This form of sexually dissident culture can be better understood by the notion I refer to as broken record, an affective drive that connects queer memory with the sonic experiences of listening to Mexican romantic ballads. In this transversal approach to literature, satire, and performance, I argue that drag culture combines affect and a critique of history to foster a sense of belonging in entertainment venues so as to give shape to sexual dissidence in contemporary urban Mexico. Their performances expose how the politics of sexuality and race propose a critique of history by deploying parody, and cabaret. I situate these modes of sensing in the cabaret performance of a drag queen from Mexico City, namely Roberto Cabral. I contrast these literary representations to build on what I call an ecology of drag, a network that looks at how material objects activate different modes of perception around queerness, such as saturation and fragmentation. In this article, I examine the ways in which drag queens are represented in the literature of Latin American authors, such as Carlos Monsiváis, and Severo Sarduy. In a concluding note, Edgar Allan Poe’s and Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories are presented as whodunit counter-examples that anticipate the open narrative of género negro. Given this frame of reference, this essay analyzes three representative detective novels of the last fifty years as works of ambiguity and irony that criticize and reinterpret Mexico’s changing society: Rafael Bernal’s El complot mongol casts a cynical eye on the weaknesses of the so-called Mexican “miracle ” Paco Ignacio Taibo’s No habrá final feliz questions police-directed violence against a rebellious populace whose repression exhibits the nation’s “revolutionary” mythology and Élmer Mendoza’s Balas de plata encodes the patent crisis of an emergent narco state characterized by unheard-of violence, dubious morality, and social paranoia. Differing from the closed narrative of the whodunit, género negro fiction favors the open textuality of the hardboiled, where content and themes critically codify social and historical contexts.

El complot mongol by Rafael Bernal