A search for disappeared persons in Tjiuana, Baja California, Mexico (2020) | David Peinado Romero / Shutterstock
Since 2006, Mexico has seen more than 300,000 murders and more than 110,000 people disappeared. Faced with a constant increase in violence, activists have turned to a new strategy: collective actions and demands centered around the work of memory. In their new book Las Luchas por la Memoria Contra las Violencias en México (El Colegio de México, 2024), editors Alexandra Délano Alonso, Benjamin Nienass, Alicia de los Ríos Merino, and María De Vecchi Gerli bring together researchers, activists, architects, curators, artists, and relatives of disappeared persons to discuss the processes of local and national memory construction in Mexico.
Délano Alonso and Nienass sat down with sociocultural anthropologist and writer Natalia Mendoza to discuss the book and how looking to the past offers a path forward. Their conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Natalia Mendoza: While there are already some studies of social movements against the various types of violence affecting contemporary Mexico, I believe this is the first one to frame the question in terms of memory. Unlike Chile and Argentina, Mexico has not really been part of the conversation on memory until quite recently. How did you arrive at memory studies, and why is it productive to think about contemporary Mexican violence, and social reactions against it, in terms of memorialization and the politics of time?
Benjamin Nienass: We were initially drawn to a type of activism that focuses on contesting or aestheticizing places that you would call “sites of memory,” either because they are commemorating specific victims or the unspecified victims of large-scale violence, and so memory was the entry to the debate. But then it also very quickly became apparent that memory was not necessarily the best angle to think about these spaces. In many struggles over memory, what you often deal with is a past that is considered past, and then social contestation over commemoration sets in. In Mexico, we found that what looks like contestation over how to remember the past is really about ongoing events, and activists are using these spaces for interventions that are also about organizing for the present and the future.
Alexandra Délano Alonso: We hadn’t had a broader social debate around the question of memory in Mexico, except perhaps in the events related to the 1968 student massacre or the dirty war period. But then in 2011, activists started using this concept in the Movimiento por la Paz con Justica y Dignidad, the Movement for Peace and Justice with Dignity, which put the demand around memory at the center of the debate of what the government and the state should be doing in legal and policy frameworks, while also treating memory as a necessity for ending violence, building peace, and repairing the social fabric.
Mendoza: And in that case, memory meant memorialization, as in material expressions of memory. Or what exactly did social movements mean when they spoke about memory as a demand?
Délano Alonso: The activists’ demands were around creating spaces for mourning and for memory, and especially for a kind of memory space that moved away from the criminalization of the victims to give them and their families the dignity that they deserved. This was a direct challenge to the narrative of the state that claimed that if people died or something happened to them in a context of violence, it was because they deserved it or had it coming since they were involved in crime or illicit activities. So the memorials were seen as material spaces where families could gather for mourning and where an alternative narrative could emerge. At the same time, the question of memory was never separated from the other four pillars of justice, truth, reparation, and non-repetition in the transitional justice framework. There has always been an alignment of memory as one of the five elements that need to be the focus of how to end the violence—and how to move forward and build something different.
Mendoza: Building on this idea of creating something different, in the process of putting this book together, you worked hand in hand with non-academics and activists, who participated as authors and editors. It’s a very good example for other academics who are trying to work hand in hand with victims and other organizations. How did these collaborations shape the final result?
Délano Alonso: That was the focus of our project from the very beginning. We were always in conversation with people who were working within these groups and organizations of families of the disappeared, and some of those directly affected. We initially had a workshop and a seminar in Mexico, where we brought everyone together to discuss the work that everyone was doing, to gauge whether a book was necessary, and what kind of book was relevant in this context. We talked about the importance of having an archive of this moment, of a collective book that would generate more conversations around these issues, and also to show the conversations that are taking place across academia and activism, focusing on the need to foster horizontal and transdisciplinary spaces for conceptualization, theorization, and action.
Many academics are involved in these practices and these movements. Many of the activists who are in these movements are also moving in spaces of academia, teaching, and scholarship. Our co-editor Alicia de los Ríos Merino is a scholar and a well-known activist, a member of many of these collectives, and the daughter of someone who has disappeared. Making clear distinctions between those identities in this struggle is problematic, and we wanted to address that. There is also a great need for broader solidarities across different sectors of society in Mexico, and we wanted to create a space to show how some of that is possible.
Nienass: All editors agreed that we didn’t want to discuss away the tensions between the different angles that accompany contestations over sites of memory. What had emerged in our work was that when architects took on a memory project, for example, they often wanted to give a space a conceptual significance that went beyond the particular instance, to draw in more people and cases, whereas family members were often more concerned about an outlet for their individual story and grief. We were hoping not to necessarily resolve these potential conflicts but to bring all these different positions to the table.
Mendoza: That points to important debates around periodization, which the book also notes and engages with. How did you decide to include such a wide range of movements and types of violence over such a long period of time?
Nienass: We started realizing that a lot of this activism that we are observing in Mexico is also a political struggle about delineating time. In other words, trying to address which past needs to be collectively remembered in the first place. Different activists took very different timeframes into account. In the end, we did the same. It was the activism on the ground and the contemporary politics in Mexico that shaped our understanding of the timeframe, rather than our conceptual frame. For example, what are the linkages between 1968 and recent events where the state is held responsible for massacres and disappearance? How are they actually related, as many activists claim? What new political possibilities emerge and what may potentially be obscured by making these connections? Recently, we also saw a much broader historical legacy being addressed among some activists, including colonization, for example. What we saw on the ground is that these timeframes were being linked by activists, so we wanted to examine that in the book—what does it mean to bring these different histories of violence in conversation with one another?
Délano Alonso: I would add that the work of memory activists in making these linkages is a way to challenge the state’s narrative of criminalization and the idea that the current violence is only a result of criminal or narco violence. Instead, by making these historical connections, the activists are showing a continuity in different manifestations of state violence over time, as well as conditions of structural violence. What if we look at the questions of who are the victims of these different forms of violence over time, in terms of race, gender, class, geographical location? And that’s why it was important in the book to both extend the time period beyond the recent violence, and to show different forms of violence that don’t just have to do with the disappeared, or with contexts that are directly associated with the so called “narco war.” Feminist movements and memory activists in particular have also pushed for a much broader analysis of the structures of violence in Mexico.
Mendoza: Now that you mentioned feminist sites, I want to ask how you understand the relation between feminist movements and other forms of activism in this context. Are there new solidarities articulating across movements in a context of widespread misogynous violence in Mexico?
Délano Alonso: There are definitely differences and cleavages across the many forms of social mobilization in Mexico, but also overlaps. I think one of the sites that has been the most informative in this process of understanding intersectional solidarities, and where those connections are drawn more clearly, is the Glorieta de Las Mujeres que Luchan (the Roundabout of the Women Who Fight), in Mexico City. The Roundabout is part of a network of anti-monuments that mark different moments from 1968 until today in Mexico City. What is distinct about this anti-monument is that in one single space, in the middle of one of the city’s most important avenues, it brings together different historical periods of women’s activism against different forms of violence, celebrating those who are fighting and struggling today—i.e., the mothers who are searching, the Indigenous activists defending their land—and at the same time memorializing women victims over time.
It’s a space where different struggles are coming together very intentionally, but that doesn’t always happen in other memory spaces, even if they share similar practices. One of the things that I wish we could have included in the book would be a chapter about the struggles in Juárez in the 1990s to demand justice for the women who were victims of feminicide. They laid and hung pink crosses all around the city to ask for information, to demand justice, and to commemorate them. That’s a very significant moment in the history of social mobilization against gender-based violence that we didn’t talk much about in the language of memory—how these crosses were memory markings for the victims and a way of calling people together to mobilize. Now the memory of Juárez is linked to present struggles. An example of that marking of continuities across different periods and spaces is a pink cross that was recently placed in the Glorieta de las Mujeres Que Luchan, specifically making that connection.
The book represents multiple expressions of memory spaces, from murals and graffiti to embroidering, or renaming streets and public plazas. And some of these public spaces face significant contestation: Individual citizens or the government erase the murals or take down crosses or posters with the name of the disappeared, and then those who painted them or hung them go back and repaint them or replace them. This happens continuously at the Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan, which shows that the struggle continues to be present, both in how certain events are remembered and in the violence faced by those who struggle to mark those events and claim justice, particularly women. Many of the women who are searching for the disappeared have been threatened with death or disappearance themselves. Indeed, one of the questions we were asked at an event where we presented the book was: Why is it mostly women doing the work of memory, and how do they do it in such a violent context?
Mendoza: Right. What is interesting is that men used to go out and search. In the ranching tradition of northern Mexico, tracking used to be a mostly male activity. In the early 2000s, the early efforts to search for the disappeared were led by men, by fathers more specifically. But after the murder of Nepomuceno Moreno in 2010, all search collectives went underground and vanished. When they came back in 2019, it was 90 percent women. Many of them are single mothers. Men are either in jail, or have been killed, or are simply increasingly absent figures. Some buscadoras say that it’s more dangerous for men to join the searches. Whatever the cause, the truth is that searching has become yet another way of furthering the exploitation of working class women. It has become a “third shift,” or an extension of the care-related tasks. I once heard a buscadora say, “I either work or search.” You cannot work and then search—you need the money to search, but then you need the time to search, and the search itself is extenuating and you can’t do anything else after spending hours excavating in the sun, in the desert.
Délano Alonso: Yes, this is an example of how disappearances affect family relationships and structures. There’s research now in Mexico that shows how people end up separating from or divorcing their partners or children grow up without parents present because they are searching for their sibling. It’s very hard to sustain this for an extended period of time, and we are living in a country that has now been experiencing this for almost 20 years. How this has affected social relationships in communities and generated intergenerational trauma are important and urgent questions to pay attention to.
Nienass: I think this is also significant in relation to the concept of citizen forensics, which is already about wresting authority away from traditional experts and technical experts. This is a space in which established authorities don’t work for many reasons, and other actors— in this case, the collectives who are searching—step in. So it’s a question of where the authority to search comes from. All of this is being renegotiated in a context where the authority of the state has seemingly collapsed, both in the fact that it cannot control the violence and in its inability to provide a framework of justice.
Mendoza: At various points in the book, the demands of this wide variety of groups appear to consolidate around four non-negotiable notions: truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of non-repetition. These are concepts that have been codified in the tradition of transitional justice as the four pillars. In the Mexican case, however, each one of these notions has been challenged, not only because the state lacks capacity to fulfill them, but because social movements themselves have conflicting interpretations around justice or truth, for instance.
Nienass: Implied in the transitional justice model are two things: that you have a clearly marked transition, and that you have a kind of combination or sequencing of the different mechanisms that supposedly complement each other. Part of this understanding is that the goal is to establish some sort of truth or public narrative through different mechanisms after a major transition, and then one can talk about how we’re going to communicate this truth—to the larger public and to future generations—through sites of memory, educational curriculum, et cetera. Ralph Buchenhorst distinguishes between an evidentiary and an expressive phase, where the former provides historical contextualization and the latter addresses aesthetic and representational questions. Not that it ever works that neatly—and it certainly doesn’t work in the Mexican case; as one of our coeditors, Maria De Vecchi Gerli, shows in her own work, there is not this clear rupture, this clear transition. In Mexico, these steps are all happening at once: establishing a truth is part of the struggle over commemoration. People are contesting the narratives that this is narco-violence and are saying, No, this is state violence. This is a culture of impunity that has been with Mexico for a long time.
Délano Alonso: One of the moments I remember the most in shaping my own understanding of this debate in Mexico was at a conference focused on violence and peace where one of the mothers of the disappeared stood up and deeply questioned memory as central to the demands being made, arguing that what is needed is justice first, then memory. And there are different understandings of what justice means here too. Some collectives argue that their focus is not on punitive justice but on finding the disappeared and burying them. Others are focused on legal changes to protect victims and to offer reparations, and to hold accountable those who are responsible. There is also a question about truth. What kind of truth is being sought by different actors? There’s the forensic truth and the need for closure in each individual case, and then the broader sense of truth that can be used as evidence in court to demonstrate broader human rights violations.
Some activists do center the question of how memory is necessary as a path towards justice and non-repetition. From this perspective, memory work doesn’t need to wait for those transitions to happen first; memory itself can be a space from which those changes are made. For example, in the decriminalization of the victims within memorial spaces as a path towards justice and truth, or how memorial spaces are not just a space for mourning but can be spaces that build the conditions for non-repetition by offering alternatives for education and recreation for youth and communities that lack infrastructure, and for building solidarities across different groups. Not all the memorials that exist in Mexico now are built in this way or with these conceptions, as the different examples in the book show. But some activists are considering memorials or anti-memorials as a space in which they can build conditions for communities that are experiencing violence to challenge and change those conditions at the local level. They are not waiting for the state to act. They are not waiting for one of their demands to be met in order to proceed with the next one; they see them simultaneously supporting each other.
In this sense, memory is an element that pushes the transitional justice paradigm in different directions, troubling linear conceptions of time and the conditions in which peace and justice are made. A memory that is not just a commemoration or an acknowledgment of the past but an orientation to the present and to the future.
