From Halconazo to #YoSoy132: Affective experience,cultural memory,and intergenerational transmission in a Mexican graphic narrative

Abstract

This article examines Augusto Mora’s Grito de Victoria (2013) to show how comics make cultural memory both intelligible and affective through form. Drawing on cultural memory, affect theory, and the politics of the gaze—and using Passeron and Revel’s penser par cas—it follows how sequencing, repetition, and closure braid El Halconazo (1971) with #YoSoy132 (2012). The narrative forges an intergenerational link—Victoria/Vicente with Valentín/Vanessa—without erasing historical differences, offering “prosthetic” access to events not personally lived. Rather than opposing dominant frames, the book works within a memorial consensus that makes the persistence and mutation of state repression legible. Treating violence as a problem of form—focalization, rhythm, the gutter—the comic opens an ethical space for witnessing and solidarity. The study clarifies how Latin American protest comics sustain transmissible memory and why close attention to page architecture advances debates in comics and memory studies.