The Rio Grande as It Could Be:Beatriz Cortez's The Underworld Carolyn Fornoff (bio) On June 24, 2019, twenty-five-year-old óscar alberto martínez ramírez and his toddler valeria drowned while attempting to cross the Rio Grande to claim asylum in the United States. The martínez family—óscar, his wife tania vanessa Ávalos, and their daughter valeria—had arrived at the border city of Matamoros, Mexico, after a months-long trek from their hometown in San Martín, El Salvador. They planned to apply for asylum in Brownsville, Texas, but when they reached the border, the international bridge was closed for the weekend. Like other asylum-seekers faced with torturously long waits, they decided to risk forging the river instead.1 Unlike countless migrant deaths that pass unnoticed by the general public, Óscar and Valeria's drowning became highly visible because it was photographed. Julia Le Duc, a photojournalist for La Jornada in Matamoros, arrived on the scene after receiving an emergency call. Her perturbing photograph captures father and daughter floating face down in the Rio Grande, their bodies tightly pressed together. Their corpses diagonally occupy the shot, framed by a riverbank littered with cans of Bud Light. Valeria is tucked under her father's shirt, her arm embracing his [End Page 379] neck. It is a shocking image of the deadly toll of U.S. migration policy: a death sentence carried out by a weaponized river. The graphic image of Óscar and Valeria quickly became omnipresent, distributed by the Associated Press to countless news sources and shared by many on social media. While several newspapers acknowledged the discomfort of disseminating such an explicit photograph, it was justified as a way to bear witness to the ongoing statistical surge in migrant drownings.2 Members of Congress circulated it as proof of the human cost of inhumane migration policies and as impetus to pass a $4.5 billion emergency humanitarian aid bill. Many hoped that the brutal sight of Óscar and his young daughter's corpses would spur collective action and generate empathy for migrants. Just as swiftly as the photograph went viral, others rightly questioned the ethics of its transmission. Photography critic Teju Cole succinctly summarized their concerns: "do we need the spectacle of corpses to make the story real?"3 The representation of the dead is racialized, Cole furthered. The media most readily circulates images of injured Brown and Black bodies, inuring the public to their pain, and normalizing its consumption. Many outlets did not mention Óscar and Valeria's names, referring to them in headlines simply as "drowned migrants." This presented them as anonymous victims, detached from their interiority and their loved ones' pain. The advocacy group RAICES encouraged its followers on social media to instead share pictures of Óscar and Valeria taken before their death, to prevent their commodification as "just another tragedy" or symptom of policy failure.4 In the debate surrounding Le Duc's photograph lies a central question about whether the familiar forms of documentary realism are capable of reckoning with the contemporary crises of migration. Realism has long been the dominant aesthetic mode for representing state violence. Yet the underlying premise that realist documentation spurs action is not necessarily the case. The aspiration for objectivity is similarly complicated. Attempts to provide unmediated portraits of vulnerable subjects cannot actually escape mediation, Pooja Rangan contends. Documentary ends up "regulating what does and does not count as human"; it requires that the Other be legible.5 It generates empathy through portraits of vulnerable Others that mirror the viewer's own experiences or expectations or, worse, fetishizes their suffering as spectacle. The question then becomes what [End Page 380] art can do beyond simply raising awareness or rendering visible the racialized violence and injustice of weaponized borders. How can art intervene in ways that begin the work not only of critique and mourning but of mapping alternative forms of relating to the borderlands and border-crossers? This imperative to respond to the world as it is and imagine it as it could be impels a shift from realist to speculative modes. In a project titled The Underworld curated for X-TRA Contemporary...