These chronicles don't need photographic descriptions or verbal pyrotechnics to embrace the legacy of the new journalism of Tom Wolfe or Hunter Thompson. Servín also doesn't resort to the literary devices of the essay, where the author's authority is based, first and foremost, on beautified prose. This book doesn't explain, but rather formulates irrefutable judgments. Nor does it attempt to find something sublime in violence or some aesthetic secret in popular culture. It is a contrarian perspective, not a project for a transcendent or essential interpretation of Mexicanness.
"Yo soy el Mandrake" (I Am the Mandrake) is indeed a descendant of the Mexican red-tape newspaper, but not in the pornographic and moralistic way in which, according to its educated critics, most newspaper readers of the last century have read it.
The city's inhabitants are protagonists of the red-tape newspaper as Mandrakes, victims or accomplices. Some academic experts argue that the red-tape newspaper is a mechanism of social control or, on the contrary, an expression of everyday resistance to power. Servín recognizes it for what it is, the sarcastic record of an inhospitable reality.