Julián Cardona fearlessly roamed the streets with his camera in tow, photographing corpses and listening to wailing survivors as one of the great chroniclers of an undeclared war between cartels and the Mexican military that has cost thousands of lives in Ciudad Juárez, a sprawling, smoggy city that rises up from the Chihuahua Desert just south of El Paso. Some called him the “Bard of Juárez.” He was a fearless sage—a man to whom many confided secrets—and a bold illustrator of butchery and tragedy. To the very end of his life, he watched and he listened, both as a photojournalist and as an author, filling his head and his notebook with astute observations about the methods Juarenses and others along the border used to cope with the violence unfolding around them.
Slowly, without meaning to, Cardona began to assemble a glossary of narcolenguaje—a definitive glossary of terms spawned by the border wars of the 2000s and 2010s. The result is Abecedario de Juárez, Released earlier this month, the book is an unconventional and fully illustrated, alphabetical account of an era in which border citizens in conflict zones used words, shortcuts, and stories to process relentless waves of violence.
Cardona got his start covering crime—or nota roja—as a photographer for El Diario de Juárez and other local media outlets and began collecting stories for this book at least a decade ago. But his work assumed a far more interesting shape after he met a Tucson-based border writer and gifted artist, Alice Leora Briggs, through a mutual friend, another legendary border storyteller named Chuck Bowden.
