Jeanie Ruth Candelaria Toscano

I'm a teacher and scholar of Latin American and Caribbean literatures and cultures.

I specialize in 20th and 21st century Mexican literature, aesthetics of violence, border studies, gender and sexuality, postcolonial studies, and Hispanic musical cultures.

I research aesthetics of narco violence in contemporary Mexican cultural productions, including the musical-literary genre known as 'narcocorridos' (narrative ballads about narco traffickers) and the contemporary literary genre known as ‘narcoliterature’ (novels about narco trafficking).

Narco cultural productions have historically suffered from a lack of scholarly attention, typically being dismissed as mere glorification of the violence they reference. In my research, I deviate from this facile assessment by viewing these cultural productions as sites for expressing collective feelings of despair and disenchantment in a postmodern, late capitalist society.

I teach Spanish as a Heritage Language, Spanish fundamentals and intermediate Spanish, History of Latin Music, Survey of Mexico and Central America, and Gender and Sexuality in Latin America.

I'm originally from Culiacán, Sinaloa, México.