Surviving Mexico

Surviving Mexico is an empathetic, deep, conceptually grounded, yet accessible and easy-to-read ethnography of Mexico’s endangered but resilient journalists over a fifteen-year human rights crisis—their human rights crisis. This is an urgent and profound testimony to what professional commitment to truth-telling, public service, and one another enables journalists to do even when government fails to protect citizens and danger is excruciating and enduring. Brava! ~Sallie Hughes, author of Newsrooms in Conflict: Journalism and the Democratization of Mexico

Surviving Mexico is the most well-documented book I have read on this subject. It is beautifully written, very well structured, and clear in describing the difficult work of journalists in Mexico. ~Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, author of Los Zetas Inc.: Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War in Mexico

A book filled with stories of horror—and of hope. ~Texas Observer

A meticulously researched study…[Surviving Mexico] is made lively and moving by the many interviews with Mexican journalists and media owners who themselves tell the stories of the dangers and at times, the horrors, that working reporters routinely face in many parts of Mexico. ~ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America

Urgently indispensable...Based on more than 160 interviews with journalists, activists, and academics across several regions of the country, González de Bustamante and Relly present a highly readable account of the myriad dangers faced by journalists in Mexico, the impact of trauma and violence on their lives, and how individuals and collectives have organized to meet the challenges of working in such a dangerous place. ~Nieman Lab

Surviving Mexico is a much-needed book that offers a wide scope for understanding the endemic violence against Mexican journalists. It will be useful for scholars and journalists interested in understanding the harsh conditions that news workers have to constantly face when doing their jobs. The book’s central arguments and discussions are consistent with broader debates on media in the Global South, where emergent democracies struggle with post-authoritarianisms and populisms. ~Journal of Latin American Studies

Surviving Mexico is about an essential component of Mexico’s security and humanitarian crisis: violence against news professionals whose daily work can breach the zones of silence brought into being by that same crisis. More than its scholarly framework, this book’s moral impetus and wealth of information about the meanings and consequences of working and living in these circumstances will appeal to many readers. ~Bulletin of Spanish Studies