This article analyzes a selection of film and audiovisual records documenting two different moments in the history of the Tehuantepec Isthmus Railroad. The materials analyzed include a film on the inauguration of the route by Porfirio Díaz in 1907 and official videos recently produced to promote this work. From perspectives shared in film and infrastructure studies around notions of excess, contingency and uncertainty, I examine how, within the framework of two different political projects that could be understood as antagonistic, these types of materials have constituted artifices that seek to materialize promises of development around plans for regional development and greater national and international integration.

The movement of the obtuse direction is wandering. It follows an eccentric trajectory. It departs from the domain of representations. In this issue, by presenting different ethnographic situations, we show how the concept of the obtuse allows us not only to address the legal-evidential value of the ethnographic record but to extend and even reimagine it.

Whis essay examines photomontage practices in rural contexts of Michoacán, Mexico, in order to ask how social uses of photography are intimately linked to collective subjectivities and affects of loss, between histories of migration and recurrent cycles of violence. These visual practices cannot be understood without paying attention to intrinsic aspects of photographic technology-such as its indexical character, its materiality, its artificiality, and its temporal anchoring. Here a careful reading of the concept of "the obtuse" proposed by Roland Barthes reveals how photomontage techniques, in the hands of local photographers, generate visual effects and dislocations through the manipulation of subtle details that contribute to recreate, but also to subvert, the "ways of looking" among the inhabitants of the region.