Digital Narratives and Linguistic Articulations of Mexican Identities in Emergent Media: Race, Lucha Libre Masks and Mock Spanish

Abstract

This project examines the articulation of Mexican identities in digital narratives through a variety of genres, bringing into conversation various disciplines to present more comprehensive studies on the construction of representational paradigms, their consumption and social impact and their association with other cultural and literary texts. Deploying a multidisciplinary approach, this work articulates a theoretical framework that incorporates the fields of semiology, postcolonial theory, visual culture, urban studies, ludology, linguistic anthropology and border studies. This project analyzes the processes through which the identities of Mexican subjects and the depiction of Mexican spaces are articulated in new digital narratives in the form video games as mass culture objects, which are conceived from hegemonic loci of production, are globally consumed and have the potential to transmit deeply rooted social knowledge. Furthermore, the lack of spaces in which represented minorities may counter the stereotypical images projected forecloses dialogic processes. Through the agglomeration of different representational modules (visual units, narrative elements and linguistic portrayals) different genres impose predisposed rhetorical framework and found that the vast majority share a predetermined collection of elements that create a representational mosaic of how "Mexicanness" should be depicted and perceived. Furthermore, said digital subject representations enact cultural ideological frameworks that are imposed onto the audience, influencing meaning-formation processes. This work also analyzes the dynamics between the production, representation and consumption of videogames and traces tangents with the social and historical contexts of earlier visual media in Latin America.