Laboratorios audiovisuales de la frontera

Anapra is the birthplace of the now-iconic pink cross symbol—an expression created by a group of women in the 1990s, which became the only way to raise their voices against the impunity surrounding the murder of their daughters.   

It is in this complex border territory, located right beside the wall dividing it from Sunland Park, New Mexico, where Mayra Martell began her work in 2005, documenting cases of missing women and femicides.

In 2022, she launched this project through photography and video workshops at Federal Secondary School No. 14, located in Anapra, continuing with the same students into high school.

After so many years covering violence in this area, it became vital for the artist to understand how young people, who have grown up witnessing the realities around the border wall—migration, drug trafficking, human trafficking, among others—cope with and process this violence.

The themes unfold as a kind of cartography, connected through long-term observation and documentation of time, and of the political and social events that have developed between Mexico and the United States.