Affective Aesthetics: Reimagining Memorials in Mexico

Gabriela Damián Miravete’s speculative short story, “They Will Dream in the Garden,” envisions a future set in 2079, where Mexico has eradicated feminicides and the stories of victims are memorialized in a holographic archive. This imagined future sharply contrasts the systemic violence that has historically marked the country, reframing memory as a force that shapes future possibilities rather than a static recollection of the past. The narrative oscillates between these two temporal realms: a past marked by trauma and a future where the preservation of memory is central for transformation and justice. The story’s claim that “conserving the memory was the only way out”¹ highlights the urgency of remembering, a process that must be ongoing to restore personhood and ensure visibility. This claim raises an essential question: Who owns collective memory? Here I point to the issue of the ownership of truth and memory as both traits are tenets in human rights and frameworks towards justice efforts. This issue presents a crisis of authority: Who has the right to determine how the past is remembered and recollected? In Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, he argues that the traditional authority structures in late capitalism have collapsed², designating accountability on individuals and increasing understanding that “the public has been displaced by the consumer.”³ This shift has profound implications for memory politics as it pins an ambiguous responsibility on collective truth and justice for the victims of feminicidal violence.

By analyzing the speculative memorial in Gabriela Damián Miravete’s short fiction alongside the activist-led Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan (Roundabout of Women Who Fight) in Mexico City, this essay interrogates Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism as “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”⁴ Fisher argues that capitalism absorbs even its most radical critiques, formatting desires and aspirations, and even colonizing “the dreaming life of the population.”⁵ Yet feminist memorial interventions in Mexico resist such fatalism. Through what I term “affective aesthetics,” speculative practices that reorient memory from passive commemoration to lived experiences, these memorials represent what Walter Mignolo has called “decolonial aesthesis,” which disrupts the hegemonic aesthetic norms that “have played a key role in configuring a canon, a normativity that enabled the disdain and the rejection of other forms of aesthetic practices, or, more precisely, other forms of aesthesis, of sensing and perceiving.”⁶ Both memorials analyzed in this essay reject the idea of memory as an individual burden, instead positioning it as an ongoing collective responsibility.

Feminicidal violence in Mexico has functioned within capitalist paradigms, sustained by a system that has commodified women’s labor through the maquiladora system of the 1990s while rendering their lives disposable. Fisher notes that capitalism “seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable”⁷, foreclosing economic but also imaginative possibilities. The systematic erasure of murdered women and the absence of consistent documentation of feminicidal violence in over three decades reflects this same logic of invisibilization whereby state and corporate interests prioritize economic growth over human life. Both Damián Miravete’s speculative archive and the Glorieta break open this framework and refuse to let memory be hijacked by the state’s sanitized narratives of justice.

As Alain Badiou’s states, “there is an affect of injustice, a suffering, a revolt. But there is nothing to indicate justice, which presents neither spectacle, nor sentiment.”⁹ Indeed, the feminist collective behind the Glorieta embodies this principle where “indignation and rage unite us; we embrace our pain and turn it into action and organization. We take public space to plant memory and demand justice.”¹⁰ Damián Miravete’s protagonist Marisela similarly transforms grief into resistance by creating a holographic memorial for the murdered women. Using testimonies, photographs, videos, and data retrieved from the women’s personal emails and social media, she recreates their voices, movements and presence to “bring them back to life”¹¹, allowing visitors to interact with that memory/past in real time.

The rise of anti-monuments in Mexico City in recent years exemplifies how activists counter the state’s narratives of memory. These unauthorized installations, often erected by the families of victims themselves, transform urban spaces into sites of resistance. The Glorieta, established by feminist activists known as Frente Amplio de Mujeres que Luchan, appeared right after the removal of the statue of Christopher Columbus on Paseo de la Reforma. When the head of government of Mexico City and current Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced plans to replace the statue with a replica of the Young Woman of Amajac¹², feminist activists re-signified this contested space to make visible those who have faced violence, repression, and revictimization for fighting against injustices in Mexico and renamed it the Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan.¹³ They replaced the Columbus statue with a purple silhouette of a woman raising her left fist and called it the “Antimonumenta-Justicia.” This intervention, legally defended by the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights, decolonized the space affirming the right to memory against state erasure.¹⁴ Despite repeated efforts by authorities to dismantle it, activists continue using the site for protests and vigils, especially on International Women’s Day. These actions push back against one of the key claims under capitalist realism: that meaningful resistance is impossible.

As Sara Ahmed states, emotions are “sticky,” accumulating affective intensity as they circulate and creating “sites of personal and social tension.”¹⁵ Damián Miravete literalizes this concept in “They Will Dream in the Garden,” as she embeds the handwritten note of “short-term and long-term goals”¹⁶ of the real-life victim Erika Nohemí Carrillo. The narrative incorporates a documentary photograph by Mayra Martell’s series, Ensayo de la identidad, Ciudad Juárez 2005-2020 (Essays on Identity, Ciudad Juárez 2005-2020),¹⁷ which captures Carrillo’s life goals and dreams tragically cut short by feminicide. By integrating this visual archive by Martell, the story resists erasure, creating a polyphony of voices and layering individual and collective grief into a palimpsest of memory. This strategy aligns with broader feminist efforts to reclaim narrative spaces and reject state-imposed silences, ultimately questioning the ways we remember, mourn, and advocate for justice.

Damián Miravete’s holograms, sometimes called “silhouettes,” are more than mere fixed images; they form an interactive, affective apparatus that educates the living. Children as young as six visit the memorial on school trips, engaging directly with the memorial display through real-time interactions drawn from archival data gathered by the protagonist. A key part of the lesson is teaching young boys to respect women’s autonomy by viewing them as people rather than objects, which is reinforced by each hologram emitting a light electrical charge when touched without consent. Though not explicitly stated, the story implies that this future Mexico has undergone transitional justice, formally recognizing feminicides as human rights violations and establishing a system of memorialization. As the International Center for Transitional Justice argues, victims of human rights violations cannot erase their experiences; they must be recognized and the states bear the responsibility of safeguarding the historical memory from periods of violence and repression. In this context, “architectural memorials, museums, and commemorative activities are indispensable educational initiatives that establish a public record and serve as a bastion against denial and recurrence.”¹⁸

Nonetheless, the story exposes the tensions with state-sponsored memory projects. In Damián Miravete’s speculative future, the Mexican government mandates that the memorial operates as an educational tool, requiring mandatory attendance by young people to learn the history of the murdered women in Mexico. While Marisela recognizes the initiative’s importance, she “refused to reprogram them, to turn them into chapters in a textbook”¹⁹ for state-sanctioned lessons. Her resistance reflects Mark Fisher’s critique of precorporation, or “pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes,”²⁰ the process by which radical spaces are neutralized and assimilated into dominant structures. If state power dictates the terms of remembrance, does the memorial retain its subversive potential or does it become another mechanism of control?

Both Damián Miravete’s speculative memorial and the Glorieta reject linear temporality, challenging the state’s efforts to contain memory. Instead, these memorials insist on the difficulties of keeping memory tucked away by presenting them as iterations of past-grief, trauma and injustice that remain suspended in time. For example, “They Will Dream in the Garden” collapses past and future, refusing clear temporal demarcations within the page, such as clear separations or changes in font. In turn, readers must actively engage with the text, working through its fluid chronology and confronting the implications of a memorialized future. Similarly, the Glorieta opposes a passive monument through constant transformation: graffiti, changing posters, and new names that are frequently added, ensures that memory remains dynamic rather than static. These sites embody an affective force “that produces shared capacity and commonality”²¹ in order to understand that affect is part of the material and human and insisting on presence as an affront to the logic of disposability of capitalist realism. Although Mark Fisher describes the labyrinthic “memory disorder” we face under capitalist realism, recalling Fredric Jameson’s consideration of temporality in his analysis of postmodern/post-Fordist culture²³

Returning to the question “Who owns collective memory?,” this essay argues that memory is not singular but rather a contested terrain. Against the neutralizing efforts of hegemonic forces of capitalist realism to obfuscate the affective experiences of injustice, it is necessary to actively defend the right to truth. While capitalism may commodify the past, collective memory, when reclaimed through affective aesthetics, can serve as sites of resistance, reorienting the possibilities of justice.

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1. Gabriela Damián Miravete, “They Will Dream in the Garden,” in They Will Dream in the Garden, trans. Adrian Demopulos (Rosarium Publishing, 2023), 141.
2. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? ( Zero Books, 2022), 50.
3. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 76.
4. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 2 (emphasis my own).
5. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 8.
6. Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vazquez, “Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings,” Social Text (blog), July 15, 2013, accessed November 25, 2024, https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/decolonial-aesthesis-colonial-woundsdecolonial-healings/.
7. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 8.
9. Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (Verso, 2005), 96.,/note] The frustration by victim’s families and activists facing systemic impunity of feminicidal violence in Mexico epitomizes this tension. Affect, as theorized by Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “drive[s] us toward movement, toward thought and extension.”⁸Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” The Affect Theory Reader (Duke University Press, 2010), 1.
10. Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan, “Nosotras,” accessed November 30, 2024, https://www.glorietadelasmujeresqueluchan.com/archiva-nosotras, translation my own.
11. Damián Miravete, “They Will Dream in the Garden,” 139 (emphasis in the original).
12. Gobierno de la Ciudad de México, “Presentación del proyecto escultórico ‘La joven de Amajac’,” filmed October 12, 2021, YouTube video, 1:04:36, accessed November 22, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/live/R6gTu-PJngE.
13. Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan, “Comunicado,” September 25, 2021, accessed November 23, 2024, https://www.glorietadelasmujeresqueluchan.com/_files/ugd/f5d056_d4526862c2a141ab9fb74551a9b4b6d3.pdf.
14. Comisión Mexicana de Defensa y Promoción de los Derechos Humanos, “Frente Amplio de la Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan,” published April 12, 2023, accessed November 23, 2024, https://cmdpdh.org/caso-frente-amplio-de-lacaso-glorieta-de-las-mujeres-que-luchan/.
15. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 11.
16. These include: “Get into swimming; Work hard to pay school enrollment fees; Scrape up money for El Cervantino; Build the closet; Paint the house in September; Buy dining room chairs; Buy some shoes; Read Plato; Talk to and be friendly with people.” Damián Miravete, “They Will Dream in the Garden,” 144.
17. Mayra Martell, Ensayo de la Identidad: Ciudad Juárez (2018-2005), accessed April 4, 2023, https://mayramartell.com/
    portfolio/ensayo-de-la-identidad-ciudad-juarez-2018-2005/.
18. International Center for Transitional Justice, “Truth and Memory,” ICTJ, accessed January 29, 2025, https://www.ictj.org/truth-and-memory.
19. Damián Miravete, “They Will Dream in the Garden,” 141.
20. Fisher, Capitalist Reaslism, 9.
21. Nigel Thrift, “Understanding the Material Practices of Glamour,” The Affect Theory Reader (Duke University Press, 2010), 292.
23. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 59.[/n[te], the memorial in Damián Miravete and the Glorieta both require collective interaction with the narrative of feminicidal violence.²²In Damián Miravete’s “They Will Dream in the Garden” the narrative opens with the evocative lines, “The orange trees will be heavy with fruit, and their blossoms will fill the humid air of the western garden” (130) and closes with “In the garden they will dream of their future” (144). This imagery of a sanctuary for memorializing the dead women inspired the painting “A Requiem for Their Breath,”from my first art project, Invisible Suffering. The painting served as a symbolic memorial for the victims of 2020 – from those taken by the COVID-19 virus and those whose lives were cut short while pleading, “I can’t breathe,” at the hands of police. For more information about the painting, please visit the link here.

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  Diana Aldrete

  Diana Aldrete is an Assistant Professor of Language and Culture Studies and Human Rights at Trinity College, as well as a visual artist, in Hartford, CT. She is currently developing her first manuscript, Between Land and Death: Women Writing for Justice in Mexico, which explores how contemporary Mexican women writers use literary production as a political tool against feminicidal violence, engaging with concepts of justice and linking literature to activism. As a visual artist, her work similarly addresses themes of violence and erasure, highlighted in her 2022 solo exhibition, Invisible Suffering, which interrogates the historical resonance of unseen suffering in the year 2020. Her current art project, Ech.o Locations, investigates the ecologies of the Great Lakes and the interactions between water, land, and their human and non-human inhabitants by integrating field research, visual anthropology, sound studies, and visual art (photography and painting), to emphasize the critical need to protect freshwater ecosystems.