UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Beneath these images that circulate political economies of affect, emotion, manhood, heartbreak, is the obscure romantization of drunken performances in Mexican popular culture. The presence of alcohol (literal or figurative) is, there, imperative to the successful des-ahogo of heartbreak. Des-ahogo is an ironic term, literally “un-drowning,” precisely evocative of the very drowning in alcohol. This is a tracing of the body that performs the pleasurable des-ahogos sustained and enhanced by intoxication, but also a disease in witnessing, analyzing and learning within this framework.