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Book launch of Struggles for Memory against Violences in Mexico, including panel discussion and reception.
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.
Alexandra Délano Alonso is Professor of Politics and Global Studies at The New School and Eugene M. Lang Professor for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring. As a migration scholar, her earlier writing examines the Mexican state’s relations with its diaspora in the United States and, more recently, the shifting forms of agency and solidarity created by and for migrants at the margins of the state, both in Mexico and in the United States.
Benjamin Nienass is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His publications on Holocaust memory in Germany, public grief in the United States, and memory activism in Mexico have appeared in The Review of Politics, Politics and Society, The German Studies Review, Globalizations, the Latin American Research Review, Current History, Sociologica, Memory Studies, Social Research, and many other journals.
Omar Gómez Trejo is a lawyer from UNAM and has a Master Degree from FLACSO. He worked for 12 years in the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights at UN in different countries. He was the executive secretary of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) for the Ayotzinapa case.
Antonio Tizapa is the founder of "Running for Ayotzinapa 43", a community group based in NYC. He is the father of Jorge Antonio Tizapa Legideño, one of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College who were forcibly disappeared by local and federal police and military in collusion with organized crime, on September 26, 2014 in the city of Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico.
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Benjamin Nienass is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His publications on Holocaust memory in Germany, public grief in the United States, and memory activism in Mexico have appeared in The Review of Politics, Politics and Society, The German Studies Review, Globalizations, the Latin American Research Review, Current History, Sociologica, Memory Studies, Social Research, and many other journals. He is also the co-editor of Silence, Screen, and Spectacle: Rethinking Social Memory in the Age of Information (Berghahn, 2014), The Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism (Routledge, 2023), Las Luchas por la memoria contra las violencias en México (Colegio de México, 2023), and of several special journal issues, among which “Myths of Innocence in German Public Memory” in German Politics and Society (2021).
Mercedes Doretti is a forensic anthropologist who unearths evidence of crimes against humanity, restoring voices to long-silenced victims and presenting critical findings to tribunals, human rights organizations, and special commissions around the globe. As a university student, Doretti co-founded the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF in Spanish) in 1984 to investigate the cases of men, women, and children who disappeared under the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. The EAAF now works in more than 30 conflict-torn countries throughout Latin America, Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Doretti has been actively involved as a forensic specialist in cases of femicide, migrant deaths and enforced disappearances in Mexico. She received an honorary degree from The New School in 2016.
Omar Gómez Trejo is a lawyer from UNAM and has a Master Degree from FLACSO. He worked for 12 years in the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights at UN in different countries. He was the executive secretary of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) for the Ayotzinapa case. He was the lead Prosecutor of the Special Unit for the Investigation and Litigation of the Ayotzinapa case in Mexico. Currently, he is a school visitor to the Human Rights Center at the Law School in Berkeley University.
Alexandra Délano Alonso is Professor of Politics and Global Studies at The New School and Eugene M. Lang Professor for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring. As a migration scholar, her earlier writing examines the Mexican state’s relations with its diaspora in the United States and, more recently, the shifting forms of agency and solidarity created by and for migrants at the margins of the state, both in Mexico and in the United States. Her current research explores the question of ungrievability and public mourning around migrants who have died crossing borders; memory activism in Mexico in the context of enforced disappearances; and alternative narratives and forms of social mobilization in response to border politics.
Her research and practice draws connections between academia, policy and activism by identifying spaces where bottom-up and top-down interactions produce innovative practices, policies and institutions. Looking at these questions from both sides of the border—geographically and politically, and also linguistically and culturally—, and in collaboration with community organizers, activists, artists, government offices, and other scholars, her work offers an opportunity to explore different forms of social and political participation and to understand the emergence of alternative conceptions, narratives and practices of citizenship, transnationalism, sovereignty and solidarity.
She is co-founder and former co-director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility with Miriam Ticktin, as well as a member of The New School's Sanctuary Working Group.
Born and raised in Mexico, her experience living across borders and her mixed origins as the granddaughter of immigrants have shaped her research, teaching, mentoring, university service and activism.
Natalia Mendoza is an sociocultural anthropologist, independent researcher and essay writer. Since 2005, she has conducted ethnographic research on violence and the local organization of criminalized economies in the Sonoran Desert borderlands. She is the author of Conversaciones en el desierto: Cultura y tráfico de drogas (CIDE, 2017). Her collection of essays El extravío de los signos won the INBA-José Revueltas national essay prize. She currently lives and works in Sonora, Mexico, where she serves as co-director of Altar Centro de Investigación, an independent space dedicated to socio-environmental restoration.
Antonio Tizapa is the founder of "Running for Ayotzinapa 43", a community group based in NYC. He is the father of Jorge Antonio Tizapa Legideño, one of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College who were forcibly disappeared by local and federal police and military in collusion with organized crime, on September 26, 2014 in the city of Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. On the 26th of each month, Mr Tizapa organizes a protest outside the Mexican Consulate in New York to protest crimes against humanity in Mexico, to demand the return of the Ayotzinapa 43, and for truth and justice for the more than 100,000 disappeared. More information available at: https://www.runningforayotzinapa43.com/
