This paper proposes a critical analysis of El Chapo, a television series co-produced by Univisión
and Netflix (2017) based on the biography of Mexican drug trafficker Joaquín Guzmán Loera. Around this figure, the series synthesizes a plot with multiple ramifications around the recent history of Mexico, proposes hypotheses about its causes and addresses with emphasis the so-called “war against drug trafficking”, undertaken by former President Felipe Calderón in the year 2006. From an approach centered on the category of cultural memory, this series is approached as an interesting case to investigate the potential of television fiction to tell the story and produce meanings about it. From this
perspective, El Chapo can be thought of more than as “another” successful product of television
narco-fiction, as a memory story, as it proposes certain ways of framing and interpreting that past-present.
Amaya Trujillo, J. (2018). Once upon a time in Mexico. Fiction and memory of the recent past in the series El Chapo. Comunicación Y Medios, (37), 93–105. https://doi.org/10.5354/0719-1529.2018.48588
