Brainstorm #5

Senorita Extraviada challenges representations of young women as disposable by focusing in on the grief of mothers and families, the corruption of police and factories, and the ways that mothers and families have taken on the role of investigator in discovering the details of the murdered and missing women. In witnessing the stories and grief of families the young women are “humanized.”

Lisa Cacho and the film help us to see the violence against women as sanctioned by the state, as something that is allowed to continue and in the families and black crosses we see how the families refuse to be complicit by telling the stories of the missing women, through art, and through continued efforts to hold those in power accountable. Art functions as witness to the deaths and as an acknowledgment of the injustices.