Falling to My Death

In a book that combines memoir and cultural criticism of visual media, public rhetoric, and memory texts, José Ángel Maldonado reflects on the subjectivities he embodies—mestizo, epileptic, and exile—while engaging in a critique of the various popular texts he encounters while travelling through Mexico after living in the United States as an undocumented immigrant. Using the suffix -cide (from the Latin caedere, “to fall,” and “to die”) as a guide for a discussion of modes of dying in contemporary Mexico, he creates a constellation of terms like suicide, magnicide, genocide, and feminicide, as metaphors for falling that define quotidian life in Mexico. This exercise uncloaks what he terms the “rhetorics of verticality” that many deploy when navigating dangerous situations throughout violent, militarized Mexico. Trained as a cultural critic who uses rhetorical theory to deconstruct discourse, Maldonado combines a confessional style with an accessible academic voice to demonstrate how everyday texts inform and shape reality in order to anticipate, rather than react to, the inevitability of violence.