Los homies ilustrados: violência, mídia e póscolonialidade no cenário das maras centro americanas

Abstract

This thesis presents the results of an investigation about the scenario involving the maras, youth groups implicated with violence, whose transnational action takes place, mainly, in the countries of the so-called Central American Northern Triangle (CANT), consisting of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, as well as Mexico and the South of the USA. Mara Salvatrucha 13 and Barrio Dieciocho appear on the outskirts of Los Anegeles, constituted of mostly Salvadoran young emigrants, who face conditions of vulnerability, forming groups to defend themselves against the other ethnic gangs with whom they dispute the suburbs. Established since the 1980s, this form of sociability acts by committing crimes such as extortion, robbery, kidnapping and human trafficking at borders. Moreover, it has been demonstrating a capacity for adaptation and self-reproduction that seems to come from the terrible structural conditions of the regions where they circulate, but also from a selfrepresentation that aims to deviate from binarisms presenting some characteristics that Toro (1994) defines as post-coloniality. The methodological procedures consisted of making appreciations of audiovisual productions using as input for discourse analysis according to Bardin (1977), the perspective of Jolli (1999), on the interpretation of images, the performance analysis, according to Cohen (2002) and Gómez- Peña (2005) and the model of cinematographic analysis proposed by Zavala (2003). The corpus is composed of three types of materials: academic articles, research reports and diagnoses about the social context of the maras, which appear diluted in the characterization of the object and as support for the other analyzes; interview videos and reports on the performance of maras, images and audiovisual productions that involve or cite these, with special attention to the fiction film entitled Sin Nombre (Cary Fukunaga, 2009). The theoretical framework is based mainly on authors linked to postcolonial and postmodern thought, namely: Toro (1994), CastroGómez (2006), Bhabha (2013) Baudrillard (1990), Imbert (2010), among others. The analysis undertaken resulted in a discussion of the relationship between violence, the imaginary and the media in which the maras ambivalently appear while being the target of curiosity and repudiation, as well as the setting of a scenario in which characteristic elements of postmodernity emerge and mainly of postcoloniality that is discussed around the notion of difference. They are: hyperreality and ambivalence, process of hybridity, transculturality, translocality and referential globality.