El Viudo functions as a sort of spiritual predecessor to the Detective Heredia whose
activity in Santiago, Chile begins in the 1980s. While El Viudo interacts directly with violence, Heredia walks the streets in a graphic novel that takes place around 2011 and is concerned with memories of violence. The book Heredia Detective explores absences on the street-level by investigating bodies that aren't there and by looking for parts of the city that are vanishing through the neoliberal real estate and economic processes of gentrification. A detailed analysis of these processes is included in chapter three of this project. Heredia, as a character, has lived through the harsh implementation
Figure 14. Heredia prepares himself to say good-‐bye to the City Bar Restaurant.
of neoliberalism and seen its results. As he stands on the street he thinks to himself, “Después de los lamentos contra la modernidad que arrasa con los barrios tradicionales de Santaigo no nos queda otra cosa que ir a despedirnos” [“After lamenting against modernity erasing Santiago’s traditional neighborhoods, the only thing we have left is to say good- bye”] (Heredia Detective 9). Heredia is forced to behold the product of latent capitalism. His walk around the city is propelled by the disappearance of a place and as he wanders the city with his friend The Scribe they confront the places where something once was. Heredia makes several stops on his walk to recall investigations of past crimes. He is taking his ghosts out for a stroll as The Scribe puts it (10) and in this way he interrogates all that remains, the ashes, the absences, the gutter spaces of the city. As Heredia uses memory as
a tactic against the multiple forms of disappearance neoliberalism has enacted on the city and its inhabitants he literally situates his memory between panels, in the gutter. Each time Heredia conjures up a memory the recollection happens at a page turn in the comic text. As the page is turned it is accompanied by the physical process of vanishing the present form of the city as illustrated by the comic artist Gonzalo Martínez and on the other side of the page turn, and the gutter, a new panel appears containing the memory illustrated by another artist. Once the memory draws to a close then another page turn brings us back to the present and to the city as illustrated by Martínez. The entire multiframe of Heredia
Detective is an exploration of absence and memory, an interrogation of the gutter space,
since the majority of the comic takes place in the realm of memory that is meant to contradict the pristine and clean vision of Santiago's neoliberal present. In Gonzalo Martínez's illustrations of Santiago the city is shown in sharp, clean, almost perfect detail. Martínez is an architect by training and his renderings of the city serve to make the cityscape extremely recognizable, to the point that this comic can only be about Santiago. At the same time, his clean lines and sparsely populated streets insinuate a vision of the city that is safe - the type of vision of the city that neoliberalism's security obsessed zero- tolerance policing would be proud to tout as the result of their work. The contrast that the page turn transitions create between Martínez's clean depiction of the city and the other artists' dark and violent renderings of its past illustrate is that no matter how clean or safe neoliberalism can appear to make a place there is always a history of violence that betrays the fiction of the cityscape. This tactic of memory as a form of resistance against the supposed city level results of neoliberalism is alluded to by Bjorn Quiring when he wrote:
"the city as mnemonic device has a somewhat sinister side: it commemorates that its urban law and order was established by acts beyond the law, namely violent seizures of power and acts of domination" (200). Heredia's memory resists the erasure of neoliberalism's cleansing of the city in the name of security. His memory dwells in the absences created by neoliberal urban law. The protagonist's movements about Santiago can be traced on the map-level but they cannot be deciphered or made legible from the panoptic view. Only at the street-level, within the panels of the comic text, can the movements, driven by absence and memory, be made understandable as tactics against neoliberalism’s disappearances.
XVIII. Braided Cities: Intertwining Mexico City and Santiago de Chile
In general terms the visual braid I have proposed is organized by comics that all represent urban spaces and stories of crime – in its multiform manifestations. More specifically they are Latin American urban spaces in the age of neoliberalism, and concretely the braid consists of comic images from Mexico City and Santiago de Chile. These two cities seemingly have little in common, but as seen through their artistic production it is possible to see that they both manifest interrogations, critiques, and negotiations of neoliberal economic and political realities. These cities are two of the most representative places of neoliberalism's effects in Latin America although those effects have been played out with drastically different political, economic, and social consequences. While their historical realities differ and the expressions of neoliberalism may have come under the strikingly different guises of dictatorship and narco violence, it is clear that the resultant violences and practices of disappearance, the feature of this era in
Latin America, are undeniably present. Of course, this horrifying practice has happened in other places across Latin America and beyond, therefore I must admit the limitations of my current research parameters and say that the investigation of the multiplicity of expressions of neoliberal violence and its explorations in sequential art is a lifetime pursuit. I plan to expand the scope of this research in the future and collaborate with others who's work weaves its way into these braided networks.
As I have pulled these panels out of the texts in which they are embedded to interrogate them beyond the tyranny of their plots, temporalities, and spatialities I have hoped to find new juxtapositions. By bringing these panels together, notwithstanding their existence in separate books, I have found that they are all exploring the consequences of crime and violence under neoliberalism. The distance between these texts seems reduced when these panels are braided together through the unifying lens of crime and violence, through the absences and disappearances they investigate. This braid is subversive to the strategic delimitation and dominations of neoliberalism because "Insofar as comic books primarily consist of narratives of violence, crime, and justice, reading them is itself a transgression" (Phillips and Strobl 7). This means a questioning and interrogation of the practices of neoliberalism through the creativity of popular culture.