in elucidating the historical reference of social bandits, Vanderwood’s conclusion overlooks the importance of the sorts of discourses producing the uprisings that brought the Díaz regime down and lumps together all agents of disorder as bandits. For Vanderwood, bandits include highway thieves, the participants in the Tomóchic uprising, the workers who tried to unionize during the Cananea strike, and those involved in the Mexican Revolution. Yet, regardless of the actual behavior of those bandits who joined the Rurales, it is evident that the discourse of economic redistribution inherent to social banditry had an effect on later political developments, both positive and negative. Vanderwood’s approach fails to grasp this dimension of the phenomenon. In other words, the virtual (i.e., affective, potential) elements of social banditry produced an unaddressed structural problem for Vanderwood’s research, inasmuch as his approach is not able to apprehend immaterial but existing elements of his area of study.

While bandits during the Porfiriato faced a structure that incentivized a certain behavior (it was much more profitable for any one bandit to join the Rurales than to fight them), the affective structure that surrounded them survived the Porfiriato and was an essential element of its collapse and then Victoriano Huerta’s downfall. When Porfirio Díaz finally resigned, he stated that the people who had previously raised him to his position became insurrected in millenarian armed bands, manifesting that [his] presence in the exercise of the Supreme Executive Power is the cause of their insurrection (Díaz, quoted in Casasola 1960, 311). Such millenarian bands, predecessors of Villa’s División del Norte, were much more interested in redistributing wealth (to themselves) than in eschatological mysticism or ideologies and in most cases had little agreement with Francisco I. Madero’s project for Mexico. People such as the leaders of the gangs that delivered the final blow to Díaz, taking the city of Torreón by force, rose in arms inspired mostly by stories of social banditry and popular resistance. These sorts of uprisings were by no means a new development in Mexico. Several other popular movements, such as the one led by Santiago Vidaurri (1809–67) in northeastern Mexico, originated in this imaginary and to a significant portion of Mexico’s population represented a more feasible and attractive proposal for social reform than the modernization project of Masonic liberals or the well-known oppression of the Conservative Party.

The reason this was so is mostly aesthetic. Narratives of social banditry were aesthetically pleasing to a sector of the population. These familiar stories also resonated with the way they narrated people’s lived experience. Stories that are familiar seem more plausible, and, as Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes proposes, solutions that have been idealized in narrative become part of a structure that is used to decide between two paths of action when reason cannot easily offer parameters for that decision. The construction of this narrative operates within a virtual structure, an assemblage that affords some flexibility in order to adjust to experience but that adjusts the feeling of such experience to a pattern that is aesthetically pleasing and familiar. Behavior is based on that narrative and feeds back into it. This book, then, is built around the notion that we enjoy the stories that we enjoy because they validate aesthetic constructs derived from preexisting structures of feeling that we then use to make ethical decisions.¹ I develop this idea further below, using the term affective assemblages to refer to these structures of feeling that legitimize both our aesthetic preferences and our ethical choices.

Productive Desires: Rethinking Myths from an

Affect-Based Perspective

To elucidate what I am calling an affective assemblage and how it influences storytelling, I first need to briefly refer back to the modern use of the term affect and, more specifically, sketch out its connections with the concept of virtuality. Affect came into its modern usage via Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s version of Baruch Spinoza. Originally, the term came into prominence through their work, A Thousand Plateaus (2005). Ian Buchanan defines this modern version of the concept in the following way.

Affect: That which the body and mind suffers (in the classical philosophical sense), which means simply that it is something we experience passively rather than actively. One may be affected both by internal stimulus, from the imagination, the instincts, or more generally the unconscious (psychoanalysis as a whole is premised on this idea), or external stimulus, which may take a huge variety of forms, from simple physical or sensorial stimuli to complex and cognitive stimuli. Affect is sometimes treated as a synonym for emotion, but as Brian Massumi argues in Parables for the Virtual (2002) it differs from emotion in that it is beyond our voluntary control. (Buchanan 2010)

Affect, then, is a passive experience of sensations that bears an impact on psychic life. Even if the terms aren’t synonymous, and the tenuous difference is important, affect’s link with emotion is significant. In many ways, affect is a precursor to emotion—even though it does not necessarily lead to emotion. As Eric Shouse (2005) puts it, Feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal. Affect does not equate to feeling, because feeling is a sensation that is interpreted in relation to other sensations. It is not emotion either, as emotion is a socialized feeling, one that is part of a sign system and can thus be expressed and experienced. In other words, a feeling is a sensation that is recognizable to the person who feels and an emotion is a sensation that is recognizable to others as well. Affect, on the other hand, is unrecognized, a nonconscious experience. In Shouse’s words, Affect is what makes feelings feel. It is what determines the intensity (quantity) of a feeling (quality), as well as the background intensity of our everyday lives (the half-sensed, ongoing hum of quantity/quality that we experience when we are not really attuned to any experience at all). According to Brian Massumi in the foreword to A Thousand Plateaus, "[Affect] is a pre-personal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. L’affection (Spinoza’s affection) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body" (Deleuze and Guattari 2005, xvi). In this way—and this is what interests me most for this book’s argument—affect is, on the one hand, an unconscious experience; and on the other, affect is an experience of the virtual. Affects are potential feelings and emotions. Affect is a virtuality that precedes feelings and emotions’ actualization.

It is important to note that this concept of virtuality is not opposed to materiality, as in virtual reality. Rather, it is a concept that describes the realm of potential, which is in a way also real, even if it is not material or, to be more exact, even if it has not been actualized. A good metaphor is the potential force of a stone suspended at some height above the ground. Even if at a given time that force has not been actualized—that is, even if the stone has not been released—the potential force is real and present. In architecture, this is thought of in the following terms: a ceiling contains its weight, a force called a static or dead load, while a piano suspended above flooring contains the potential for a dynamic load (a concentrated force on specific joists if dropped); in a similar way, a person bears the load of their potential emotions, some of which are dead loads (dispersed throughout a structure/person and permanent—everyday stresses) and some of which are dynamic (sudden impact of emotion that could become grief, panic, pain, etc.). Affect is akin to the suspended piano, as the precursor to strain (actual deformation of a structure).

In affect, as is the case with architecture, strain can only follow certain paths while the building remains in place. Such structures that allow for the flow of affect are affective assemblages. Furthermore, for Deleuze and Guattari, the virtual is also a central notion as the point of departure for becoming, which is their privileged term in a becoming/being dyad. In Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical works, becoming is arguably even more real than being. While being falls within the realm of repetition, becoming falls within the realm of difference. Becoming alludes to an experience that is not forced into a preconceived pattern but is allowed to take its own original shape as it comes into being.

The relevance of this notion of virtuality for reading cultural products can be more easily gleaned from understanding Deleuze’s (1986) critique of cinema. Although film is one of Deleuze’s primary objects of study, he values only a few exceptions. As Buchanan explains, Deleuze disparagingly refers to film in general as ‘bare repetition,’ a kind of mechanical repetition which does not yield difference but returns over and over again to an originating structure (Buchanan 2008, 5). The virtual is one of the main foci of Deleuzian thought because he values above all else new concepts, new forms of life, and the production, rather than the repetition, of pleasure. Deleuze aims to preserve the possibility of difference in the face of a widespread environment that favors repetition, a tendency he describes as fascist. This is so because he considers the structures that constrain becoming oppressive, as they deprive individuals of their ability to become individuals. The dominating metaphors of his thought (duration, lines of flight, nomadology, schizoanalysis, etc.) represent the vital role of virtuality and becoming for his theoretical approach.

This theoretical approach is not blindly shared in the present study, as the rise of neoliberalism has shown us that political manifestations of the sort that Deleuze privileged are not necessarily positive (Culp 2016, 5–24). Yet, as Deleuze developed his thought, it was difficult to predict that deterritorialization might in some contexts run counter to what was, in his view, philosophy’s "higher calling, the identification of the intolerable. . . . For Deleuze, philosophy exists for no other purpose, as is patent in his interest—more directly articulated in Anti-Oedipus—in the matter of voluntary servitude, the apparently inexplicable willingness on the part of many to put up with and indeed tolerate the intolerable" (Buchanan 2008, 10). Deterritorialized, free-flowing networks now dominate the push to make people voluntarily submit to servitude. This is not to say that Deleuze’s concepts should be abandoned, as they are very appropriate for the critique of ideology in the information era, but instead to point out that recent years have seen some of the elements he positively valued become reterritorialized into cruel, oppressive political projects. Because of this, Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes does not completely share all the values that Deleuze and Guattari assigned to most of the terms that originated in their project Capitalism and Schizophrenia but maintains some distance. This is most apparent in my chapter on cowboys, where Lacanian psychoanalysis is used side by side with affective theories to explain the mechanism at work in an affective assemblage related to trauma. While Capitalism and Schizophrenia was a project framed against psychoanalysis, this book is not. Deleuze and Guattari rejected psychoanalytic thinking mainly (though not solely) on the grounds that it was a theory used for the reproduction of trauma. Freud saw mankind’s psyche as arising from the trauma produced by the Oedipus complex, and Deleuze and Guattari rejected the central position of the repetition of trauma in the makeup of the human mind. As explained later, the chapter on cowboys makes the argument that the traumatic complex that gives rise to the avenger cowboy reproduces in a way that is consistent with the reproduction of mythology at the core of psychoanalysis—even though, as the chapter further argues, such a mechanism becomes ultimately more coherent when viewed from the standpoint of affective theory.² That is, while Deleuze disagrees with Freud because the latter proposes that feelings are, at their core, the representation of complexes, Deleuze and Guattari recognize that in disfunctional processes, desire can be made to follow such paths, but it is not natural to desire. In such a way, generally opposed theoretical frameworks like the Lacanian and the Deleuzian view of the psyche come to touch each other.

Yet even when my book does not completely rely on a Deleuzian framework, a Deleuzian-based notion of affect (especially in terms of virtuality) is key to understanding why and how certain myths (like those surrounding narratives of bandits, cowboys, and desperadoes) are reproduced from a perspective that inscribes them in material conditions of production. Thinking in terms of affect becomes important for our understanding of narrative since it helps us explain how discourse often seems to produce unrelated consequences. In other words, the notion of affect as virtuality explains more comprehensively the motivations that lead people to accept the intolerable. As Massumi puts it, The primacy of the affective is marked by a gap between content and effect: it would appear that the strength or duration of an image’s effect is not logically connected to the content in any straightforward way (Massumi 1995, 84).

The primary purpose of my book is to contribute to the understanding of this gap between content and effect, specifically in relation to narratives of political violence. In my proposed notion of affective assemblage, the adjective affective should then be understood in Deleuzian terms, as a reference to those virtual, potential, and unconscious intensities (in this case associated with the figures of the bandit, the cowboy, and the desperado) that lead people to act even if they produce undesirable effects. Narratives on bandits, cowboys, and desperadoes promise redistribution, regeneration, and universality. However, they often bring about, when acted upon, the very opposite of their stated discursive goals. As I analyze throughout the book, these narratives’ affective assemblages paradoxically engage us in what the affect scholar Lauren Berlant calls cruelly optimistic relations—that is, situations in which the things we desire obstruct the fulfillment of said desire (2011, 1). In this sense, affective assemblages can also be seen as a development of Sara Ahmed’s concept of affective economies that is more suitable for understanding narratives. Ahmed proposes a theory of emotion as economy, as involving relationships of difference and displacement without positive value. That is, emotions work as a form of capital: affect does not reside positively in the sign or commodity but is produced only as an effect of its circulation (2004a, 120). According to Ahmed, affect works just like capital: it is real only as it is becoming, circulating between the virtual and the actual. This is particularly apparent in what she calls happy objects, her analysis of which revolves around the Nietzschean idea that causality can be attributed retrospectively, with the object of feeling following the experience of feeling rather than the other way around (Ahmed 2010, 27). The relationship between happiness and the heterosexual family is, for Ahmed, a cogent example. In the case of the heterosexual family, an economy of affect is developed around the need to sustain the transformation of affect produced by family life into the emotion of happiness, thus socializing people to interpret heterosexual family affects as happy objects. Put simply, this means that the happiness of the heterosexual family precedes an actual family, and objects related to heterosexual family life are codified as happy, even if they are experienced as miserable. Although Ahmed uses emotion and affect almost indistinguishably—which might be problematic both because of affect’s uncodified nature and because affect can develop into things other than emotion—her focus on the actualization of affect and its circulation within society is of utmost importance for understanding the persistence and flexibility of the affective assemblages studied in my book.

The term assemblage should also be understood in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense. As Buchanan observes, the term is a loose translation of the French agencement, itself an appropriation of the German Komplex, as used in Freudian discourse’s Ödipuskomplex or Kastrationskomplex (2015, 383). Assemblage alludes to a structure made up of virtual contingent articulations among myriad heterogeneous elements. At some point, this structure might be coded by taking up a particular form. In this sense, an assemblage encompasses both a virtual and an actual dimension. Actual elements take an active part in the virtual structure in order to produce real effects (Buchanan 2015, 389). In this system, an assemblage channels the actions of the actual realm. This is relevant, as it allows us to interpret how an assemblage, like the myth of regeneration through violence, interacts with the actual elements that keep it current. It allows us to think of narratives related to the present as myths as well, establishing links between the mythic thought of folklore and contemporary political thought. What makes an affective assemblage powerful, and thus relevant for studying the transhistorical persistence of the narratives I examine in this book, is its resistance. Affective assemblages are resistant because the discourse they produce is fueled by an absence; hence this absence usually goes unaddressed. The affect that fuels the assemblage is always generated by an absent element, and the assemblage seeks to address a problem that is not the problem that generates its affect. In plainer terms, these types of narratives say that they do something but in fact do something unrelated. The resulting relationship does not necessarily have to be cruelly optimistic, in Berlant’s terms, but it often is, as the affective component makes it easy for the assemblage to undermine its discourse.

Traditional interpretations of cowboy narratives (such as those by Slotkin, Wood, Annette Kolodny, Deborah Madsen, and Brian Henderson, among others) have noted the abovementioned dissonance between discourse and facts yet have not provided a comprehensive understanding of how this dissonance works. The traditional reading of the American frontier, most notably developed by Slotkin, basically states that the cowboy is the main character in an American epic—contrasted to Homeric mythology—where myth-epics would reflect the most progressive ideas of American man, emphasizing the rule of reason in nature and in human affairs, casting aside all inherited traditions, superstitions and spurious values of the past. The freedom and power of man were to be asserted against the ideas of necessity, of historical determinism, of the inheritance of guilt and original sin (Slotkin 1972, 3). Slotkin analyzes how the stories settlers told about the New World allowed them to conceive of a new beginning and make sense of and justify the violence they carried out in their invasion of the continent. In his narrative of American mythology the people eventually destroyed the natural conditions that had made possible their economic and social freedom, their democracy of social mobility. Yet the mythology and the value system it supported remained even after the objective conditions that had justified it had vanished (557). In his explanation, Slotkin borrows heavily from Joseph Campbell’s theory of the monomyth and the idea of comparative mythology, seeing myths as reflections of the human psyche. In this way, the myth of regeneration through violence in the American frontier becomes an articulation of a Campbellian monomyth that comes from the clash of two cultures, each with its own mythology.

While Slotkin’s interpretation of many elements of the cowboy genre is keen and influential, the mythopoeic framework is susceptible to the sort of critiques that Deleuze and Guattari brought against psychoanalysis and its dependence on theories of the psyche as a form of representation. These critiques can be boiled down to the proposition that psychoanalysis does not fully explain myths’ persistence and flexibility. The Jungian approach to explaining myths through psychoanalytic versions of a collective unconscious proves unfruitful because while it is able to account for mythic structures, it does not put forth a verisimilar explanation of how these structures come into being. This type of structural analysis either successfully points out what different myths have in common or associates the actualizations of a myth with its corresponding images in an archetype, but it fails to explain what myths do and, most important, why they recur. Why, for instance, do the people who behave according to the cowboy genre’s model produce and reproduce violence in a cycle of regenerating trauma? A myth that is only represented could be more simply abandoned than a flow of affect produced by a set of material conditions that reinforce a vicious cycle.

In order to address the subject of myths in a more materialistic manner, the Deleuzian construct of affect refers us to what Deleuze and Guattari propose as schizoanalysis, an analytic approach to the mind that focuses on desire as a process of production rather than as a process of representation. For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is a machine, a synthesis of machines, a machinic arrangement—desiring-machines (1987, 325). Rather than a reflection of a model, desire is the product of social environments and of individual reactions to those environments: The order of desire is the order of production; all production is at once desiring-production and social production. We therefore reproach psychoanalysis for having stifled this order of production, for having shunted it into representation (325). Psychoanalysis focuses on the way a myth becomes reproduced in life, which is neither true production nor singularity but rather the reproduction of repetition. In the desiring-machine that is myth, Deleuze and Guattari find no life, just space for an endless repetition of the same myth. Psychoanalytic desire is then an echo of what desire is—just like in Ahmed’s claim that the happiness of the heterosexual family is an echo of a happiness produced retrospectively by caging the affects of family life into a structure of prepackaged emotions.

By means of a shift of framework, focusing on affective assemblages instead of myths, a different path is struck: one that is productive in other ways. A Deleuzian-inspired theory of virtuality and affect allows us to think of the psyche in terms of desires and these desires in terms of productive conditions. As explained earlier, desire is thought of as something that is produced actively, not as the representation of an ingrained idea. When it comes to stories that cohere into a corpus that we call myth, the implication is that the desire elicited by the experience of such a narrative is not an imperfect reproduction of a model but a product that uses such tales as components. Within a range of options beyond which interacting with the myth might not be plausible, the affective assemblage is free to produce something different, related to the spectator’s environment, experience, and concurrent affects. Replacing a mythopoeic analysis that focuses on ideas in a Platonic sense with an affective framework allows us to understand the immaterial structure of a narrative tradition in materialistic terms. This in turn enables us to relate the way in which the story persists even after the world that gave birth to it has changed to its conditions of production. This is to say that even though the original conditions of production of an affective assemblage may have ended, the feedback loops in which it is involved might have produced different conditions of production that require similar assemblages. The production of affect through narrative and the enjoyment it brings (an enjoyment readily on display at movie theaters the world over) creates a structure for the pleasure generated by a story and allows these assemblages to endure and to influence ethical thought, as narratives produce desires that flow outside of the realm of entertainment and influence action. In this vein, we can observe that the experience of narrative produces a much richer and more complex ecosystem than the reproduction of an ideal. Even when, as Berlant (2011) proposed, the circumstances within which affect is produced change, a story may present an affective assemblage able to undermine the discursive aim proposed by the story itself.³

Bandits, Cowboys, and Desperadoes in the Mexico-U.S. Frontier

In order to illuminate how affective assemblages work, I contrast fictional works with historical representations of cultural heroes, since the purpose is to propose a framework that can allow us to analyze the interrelationship between fictional and political narratives. In this light, I aim to both develop a framework to analyze affective structures and to use this framework to analyze three case studies. These case studies focus on three archetypes that are the core of a group of stories: (a) the drug lord/smuggler who, immersed in a crisis of consumption and overcapitalization, claims to engage in social banditry in order to justify a path as