Inside the 6th Street Container — a Knight Art Challenge finalist — in Little Havana is a little room. In fact, the Container, while elongated and appearing like a shipping container, is really a funky gallery with an alleyway entry. The exhibit currently up is an installation that looks like a cramped living room somewhere in Central America or Mexico, from Honduran-born Alma Leiva. It’s part of a series she has done around the country called “Celdas,” or “Prison Cells.” This one is specifically named “En la Celda.”

The room is filled with votives, Catholic iconography, pictures, tapestry, Christmas lights, a little altar. It’s cozy and familiar. The television, like most living rooms anywhere in the world, is the centerpiece. But unlike some of those other TVs, the constant images being shown are of violence; what has become an almost endemic, mind- and soul-numbing violence. Pictures of bloody young men, brought down by drug or gang violence. Although North America is filled with guns and death, the daily street battles still don’t compare to what is happening in neighboring Mexico.

For Central American countries such as El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Honduras, the latest plague of drug and gang violence seems only to have replaced the slaughter that went on during the brutal civil wars of previous decades.

The installation suggests that everyday life goes on, people cook and eat and talk, but with an ever-present backdrop of blood and death. Indeed, while a tragic part of this equation is that children in these countries are exposed to this every day, whether through their televisions or witnessing it on the street, people here visiting this show should be prepared if they are bringing children; through a small little portal broadcast from an old-fashioned screen, the brutality is looped and looped. It’s a subtext to a new reality south of our borders.“En la Celda” at the 6th Street Container, 1155 S.W. Sixth St. (rear entry), in east Little Havana; www.6thstreetcontainer.com.