Narcocorridos and Moral Panics; the Case of Cartel TikTok and #Chapiza

TikTok has become a popular platform among a group of people known in popular culture as “Chiquinarcos”: a subculture that emerged particularly in North and Northwest Mexico, whose fundamental characteristic is the expression of admiration and emulation towards certain figures and practices within the world of drug trafficking. In this work, I analyze the “Chapiza” hashtag on TikTok and how it has been used and circulated. I ground the theorization in the broader socio-political context of the war on drugs, the U.S.-México border conflicts, and the region of Culiacán, México. I argue that these cultural expressions of narcoculture have been the object of governmental condemnation and state-driven moral panics that have failed to consider these communities in their rich and complex history.