Interview with Rossana Reguillo, conducted by Diana Taylor, founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. In this interview, Professor Reguillo speaks about how fear, interplaying with other emotions like anger and hope, is structurally used by different governments to shape politics of passions. She maps recent historical events to analyze how state authorities control fears and hopes of citizens all over the Americas. She also analyzes the conflict between the Mexican government and the ‘narco’ criminal culture as the site where politics of passions strongly emerge. For her, these convulse relationships function as machines that produce uncertainties - the basis for political emotions. Examples such as the events of September 11 illustrate how fear and anger are attributed to certain subjects, who become the ‘monsters’ to be punished. Toward the end of the interview, Professor Reguillo speaks about current civil society movements of resistance, such as Occupy Wall Street, as new expressions of political passions, and the role of young citizens as the main actors for political participation.Rossana Reguillo Cruz is a research professor in the Department of Sociocultural Studies at the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Occidente, ITESO in Guadalajara, Mexico, where she coordinates the program of research in Sociocultural Studies. Her current areas of study include youth and urban culture, mass media, and cultural aspects of the relationship between communication and human rights. She has been a visiting professor at several Latin American universities and in Europe and the United States. Her publications include La construcción simbólica de la ciudad: Sociedad, desastre, comunicación (Guadalajara: Universidad Iberoamericana/ITESO, 1996); Ciudadano N: Crónicas de la diversidad, with an introduction by Carlos Monsiváis and a preface by Jean Franco (Guadalajara: ITESO, 1999); Estrategias del desencanto: La emergencia de culturas juveniles en Latinoamérica (Buenos Aires: Ed. Norma, 2000); and Horizontes fragmentados: Comunicación, cultura, pospolítica. El (des)orden global y sus figuras (Guadalajara: ITESO, 2005).