The Melodramatic Mode in Poetic Activism: An Analysis of María Rivera’s “Los muertos” and its Afterlives

In this article I examine María Rivera’s “Los muertos” (2010), a poem about ongoing violence in Mexico that has been included in the activist repertoire within the context of the state-led “War on Drugs”. I use an interdisciplinary approach to analyse, on the one hand, how the poem has approached this violence in the country and, on the other hand, how the poem has been taken up anew by other artists and/or activists: by the Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad, by Luis Felipe Fabre in “El poema de mi amiga” (2013), and by Violeta Luna in the political performance “Requiem for a lost land” (2016). In particular, I investigate the melodramatic mode as one of the catalysing elements in relation to the unique impact of “Los muertos”. Through a close reading of the poem, in combination with an analysis of its afterlives, I want to cast light on the changing meanings and roles that both the poem and its melodramatic underpinnings have assumed in different contexts: meanings and roles which reveal, in turn, the multiple political potentials of the original text.