The Body and the Law in the Mexico/U.S. Borderlands: Violence and Violations in <i>El viaje de los cantores</i> by Hugo Salcedo and <i>Backyard</i> by Sabina Berman
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it