Between Ruin and Resilience

This paper analyzes the intersection of ruins, memory, and cultural heritage within the necropolitical landscape of Ciudad Juárez. Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, in her 2016 photographic series Pistas de baile (Dance floors), depicts trans sex workers posing in the ruins of demolished nightclubs in Ciudad Juárez. Margolles has spent her career mining the affective dimensions of death, frequently using bodily fluids and cadavers to confront the viewer. Rather than the inert matter Margolles encounters in the morgue, the women in the Pistas de baile images portray resilience and agency, all the while navigating a postapocalyptic landscape. By centering sex workers and destroyed nightclubs, Margolles prompts a deeper examination of the place of the ruin as both a marker of an imagined collective past and a symbol of national belonging. Yet these ruined dance floors deny those romantic associations, as these sites have been destroyed as part of efforts to “revitalize” the city’s image after the height of the early 2000s narcoviolence. The trans sex workers are multiply marginalized, occupying positions of extreme precarity with regards to basic human rights. The series Pistas de baile, I argue, seeks to invert the traditional markers of civic pride and cultural heritage, positing violence as a deeply ingrained spatial problem.