Destruction Mania

Thinking demolition derbies on the northern Mexican border

Abstract

This article first presents a review of the literature generated from various disciplines on demolition derbies, a car crash spectacle particularly associated with rural areas of North America but that has been replicated in border cities in northern Mexico. In this bibliographic scrutiny, ideas such as rites of reversion, creative destruction, programmed obsolescence, individualization and spectacularization of the accident, as well as violent and hyperbolic masculinity emerge and are discussed in order to understand how the idea of destruction emerges as an inherent aspect of modernity and its development in industrial capitalism. From this review we intend to locate theoretical and methodological clues with which to make sense of the reappropriation of this phenomenon on the Mexican side of the border.