Carolina Gonzalez - Broken dreams/Broken wings: an interpretation of violence against women through Mexican graphic narratives

H.G. Santarriaga, a Mexican comic book artist known for his visual style and ability to address a variety of genders, has been exploring various visual expressions to speak about the different forms of violence happening against women, in the contemporary Mexico. In the last two years, Santarriaga published a collection of graphic novels named Sueños rotos which, from the point of view of a female protagonist, based on true stories and verified facts, speak about prostitution and human trafficking. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the visual and narrative mechanisms that the author uses to speak about violence against women and study the contrasts made from different forms of media and its approach to this problem. We will explore the process in which though the use of colour, contrast and the use of testimony are managed to create a voice that coincides with the point of view of a victim who is experiencing restriction, violence and the annulation of her human condition. Furthermore, we will focus our attention on how these are represented on the graphic novels and the visual and narrative devices that the author uses in order to analyse if these graphic novels could be considered as an alternative registration of the collective memory.