2024 Honorable Mention — The Victor Villaseñor Best Latino Focused Nonfiction Book Award – English, Empowering Latino Futures’ International Latino Book Awards

Exploring representations of Latinx people from Scarface to Narcos, this book examines how pop culture has framed Latin America as the villain in America’s long and ineffectual War on Drugs.

If there is an enemy in the War on Drugs, it is people of color. That is the lesson of forty years of cultural production in the United States. Popular culture, from Scarface and Miami Vice to Narcos and Better Call Saul, has continually positioned Latinos as an alien people who threaten the US body politic with drugs. Jason Ruiz explores the creation and endurance of this trope, its effects on Latin Americans and Latinx people, and its role in the cultural politics of the War on Drugs.

Even as the focus of drug anxiety has shifted over the years from cocaine to crack and from methamphetamines to opioids, and even as significant strides have been made in representational politics in many areas of pop culture, Latinx people remain an unshakeable fixture in stories narrating the production, distribution, and sale of narcotics. Narcomedia argues that such representations of Latinx people, regardless of the intentions of their creators, are best understood as a cultural front in the War on Drugs. Latinos and Latin Americans are not actually America’s drug problem, yet many Americans think otherwise—and that is in no small part because popular culture has largely refused to imagine the drug trade any other way.

"A concentrated, rigorous look at Latinx representations in late-20th- and early-21st-century 'narcomedia,' or 'communication forms that emerge from drug trafficking'...Ruiz’s observations are incisive throughout. He is at his best, though, when directly addressing the 'how' and 'why' behind the production of problematic Latinx representations...Narcomedia itself makes important inroads into paving the path ahead for Latinx representations in US-made film and TV. Ruiz’s book is a fine example of the scholarly vigilance and clarity of thought needed to hold the abidingly white-centric entertainment industry’s feet to the fire in their ongoing representations of Latinx people on-screen." - Los Angeles Review of Books

"Ruiz's work is a valuable contribution to the protracted "blame game" between US and Mexican authorities. . . . [Narcomedia] is a snapshot of a complex topic, offering a good entry point for the public into the complicated subject of the War on Drugs." - CHOICE

"A fun and informative romp...[with a] serious message." - Drug War Chronicle