‘Once upon a time, Santos was reading about the Sahuayo zombies when…’: performances of (post)modernity and nationalism by Mexican zombies

Abstract

This article examines the performance of (post)modernity and national identity in Mexico through the analysis of four different irruptions of the zombie canon in a range of media: the 1962 film Santo vs. the Zombies, the 1990 comic strip El Santos contra la Tetona Mendoza, the 2010 film trailer for Zombies del Bicentenario and the 2011 Zombie Walk in Mexico City. Each of these examples represents a paradigmatic shift in the construction and performance of Mexican national identity at their moment of creation. In a country where there has been a continuous and enormous effort to create a homogenous and stable national identity centred on the mestizo, the zombies examined in this article fracture hegemonic definitions and offer a variety of other(ed) ways of performing being Mexican.