Mexican Antigones: In Search of a Stolen Mourning

This paper argues that the unique context out of which Sara Uribe's Antígona González emerges, that is, a debilitated Mexican state that has yielded control to dark forces of global capitalism, shapes the heroine's agency and power. Mainly, unlike the Sophoclean heroine, Antígona González is not driven fatally to stand up to the Law or state authorities as there is an implicit and collective acknowledgement within the social space constructed in the poem that there is no visible state or Law to stand up to. This same context, moreover, creates the necessary conditions for her to activate alternative strategies to carry out her obligation to her disappeared brother. These same strategies re-imagine and recover a precarious form of community – the green shoots of a fledgling and inchoate nation – that, while rekindling human interactions around shared grief and a common purpose, also constitute a compelling poetic protest against the state of affairs of Mexico in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, 2017

Engaging with the sizeable scholarship on Lourdes Portillo's 2001 documentary Señorita Extraviada/Missing Young Woman, this article investigates the potential of the visual image to create a form of radical melancholy that resists containment by the persistent patriarchal frameworks used to interpret the Juárez feminicide. Taking Señorita Extraviada as a historically important feminist text documenting a crucial moment in grassroots women's activism against the gender violence systematically expressed in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, this article discusses the film's resistant potential. Engaging with Rosa Linda Fregoso's measured praise and critique of the film, the article proposes other vantage points through which to interpret the Keywords Lourdes Portillo feminicide experimental documentary women's activism haptic visuality rituals of mourning

Raisons Politiques. Revue de théorie politique, 2019

Judith Butler's works concerning the discursive practices used for legitimizing State violence offer a useful vantage point for exploring how the Mexican government has organized public representations of death during its ongoing Drug War. Following her insight that “frames of war” sustain a differential distribution of grievability, this article explores the discourse through which the government has presented poignant cases of carnage in order to highlight the usefulness of specific categories for sustaining and normalizing the war violence. By appropriating Butler's division between “grievable” and “un-grievable” subjects, this article complicates the understanding of the frames of war by showing that in Mexico they do not hide death but instead they allow for the exhibition of lost lives through sacrificial mourning. After showing the connections between the allocation of grievability, the quest for sovereignity and the instrumentalization of dead bodies, the article concludes by pointing towards the political possibilities of melancholia.

Social Movement Studies, 2025

How are social ties formed in the contentious campaigns led by relatives of victims of criminal and political violence? Drawing on the work of Latin American social anthropologists such as Myriam Jimeno, Morna Macleod and Natalia De Marinis, I argue that the contentious campaigns of a victim-led social movement provide the physical and symbolic spaces where the participants form a political-emotional community by sharing testimonios (testimo- nial narratives) and developing a victim-centered ethos. To sub- stantiate my claim, I discuss the case of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad) in Mexico drawing on twelve in-depth interviews and a documentary review. This article opens a dialogue between the literature on political-emotional communities and the scholarship on social movements offering a new perspective to analyze the development of social ties. In other words, future research projects can make use of the introduced theoretical proposal to understand victim-led activism more in-depth. The approach of this article can be of interest, for example, for scholars dedicated to the study of contention by survivors of genocide, mobilizations against racial violence, and protests in contexts of armed conflict.

EOLLES, 2019

In Ciudad Juárez, memories of death and spaces of absence are entangled in the city’s landscape. Pink and black memory markers used to decorate lampposts across the city are reminders of emotional wounds created by what scholars and newspapers identify as feminicide. In this article, I examine the mothers’ fight for public representation by describing the city’s geo-politics as an urban border space and then examine the impact of urban poverty on mothers’ activism. I examine how mothers politicize the memory of victims by examining the spatial politics of urban segregation, poverty, and respectability in memorials.

Latin American Perspectives

Mexico’s contentious necropolitics see different stakeholders involved in political struggles for control over the dead. The families of victims of state and corporate violence protest state necrogovernance and corporate necropower, the power to dictate the circumstances of citizens’ and workers’ lives and deaths. Two case studies show how the state and corporations deploy the criminal technique of disappearing bodies as a means of social control and rendering workers expendable and sometimes killable. Social movements counter this with a determined struggle to restore a sense of worth to the victims of violence through public mourning. Their repertoire of collective action has created a subversive necropower that challenges both necrogovernance and corporate necropower. La contenciosa necropolítica de México involucra a distintos grupos de interés que participan en la contienda política por el control de los muertos. Las familias de las víctimas de la violencia de Estado y corporat...

The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas, 2015

Latin American twenty-first-century Antigone-plays seem to follow a new pattern that distinguishes them from the long history of regional re-writings of the tragedy: they feature scenic strategies of repetitions and multiplications, whether of the Antigone character or of specific lines or scenes. I look at two Colombian plays that follow this trend: Carlos Satizábal’s Antígona y actriz (2005) and Patricia Ariza’s Antígona (2006). I argue that in both plays theatrical repetition displaces the centrality of the classic opposition between Antigone and Creon, and highlights instead the act of storytelling itself as a problematic site of representation. Both plays honor the struggle that real-life peasant women affected by the country’s six-decade-long armed conflict have to lead to tell their story to an urban audience. In the Colombian context, these Antigones speak to the translation of rural experience into urban experience.

NEW POLITICAL SCIENCE, 2019

Women simultaneously occupy a space of both strength and vulnerability in Mexico. While existing institutions, traditions, and gender norms create the conditions whereby feminicide and forced disappearances proliferate, responses to these events prominently feature maternal calls for justice. How do the victims’ mothers counter extreme gender violence in Ciudad Juárez? Existing accounts of maternal politics typically fall into three wide categories: celebratory accounts, critical approaches, and the theatrical dimension of maternal politics. While these accounts provide important insights into the political power of maternal politics, they do not adequately explain its pedagogical function. Bringing to bear the insights of Judith Butler’s performative theory of public assembly and Rita Laura Segato’s anthropology of violence, this article suggests that maternal politics transforms private experiences of extreme gender violence into political expressions of strength and agency to politically beget what Segato defines as counter pedagogies of cruelty

Journal of Latin American Studies, 2022

This article shows how vulnerable communities use Mexico's Day of the Dead for social justice activism. Activists sustain what I call the 'political afterlives' of their victims through street altars and dark humour. I analyse this as a 'necrosocial repertoire of contention'. The Day of the Dead can play an important role in human rights advocacy by insisting that the marginalised dead be honoured and cared for. However, disappeared people pose a challenge to Mexico's horizontal, or popular, ethics of commemoration and illustrate what I call 'necrotaboos', with new problems for the nation's inclusive spirit of commemorating the dead.

Latin American Research Review, 2021