Gabriela Damián Miravete’s speculative short story, “They Will Dream in the Garden,” envisions a future set in 2079, where Mexico has eradicated feminicides and the stories of victims are memorialized in a holographic archive. This imagined future sharply contrasts the systemic violence that has historically marked the country, reframing memory as a force that shapes future possibilities rather than a static recollection of the past. The narrative oscillates between these two temporal realms: a past marked by trauma and a future where the preservation of memory is central for transformation and justice. The story’s claim that “conserving the memory was the only way out”1 highlights the urgency of remembering, a process that must be ongoing to restore personhood and ensure visibility. This claim raises an essential question: Who owns collective memory? Here I point to the issue of the ownership of truth and memory as both traits are tenets in human rights and frameworks towards justice efforts. This issue presents a crisis of authority: Who has the right to determine how the past is remembered and recollected? In Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, he argues that the traditional authority structures in late capitalism have collapsed2, designating accountability on individuals and increasing understanding that “the public has been displaced by the consumer.”3 This shift has profound implications for memory politics as it pins an ambiguous responsibility on collective truth and justice for the victims of feminicidal violence.
By analyzing the speculative memorial in Gabriela Damián Miravete’s short fiction alongside the activist-led Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan (Roundabout of Women Who Fight) in Mexico City, this essay interrogates Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism as “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”4 Fisher argues that capitalism absorbs even its most radical critiques, formatting desires and aspirations, and even colonizing “the dreaming life of the population.”5 Yet feminist memorial interventions in Mexico resist such fatalism. Through what I term “affective aesthetics,” speculative practices that reorient memory from passive commemoration to lived experiences, these memorials represent what Walter Mignolo has called “decolonial aesthesis,” which disrupts the hegemonic aesthetic norms that “have played a key role in configuring a canon, a normativity that enabled the disdain and the rejection of other forms of aesthetic practices, or, more precisely, other forms of aesthesis, of sensing and perceiving.”7, foreclosing economic but also imaginative possibilities. The systematic erasure of murdered women and the absence of consistent documentation of feminicidal violence in over three decades reflects this same logic of invisibilization whereby state and corporate interests prioritize economic growth over human life. Both Damián Miravete’s speculative archive and the Glorieta break open this framework and refuse to let memory be hijacked by the state’s sanitized narratives of justice.
As Alain Badiou states, “there is an affect of injustice, a suffering, a revolt. But there is nothing to indicate justice, which presents neither spectacle, nor sentiment.”8 The frustration by victim’s families and activists facing systemic impunity of feminicidal violence in Mexico epitomizes this tension. Affect, as theorized by Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “drive[s] us toward movement, toward thought and extension.”9 Indeed, the feminist collective behind the Glorieta embodies this principle where “indignation and rage unite us; we embrace our pain and turn it into action and organization. We take public space to plant memory and demand justice.”10 Damián Miravete’s protagonist Marisela similarly transforms grief into resistance by creating a holographic memorial for the murdered women. Using testimonies, photographs, videos, and data retrieved from the women’s personal emails and social media, she recreates their voices, movements and presence to “bring them back to life”11, allowing visitors to interact with that memory/past in real time.
The rise of anti-monuments in Mexico City in recent years exemplifies how activists counter the state’s narratives of memory. These unauthorized installations, often erected by the families of victims themselves, transform urban spaces into sites of resistance. The Glorieta, established by feminist activists known as Frente Amplio de Mujeres que Luchan, appeared right after the removal of the statue of Christopher Columbus on Paseo de la Reforma. When the head of government of Mexico City and current Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced plans to replace the statue with a replica of the Young Woman of Amajac15 Damián Miravete literalizes this concept in “They Will Dream in the Garden,” as she embeds the handwritten note of “short-term and long-term goals”16 of the real-life victim Erika Nohemí Carrillo. The narrative incorporates a documentary photograph by Mayra Martell’s series, Ensayo de la identidad, Ciudad Juárez 2005-2020 (Essays on Identity, Ciudad Juárez 2005-2020),19 for state-sanctioned lessons. Her resistance reflects Mark Fisher’s critique of precorporation, or “pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes,”20 the process by which radical spaces are neutralized and assimilated into dominant structures. If state power dictates the terms of remembrance, does the memorial retain its subversive potential or does it become another mechanism of control?
Both Damián Miravete’s speculative memorial and the Glorieta reject linear temporality, challenging the state’s efforts to contain memory. Instead, these memorials insist on the difficulties of keeping memory tucked away by presenting them as iterations of past-grief, trauma and injustice that remain suspended in time. For example, “They Will Dream in the Garden” collapses past and future, refusing clear temporal demarcations within the page, such as clear separations or changes in font. In turn, readers must actively engage with the text, working through its fluid chronology and confronting the implications of a memorialized future. Similarly, the Glorieta opposes a passive monument through constant transformation: graffiti, changing posters, and new names that are frequently added, ensures that memory remains dynamic rather than static. These sites embody an affective force “that produces shared capacity and commonality”21 in order to understand that affect is part of the material and human, insisting on presence as an affront to the logic of disposability of capitalist realism. Although Mark Fisher describes the labyrinthic “memory disorder” we face under capitalist realism, recalling Fredric Jameson’s consideration of temporality in his analysis of postmodern/post-Fordist culture22, the memorial in Damián Miravete and the Glorieta both require collective interaction with the narrative of feminicidal violence.Diana Aldrete