Trans* (Dis)appearance at the Mexican Frontier

Abstract

This article positions Teresa Margolles's Ya basta hijos de puta (2018) as a refusal of trans* disappearance created by capitalistic initiatives of renovation, by the failures of the Mexican state, and by transphobic violence. Through the triangulation of three objects, a stone, a legal document, and a sound recording, intertwined with seventeen photographs of trans* people in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, the article also proposes that Margolles's recent aesthetic shift engages transness to open up a coalitional travesti-trans* studies between the North and South. A hemispheric conversation in which praxis and theory meet and where Ya basta hijos de puta as praxis demands on feeling destruction through the “touching” of the stone, on seeing the legal foreclosures through a death certificate, and on hearing of disappearance through the recording, the sound of the afterlife of transness.