Breaking down

Ciudad Juárez is one of the most significant cities along the Mexico–United States border. International investment in industrial manufacturing fueled its growth in the 1980s, positioning it as one of the country’s most promising urban centers. This sparked a wave of rapid expansion, driven by the arrival of thousands from southern Mexico and a transient population—mostly Latin Americans—who, after failing to cross the border into the U.S. and unable to return home, remained in Ciudad Juárez. Today, this border city is considered one of the most violent places in the world outside of officially declared war zones.

My return to the city took place years ago, wandering through Juárez’s historic downtown. Though I believed I had memorized the place, I was reminded of the fragility of memory. What unsettles me is not just the passage of time, but the ferocity of what time has destroyed. 

For the past five years, the city center has been slowly vanishing—transformed into a battlefield for drug cartels, a stage for femicides, and the epicenter of countless disappearances. Ciudad Juárez stands as a stark reflection of a society devouring itself, unable to stop.

I believe there’s something in these spaces that makes people forget other places exist, as if neither they—nor the city—had a past. Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to it: it has no memory, or at least none as obvious as in other places I’ve known. It feels like something inside it broke—a kind of inner fracture—like the soul of someone grieving, so stunned by loss they become stuck, trapped in the same sliver of sorrow.

Ciudad Juárez is like an old kitchen. At dawn, you can see the buses moving through the streets like cockroaches—iron cockroaches skittering across a filthy, ruined, solitary floor.