Tales of (Self-)Destruction: Zombies, Soldiers, and Biopolitics in Two Mexican Narco Short Stories Angel M. D´ ıaz-D´ avalos University of Pennsylvania Narconarratives often portray drug-trafficking culture through an “us versus them” or “friend versus enemy” Manicheism. This dichotomy erases the role of the government in the history of narcoviolence and reproduces a formulaic and a marketable “good versus evil” distinction commonly found throughout the Mexican literary field. In this article, I analyze two short stories that deconstruct this narrative, “Z” (Juli´ an Herbert) and “Hombres armados” (Daniel Espartaco S´ anchez), from the collection Narcocuentos. I approach these stories through the concept of biopolitics, emphasizing the relationship between state and (il)legal violence(s), as well as the authors’ positions in the literary field. These stories reframe the friend-versus-enemy rhetoric, offering unidentifiable perpetrators and victims instead. Moreover, they challenge the hegemonic discourse by using two figures that thrive at the boundaries between life and death: the zombie and the homo sacer. However, the anthology’s failure to attract a wide readership reveals that Herbert’s and Espartaco S´ anchez’s attempts to subvert the traditional drug-trafficking “grand narrative” has not been commercially successful in challenging the deeply engrained us-versus-them Manicheism. Keywords: biopolitics, drug trafficking, homo sacer, narcos, zombies. Frecuentemente las narconarrativas presentan la cultura del narcotr´ afico a trav´ es de una mirada maniquea de “nosotros versus ellos” o “amigos versus enemigos”. Esta perspectiva ignora el rol del gobierno en la historia de la narcoviolencia y reproduce una formula predecible y comercializable basada en la distinci´ on “buenos versus malos” com´ unmente encontrada en el campo literario mexicano. En este ensayo, analizo dos cuentos que deconstruyen esta narrativa: “Z” (Juli´ an Herbert) y “Hombres armados” (Daniel Espartaco 290 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos Vol. 37, Issue 2, Summer 2021, pages 290–314. issn 0742- 9797, electronic issn 1533-8320. 2021 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www. ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/msem.2021.37.2.290.