Calculated Narratives in Mexican Titulares
Calculated Narratives in Mexican Titulares

Summary/Abstract: This paper explores the extent to which socio-political narratives about the U.S. and Mexico are circulated via Mexican headlines between the years 2000-2015, and questions if calculated jargon is orchestrated and distributed to serve national socio-political interests. It examines whether discursive formations represented by newspaper headlines function as a type of conformist, antipathetic, reproachful, and/or reclamative narrative producer that generates sentiment in the same manner that the Latino Threat Narrative, theorized by Leo Chavez, produces self-serving iterations of Latino (specifically Mexican) personification in the U.S. It then discusses the importance that geography has had in developing a political narrative within Mexico and proceeds to discuss how threat narratives are constructed with such historiography in mind. Finally, it analyzes headline jargon in the Mexican periodicals El Norte, Reforma, and Mural between 2000-2015. It is the intent of this paper to outline what function headline jargon serves in Mexican narrative arenas, and to examine whether the way they challenge the U.S. reconstitutes a Mexican identity, or establishes completely different priorities and socio-political agendas. Specific deliberation of Mexican print media geared towards a Mexican audience is absent from discussions on how the LTN and its counter-narrative effort operate.

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