Esch then traces how the rifle loses its revolutionary, albeit not political dimension in current conflicts, in which the rifle becomes the tool of demobilized combatants turned violence workers and a powerful and confusing prop in the theater of war that is the so-called drug war in Mexico. In the case of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Esch shows that the rifle was not a prosthesis for citizenship, but a prosthesis for militancy, the key artifact to underscore one's willingness not to kill but rather to die for the revolutionary cause. Through an analysis of novels, songs, and photographs, Sophie Esch underscores the political and cultural significance of weaponry in the region and examine the firearm as a key object through which writers negotiate conceptions of modernity, citizenship, militancy, and gender.Įsch argues that during the Mexican Revolution, Mexican peasants became visible as citizens via the cartridge belts strapped across their chests and the rifles on their shoulders and that the notorious executions by firing squads during the revolution became a symbol of and an entry point to an inherently violent modernity. Unique in its focus, this first book-length study of the symbolic meaning of weaponry in Latin America was published in Pittsburgh's long-standing Illuminations Series. Modernity at Gunpoint provides a critical inquiry into the relationship between war, technology, and society by analyzing armed conflicts in Mexico and Central America from 1910 to the present.
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