The Rio Grande as It Could Be: Beatriz Cortez's The Underworld

• Published in: ASAP journal 2021-05, Vol.6 (2), p.379-402
• Main Author: Fornoff, Carolyn
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 20th century; Aesthetics; Afrofuturism; College students; Cortez, Beatriz; Interiority; Latin American culture; Le Duc, Julia; Migrants; Migration; Realism; Social media; Social networks; Speculative fiction; Violence; Visual artists
• ISSN: 2381-4705; 2381-4721; 2381-4721
• DOI: 10.1353/asa.2021.0028

While several newspapers acknowledged the discomfort of disseminating such an explicit photograph, it was justified as a way to bear witness to the ongoing statistical surge in migrant drownings.2 Members of Congress circulated it as proof of the human cost of inhumane migration policies and as impetus to pass a $4.5 billion emergency humanitarian aid bill. The advocacy group RAICES encouraged its followers on social media to instead share pictures of Óscar and Valeria taken before their death, to prevent their commodification as "just another tragedy" or symptom of policy failure.4 In the debate surrounding Le Duc's photograph lies a central question about whether the familiar forms of documentary realism are capable of reckoning with the contemporary crises of migration. The assemblage of life invoked in The Underworld is a motley crew of migrants, human and nonhuman, who co-create the waterway and resist efforts to be managed. The forensic focus on evidence, Pablo Domínguez Galbraith explains, reorients art from the subjective testimonies of victims and back toward the object of incontrovertible proof: the victim's body.10 Thus, the names and images of the victims of state violence, from Southern Cone dictatorships of the 1970s, to the 2014 massacre of the forty-three students of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College in Mexico, have been effectively circulated by activists and artists to consolidate "a conspicuous visual case against the state.