This piece appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of NACLA’s quarterly print magazine, the NACLA Report. Subscribe in print today!
In the early hours of March 26, 2024, Miguel Luna (49), Maynor Yassir Suazo Sandoval (38), Dorlian Castillo Cabrera (26), José Mynor López (37), Carlos Hernández (24), Alejandro Hernández Fuentes (35), and Julio Cervantes Suarez repaired potholes on the southbound lanes of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland. They were road maintenance employees from Brawner Builders, a large construction contractor servicing Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Northern Virginia. That day the seven men were subcontracted by the Maryland Transportation Authority and worked overnight to prevent obstructing daytime traffic patterns. Damon Davis was on site as an inspector. During their break, the seven road maintenance workers waited in the warmth of their vehicles, while Davis walked the deck of the bridge inspecting the job. Hernández, the youngest of the crew, took a moment to update his girlfriend, “Sí amor, pues ya salimos a poner el cemento y ya nada más estamos esperando a que se seque” (Yes, my love, we already laid the cement and we’re just waiting for it to dry).
Nearby, the Dali, a 947-foot-long cargo vessel carrying 4,680 containers, was departing the Port of Baltimore en route to Sri Lanka. The Port of Baltimore is an international access point and economic driver for the state of Maryland and the United States. In 2023, it handled $80.8 billion in foreign cargo value and vessels as large as the Dali are not uncommon. Before departing the port’s terminal around 12:36 am, the captain reported the vessel was in good operating condition, according to a Marine Investigation Preliminary Report conducted by the National Transportation Safety Board. Thereafter, the pilots onboard slowly maneuvered the vessel south on the channel toward the Atlantic. Within 0.6 miles of the Key Bridge, at 1:25 am, the vessel lost power. The crew onboard responded. At 1:26, they called for support and attempted to regain control of the steering. At 1:27, the crew initiated the process to drop anchor and alerted Maryland State Police, the Coast Guard, and waterborne traffic of the ship’s power outage.
They regained power, but only momentarily. Now, 0.2 miles away from the bridge, the vessel lost power again. At 1:27:53, Maryland State Police ordered local units to close the Key Bridge, which connected the Baltimore Beltway (I-695), to incoming traffic. By 1:28, the road maintenance workers and the inspector remained on the bridge deck. Were they the only ones left in the unknown? Was it too late? At 1:29:10 the Dali struck the bridge’s pier. The bridge began to collapse, with the massive cement and metal structure breaking off into several large pieces. Davis, the inspector, leapt to a part of the bridge that remained intact. The others, however, remained in their work vehicles. They fell into the depths of the cold, dark waters of the Patapsco River.
Cervantes Suarez was rescued alive, while the lifeless bodies of his coworkers—some of whom were also friends and family—were recovered in the days and weeks that followed. The deceased were survived by Davis and Cervantes Suarez, as well as wives, girlfriends, children, siblings, niblings, and friends, among others. The late victims had emigrated from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico, and had made a home in Maryland over a span of a few years to nearly two decades. Their untimely death in one of the country’s busiest waterways brought their names into high relief. As the sun rose on March 26, the tragedy that took the lives of six Latino immigrants—most of them Central American—and traumatized two others was widely circulated across media outlets.
The feeling of loss was widespread and connected to the collapse of the Key Bridge. However, it was not experienced the same way. Some woke up that morning redirecting their commutes and reflecting on the many times they had driven across those deadly waters. Others awoke to the closing of the port and a temporary loss of employment. And, devastatingly, others woke up to the absence of a loved one. To one degree or another, grief is relational. This relationality is strengthened through shared spaces of difference. That is, in the wake of tragedy, we are inclined to see ourselves in the victims. In this case, I thought about my own family—some of whom traverse the same roadways, many of them immigrants from Central America working in construction. For me and many other Central Americans and Latinxs in and near Baltimore, the death of the six road maintenance workers felt close. This closeness stemmed not only from a familiarity with Baltimore but, more importantly, from an understanding of their social position as working-class immigrant Latino laborers.
In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, I questioned how their loved ones would grieve. Later, as their bodies were recovered, I wondered: how would the state of Maryland remember them? More broadly, how would the public process the death of six Central American and Mexican laborers?
Would society deem them worthy of grief?
Loss at the Key Bridge
In the age of the internet, people have expeditiously taken to social media to air the pains of loss, provide condolences, and memorialize those who have transitioned. Portraits of the deceased are often used to commemorate those who have violently or tragically lost their lives. Several news outlets along with CASA, a Maryland non-profit organization, shared individual profiles of Luna, Suazo Sandoval, Castillo Cabrera, López, Hernández, and Hernández Fuentes. A digitally illustrated image of the six victims was also circulated with texts paying their respects.
The illustration depicts six men with identical low-cut dark hair and light brown skin. They each wear construction uniforms, consisting of a white hard hat, neon yellow mesh vests, and blue jeans. Some of them also carry lunch boxes, further contributing to their blue-collar depiction. In the frame, the six men walk away, each of them draped in a national flag representing their respective country of origin.
The figures’ skin tone and hair are meant to loosely resemble those of the victims, all of whom were olive-to-brown skinned Latinos with dark hair. The men are only distinguished in the illustration by the flags that hang on their backs; their personhood reduced to the nation-state from which they emigrated. Moreover, the figures are configured into a v-shape as they walk toward the horizon, suggesting a transition from the material world to the spiritual world. As the figures walk toward their transition, dressed in their work wear and national flags, they are depicted as sacrificial beings. Using the Key Bridge victims as surrogates, the illustration communicates that the immigrant Latino laborer is the body that is sacrificed to sustain the United States’ infrastructure and economy.
The notion that the United States is built on the sacrifices of immigrants, and particularly Latinxs, is common in movements for immigrant rights. Across media outlets, however, this narrative was not widely leveraged in the Key Bridge tragedy. Imagery of the victims—whether photographic portraits or illustrations—were sparingly used in social media posts. Moreover, there were not any consistent hashtags that memorialized the victims directly or called for justice. The most common hashtags used to cover the incident across Instagram and Facebook were #KeyBridge, #KeyBridgeCollapse, #MarylandTough, and #BaltimoreStrong. Across tens of thousands of posts, the most prevalent images depicted the bridge itself—both intact or in pieces. The visuals of the social media posts communicate the importance of the bridge to many. It was the bridge, or rather its absence, that invoked a sense of loss and not the people who lost their lives.
The visual representations and hashtags on social media primarily reflect communication from the state of Maryland. In the initial press conference after the collapse, Governor Wes Moore directly identified the people of Maryland as his primary audience. After extending his gratitude to first responders and authorities, he acknowledged the sense of loss felt in the city of Baltimore and the state: “[T]o the people of Baltimore and each and every one of the 6.3 million Marylanders who call our state home, I recognize that many of us are hurting right now and so I want to be very clear about where everything stands.” Moore reassured the people of Maryland that the Key Bridge collapse was not a terrorist attack but likely an accident. With the assurance that the state was not under attack, those who died in the collapse were cast as a casualty. That is, the statement was devoid of a critical reflection on whether the lives of the construction workers could have been saved.
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Wanda R. Hernández is a cultural worker and an Assistant Professor of Central American and Latinx Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently working on a manuscript about Central Americans’ personal archives in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.