Telling Death Stories in Mexican New Media

Abstract

The chapter focuses on collective digital projects representing real stories in Mexico, particularly on 72 migrantes (2010) and Testigos presenciales (2014). It aims to demonstrate that new media narratives are alternative ways for truth-telling while dealing with a failed state and a censored press. Since 2006, when public policies against drug trafficking provoked the rise of violence in the country, there has been a boom of what Cristina Rivera Garza has called “necrowriting.” Moving beyond conventional testimonial accounts, these works use new communication technologies in response to experiences of horrorism. The chapter reflects on how the Mexican artistic community responds to this horror by telling what they call “death stories.” Following Rosi Braidotti’s theory of the posthuman, this chapter proposes that new media narratives expose an updated version of Walter Benjamin’s storyteller. Contemporary storytellers, it is argued, excavate life from the dead in their aim of rescuing lost identities. This process, however, cannot leave the storyteller intact. In the era of the eyewitness and the new forensic sensibility, testimonial narratives are no longer attached to a particular person or locality but rather can be found at the intersections of self, community, and geopolitical borders.