Cortes, Diego2024-10-312024-10-312020https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699020969638https://hdl.handle.net/1794/301643 pagesHéctor Amaya’s Trafficking illustrates the new forms of publicness in popular music, traditional U.S. newspapers, and digital bloggers resulting from the spike of criminal violence in Mexico since 2006. This wave of violence began when former president Felipe Calderon (2006–2012) intensified the war on drugs. A native of Sinaloa, one of the worst affected Mexican states for cartel actions, Amaya provides a theoretical contribution to understanding the phenomenon of criminal violence without presenting law-and-order normative solutions as First World social scientists typically do. He explains this avoidance as a political response to the historical role of normative “solutions” that tend to validate colonialist and neoimperialist agendas and, rather than resolve anything, foster dispossession and dislocation in the Third World.en-USCreative Commons BY-NC 4.0-USbook review, popular culture, Mexico, publicnessArticle