Abstract

LOERA SALCEDO, Nereida  and  ZEPEDA LOPEZ, José Salvador. Social representations of young university students about drug trafficking and narcoculture in Nayarit. Intersticios sociales [online]. 2023, n.25, pp.337-368.  Epub Apr 27, 2023. ISSN 2007-4964.

At least since 2006, Mexico has been submerged in a whirlwind of violence as a result of the frontal combat against criminal organizations that former President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) orchestrated. In this context, cultural forms and social representations have emerged as a result of the security crisis that the country has gone through, and in this case, Nayarit. At the local level, it was in this scenario that drug trafficking and narcoculture gained visibility and became social problems that disrupted the lives of Tepicenses. Therefore, this text aimed to identify the contents of the social representations that a group of young people from Tepic and its metropolitan area, Xalisco, has built around these two objects of representation: drug trafficking and drug culture in Nayarit. The results show that this local knowledge has been re-elaborated as a consequence of the security crisis that affected Nayarit between 2010 and 2012. This was evidenced in the speeches that young people have, who are polarized in front of each one of the problems. In this way, it is inferred that the unusual wave of violence in the entity was a breaking point in the collective thought regarding the two phenomena of study, so that the construction of said representations has determined divergent positions around it, which they range between positive and negative ratings. In addition, this approach allowed identifying the relationship that exists between these two social objects and characterizing two little-explored problems in the entity.

Keywords : drug trafficking; narcoculture; social representations; young people; Nayarit.