![]() They shine a light on this war that dares not speak its name. The photographs were taken by Bernandino Hernandez, an orphan, who arrived at Acapulco at the age of 3. ![]() The army and the police can barely contain the situation and an important numbers of neighborhoods are just off limit to them. Some forty gangs are fighting to take over control of the racketing and the barrios, the neighborhoods. Five to six murders are committed each day. 1.300 murders have been committed there over the past year. In proportion to the number of inhabitants, Acapulco is considered today as the most dangerous city in the country. However, it was still a holiday destination of choice for many a few years ago. Photos in this article belong to Will Straw’s private collection.Acapulco, in the Guerrero province of Mexico was far from the coastal city enjoyed by American jet-setters in the 50s and 60s. Graciela Martínez-Zalce and Susana Vargas Cervantes have been invaluable sources of help and encouragement throughout the research and writing of this article. The migration of these influences from one 1 The research on which this article is based was supported by a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and by My thanks to both these organizations. Indeed, both the Mexican nota roja and Québecois journaux jaunes took shape through particular assemblages of elements from the tabloid newspaper, the judiciary gazette, the fiction magazine, and more peripheral genres such as the comic book or the moral-confession magazine. Neither of these periodical genres was original or distinctive in an absolute sense. For the most part, the category consisted of magazines of varying sizes and publication frequencies, like the 1950s Montréal Confidentiel and the more long-lived Allo Police. term for newspapers of low esteem) was applied to cheaply-printed newspapers or magazines which, during the 1950s and 1960s, covered crime, morality, and a wide range of sensations within Quebec. The Québecois term journaux jaunes (derived from “yellow press,” a U.S. Examples of the nota roja from the 1930s through the present include Detectives, Metropoliciaca, Nota Roja, Policía, Prensa Policiaca and Alarma. While the label occasionally serves to designate crime fiction, we are using it here in its more restricted sense, to refer to newspapers and magazines specializing in true (rather than fictionalized) crime. Nota roja is a Mexican term for the chronicling of violence and crime it has come to stand more generally for the variety of ways in which crime may be narrated within popular cultural forms (e.g., Brocca, 1993 Laurini and Diez, 1988 Piccato, 2001). ![]() Each of these traditions will be discussed individually, though both will be set within a common framework through which the capacity of crime to generate a variety of print culture forms should become evident. These traditions are the Mexican nota roja, a form which has reinvented itself continuously throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the Québecois journal jaune, whose presence has diminished, since the 1960s, to the point where very few periodicals for which this designation is appropriate are still published. It deals with two traditions that are the object of increasing attention by scholars in both places, though that scholarship is in its early stages. NOTA ROJA AND JOURNAUX JAUNES POPULAR CRIME PERIODICALS IN QUEBEC AND MEXICO Will Straw This article 1 is concerned with representations of crime in the popular print media in two regions of North America.
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