Falling to My Death: Vertical Rhetorics in Neoliberal Mexico - Hardcover

by José Ángel Maldonado (Author)

In
a book that combines memoir and cultural criticism of visual media, public
rhetoric, and memory texts, José Ángel Maldonado reflects on the subjectivities
he embodies--mestizo, epileptic, and exile--while engaging in a critique of the
various popular texts he encounters while travelling through Mexico after
living 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 constellation
of terms like suicide, magnicide, genocide, and feminicide, as metaphors for
falling that define quotidian life in Mexico. This exercise uncloaks what he
terms the "rhetorics of verticality" that many deploy when navigating dangerous
situations throughout violent, militarized Mexico. Trained as a cultural critic
who uses rhetorical theory to deconstruct discourse, he combines a confessional
style with an accessible academic voice to demonstrate how everyday texts
inform and shape reality in order to anticipate, rather than react to, the
inevitability of violence.

Author Biography

José
Ángel Maldonado is Assistant Professor of English at the University of South
Florida. He specializes in Rhetorical Theory, Critical and Cultural Studies,
Film and Television Criticism, Mexican Culture, Gender Studies, Globalization,
and Indigeneity. He received his PhD from the University of Utah. His research
deconstructs discourses emerging in Latin America that normalize violent
conditions so that we may anticipate and prevent violence of various types. His
work appears in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Southern Communication Journal, and Javnost-The Public: Journal of the European
Institute for Communication and Culture.