ABSTRACT
This chapter theorizes the experiential dimension of video stores targeted at Mexican immigrants in the southwestern United States. It explores these “piratical” spaces to foreground how they blur the distinctions established in mainstream media consumption, a blurring that reveals the mediated construction of the counterpublics congregated in these spaces. It further develops the concept of “feeling pirate” as an affective experience characteristic of Mexicans in the United States. “Feeling pirate,” the author argues, represents a form of worlding wherein the practices of media consumers diffract their own status as members, or nonmembers, of the communities they inhabit. His chapter builds on observations gathered from multiple visits to Mexican-targeted video stores and is informed by scholarship about media piracy, video spectatorship, postcolonial studies, theories of affect, and Latin/x studies. The author concludes that feeling pirate lays bare the impoverishment of existing norms of legality and exclusion and the urgent need for alternative norms to emerge.
