| dc.description.abstract | This thesis presents the results of an investigation about the scenario involving
the maras, youth groups implicated with violence, whose transnational action takes
place, mainly, in the countries of the so-called Central American Northern Triangle
(CANT), consisting of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, as well as Mexico and
the South of the USA. Mara Salvatrucha 13 and Barrio Dieciocho appear on the
outskirts of Los Anegeles, constituted of mostly Salvadoran young emigrants, who
face conditions of vulnerability, forming groups to defend themselves against the
other ethnic gangs with whom they dispute the suburbs. Established since the 1980s,
this form of sociability acts by committing crimes such as extortion, robbery,
kidnapping and human trafficking at borders. Moreover, it has been demonstrating a
capacity for adaptation and self-reproduction that seems to come from the terrible
structural conditions of the regions where they circulate, but also from a selfrepresentation that aims to deviate from binarisms presenting some characteristics
that Toro (1994) defines as post-coloniality. The methodological procedures
consisted of making appreciations of audiovisual productions using as input for
discourse analysis according to Bardin (1977), the perspective of Jolli (1999), on the
interpretation of images, the performance analysis, according to Cohen (2002) and
Gómez- Peña (2005) and the model of cinematographic analysis proposed by Zavala
(2003). The corpus is composed of three types of materials: academic articles,
research reports and diagnoses about the social context of the maras, which appear
diluted in the characterization of the object and as support for the other analyzes;
interview videos and reports on the performance of maras, images and audiovisual
productions that involve or cite these, with special attention to the fiction film entitled
Sin Nombre (Cary Fukunaga, 2009). The theoretical framework is based mainly on
authors linked to postcolonial and postmodern thought, namely: Toro (1994), CastroGómez (2006), Bhabha (2013) Baudrillard (1990), Imbert (2010), among others. The
analysis undertaken resulted in a discussion of the relationship between violence, the
imaginary and the media in which the maras ambivalently appear while being the
target of curiosity and repudiation, as well as the setting of a scenario in which
characteristic elements of postmodernity emerge and mainly of postcoloniality that is
discussed around the notion of difference. They are: hyperreality and ambivalence,
process of hybridity, transculturality, translocality and referential globality. | en |
