The Body and the Law in the Mexico/U.S. Borderlands: Violence and Violations in El viaje de los cantores by Hugo Salcedo and Backyard by Sabina Berman

The violence, lawlessness, and death currently experienced in the borderlands of Mexico and the United States are memorably portrayed in two Mexican works: Hugo Salcedo's 1989 play El viaje de los cantores and the 2004 screenplay Backyard by Sabina Berman (film released in 2009). Dramatizing the tragic death of eighteen illegal immigrants in a railroad car, Salcedo uses music and poetry to confront the audience with the frequently hidden horrors of life in the borderlands, while the language of film allows Berman to deal with a series of gruesome murders of women workers in Ciudad Juárez that have remained largely unsolved. Salcedo's El viaje de los cantores and Berman's Backyard allow us to walk into a conflicted geographical space — the U.S./ Mexican border -recognizing its tragic consequences, denouncing its horrors, and crying out for justice. These works also translate into a stylized discourse tragic experiences that have been mostly documented using the languages of journalism, statistics, economics, law, sociology, and criminology. The article argues that the proliferation of languages and analytical angles to deal with actual human tragedies in an artistic context enables El viaje and Backyard to confront the audience with the twists and turns of political and theatrical communication in all their similarities and contradictions. Ultimately, both writers conceive of artistic communication as a powerful strategy to translate — Salcedo into the language of poetry and music and Berman into the discourse of ethics — the multiple problems experienced by Mexico within its own borders and in its relationship with the United States.