Introduction: A New Kind of Public Intellectual?

Abstract

Already in late 2011 things were heating up, a year away from the elections of 2012, one of those unusual years in the political cycle in which citizens of both the United States and Mexico were voting in presidential contests. Candidacies were bruited about, and the press lamented the anti-intellectualism pervading so-called political debates. On the ground, locally, things often looked somewhat different. In early November of 2011, the international hackivist group “Anonymous” backed off its promise to publish names and personal data of Mexican drug cartel members—an Internet action that would have been effectively a declaration of war, with real rather than video-game kills on both sides (revealing the locations of known cartel members would effectively target them for rival cartels; drug trafficking organizations had already murdered numerous Internet journalists and incautious users of social media). That same day, poet Javier Sicilia, the subject of the last chapter in this volume, was leaving cempazuchitl flowers at the Angel Monument in Mexico City for Day of the Dead, promising to lead a new caravan, this time from the US side of the border, to Washington DC, to protest the US counter narcotic strategy. The reelection of Obama has done little to stem the anti-intellectualist tide in US politics; that of Enrique Peña Nieto in Mexico seems a worrisome return to the PRI-dominated stagnation that marked most of the twentieth century.