This work presents a chronicle of contemporary life in Mexico, which ranges over popular music, Latino hip hop, the murals of Siquerios, film stars, the painter Frida Kahlo, the writer Juan Ruldo, life on the border with the United States and the organization of Mexico City's urban poor in the wake of a devastating earthquake.

In this book, John Kraniauskas uses close examinations of a number of modern and contemporary Latin American and North American novels and films to highlight the relationship between such texts and their regional cultural, political, and social contexts. Studies of a novel by James Ellroy and the TV series The Wire enable Kraniauskas to consider how ideas developed in one context can be used to explain experiences in another; he also explores an ongoing shift from texts that are centered on the state and its actions to those in which other groups come to the fore. Throughout, there s a...