Marcus McGee is a PhD candidate working on a dissertation about the social life of the most circulated and controversial genre of print journalism in Mexico, “red journalism” or nota roja: a type of working-class tabloid reporting, famous for explicit photos of murder scenes and jocular headlines. His fieldwork, based on 3 years working the crime beat with street reporters in the Valley of Mexico, is grounded in the experiences of a group of media workers who envision themselves on the front lines of a war, and as communicating messages at the extreme limit of social acceptability to millions of strangers. Broadly, the research explores the way violent transgression, information, and aesthetic expression have become reciprocally connected in contemporary Mexican publics. It does so by ethnographically tracing narratives and images of violence from the scenes of murders through disparate interdiscursive modes like neighborhood gossip and readership, social critique, biography, contemporary art, social media influencing, and censorship. By examining how a controversial genre knits together experiences across far-flung social spheres, the dissertation seeks to rethink what is often called the “circulation” of texts and the fantasies that animate infrastructures of modern collective experience. 

Marcus’s research is supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, and the Mellon Foundation (via the UChicago Center for Latin American Studies). His work can be found in HAU, the Journal of Latin American Politics and Society, and the LA Review of Books. Marcus is also deeply involved in arts and letters in Mexico City, where he writes regular long-form journalism for leading national outlets like Revista Nexos, has co-curated an exhibition on red journalism and the memory of political violence at the Museo casa de la memoria indómita [The House of Indomitable Memory Museum], and published findings with Defensores de la Democracia [Defenders of Democracy], an NGO that collects and conserves information about the murders of journalists in Mexico.