Culture

On Narconovelas

Our Lady of the Assassins BY Fernando Vallejo. Serpent's Tail. Paperback, 144 pages. $15.
Cover of Our Lady of the Assassins

All wars have their bards, and Mexico’s narco wars are no exception. Since 2006, myriad fictions have been added to the torrent of news articles, academic studies, poetry, artworks, movies, telenovelas and music (the famous narcocorridos—corridos are narrative folk songs) about narco culture. Of course, long before Calderón’s war, drug traffickers, especially in the northern states of Sonora and Sinaloa, had inspired countless corridos and been taken up as subjects by Mexican novelists.