Falling to My Death: Vertical Rhetorics in Neoliberal Mexico

About this book

Ina book that combines memoir and cultural criticism of visual media, publicrhetoric, and memory texts, Jos ngel Maldonado reflects on the subjectivitieshe embodies--mestizo, epileptic, and exile--while engaging in a critique of thevarious popular texts he encounters while travelling through Mexico afterliving 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 constellationof terms like suicide, magnicide, genocide, and feminicide, as metaphors forfalling that define quotidian life in Mexico. This exercise uncloaks what heterms the "rhetorics of verticality" that many deploy when navigating dangeroussituations throughout violent, militarized Mexico. Trained as a cultural criticwho uses rhetorical theory to deconstruct discourse, he combines a confessionalstyle with an accessible academic voice to demonstrate how everyday textsinform and shape reality in order to anticipate, rather than react to, theinevitability of violence.

Details

Format

Hardcover

ISBN-13

9781638042020

Publisher

Clemson University Press

Published

December 23, 2025

Pages

214

Weight

16.2 oz

Subject

Social Science