Two Traffickers in Public
Rihan Yeh
US-Mexico Center, UCSD
April 5, 2010

I would like to consider some texts drawn from the Internet for what
they can tell us of the importance of evidentiality and epistemic
modality for the formation of publics and of what I call 'hearsay
publics' in particular.  On the basis of a Wikipedia page about a
famous Mexican drug-trafficker, I argue that the figure of the
trafficker stands for a general challenge to the formation of a public
sphere in Mexico, for to this figure accrue expressions of the problem
of securing the evidential ground for public communication.  In this
context, hearsay may not necessarily be delegitimized as less
authoritative than official channels of communication such as the mass
media.  I'd like to spend the most time, though, examining a chat from
a music fan-site to see how, over the course of their interaction, two
users use evidential markers of hearsay to negotiate their standing
relative to the world of traffic and the public at large.