Brainstorm #5 Nick Roberts

In Senorita Extraviada, Portillo Portillo documents the deaths of hundreds of women who have gone missing in and around Juarez over a ten year period. The frequency of these attacks seems to have led to a certain desensitization of these crimes for the people who live it every day and as a result, it has created this idea that the women are not important and their stories do not need to be heard. Through Portillo's documentary, she challenges this portrayal of the women who are the victims of these crimes as disposable. By telling the stories of these women who were lost and killed, and the corruption and inaction of the police and government, Portillo pushes for justice and forces people to stop thinking of these women as statistics and more as people again. 

This ties into the idea of the social death we read about earlier in the sense that when these women are treated as disposable they are essentially already socially dead and forgotten by all but their families. Portillo in a sense revives them from social death by bringing their stories to the forefront of people's thoughts and demanding justice for them. This is a great example of how art can be a center point for social reform. By creating this documentary Portillo was able to reach a larger audience and revive these women's social lives which will hopefully one day lead to justice and arrests for those responsible for these crimes.