The Struggles for Memory against Violences in Mexico documents and analyzes the diversity of collective memory projects throughout Mexico since the start of the “war against drug cartels”, in a context of various intersecting and ongoing forms of violence. There are now more than 110,000 victims of enforced disappearance and the numbers grow every month. Memorialization has been acknowledged as an important tool in the context of mass human rights violations and is often seen as a symbolic form of reparation for the victims, predominantly after regime change or a clearly-defined end to large scale violence. Compared to other cases in Latin America and other parts of the world, this has not been the case in Mexico. The scholars, activists, families of victims, architects and artists that write in this book address the pressing questions that emerge from the particularity of the Mexican case: Why would activists use the language and aesthetics of commemoration in the midst of ongoing violence and human rights abuses? What is the function of commemoration in the absence of peace and justice? What does it mean to commemorate in the absence of evidence and in the absence of bodies (i.e. in the case of the disappeared)?

The Struggles for Memory examines historical connections across mobilizations around collective memory in Mexico in the context of the dirty war of the 1960s and 1970s and recent events from the disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa in 2014, to the women who search for mass graves around the country, among a number of other memorialization efforts around the country, some well-known and others not so widely disseminated. The book challenges the framing of the violence merely as an issue related to drugs and organized crime. These interventions show the continuities in state violence over time, drawing attention to forms of structural violence that cut across enforced disappearances, violence against women, migrant deaths, resource extraction, attacks on activists and journalists, and the enduring discrimination against indigenous peoples and the dispossession of their lands.

If you require hybrid access via zoom, please email Alexandra Délano Alonso at delanoa@newschool.edu.

The book is available for free on open access (in Spanish) and can be downloaded here.

Presented by Global, Urban, and Environmental Studies, Eugene Lang College, the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility and Political Department at The New School for Social Research at The New School.