Tantos Cuerpos Dolientes / So Many Grieving Bodies

A Living Archive of Care

In 1978, eighty-three women gathered nervously around Mexico City’s Cathedral, carrying nothing but a bottle of tehuacán and their shawls to protect from the sun. After a long travel from Guerrero, Sinaloa, Sonora, they were the first to publicly display the photographs of their disappeared sons and brothers to the indifferent government and pedestrians that pretended to ignore the large red cloth that stated “We will find them.” Since this first organized hunger strike of the doñas of Comité Eureka, the photographs of the disappeared in Mexico have spread across myriad times, places, collectives and materialities. From the mothers’ and families’ own bodies to riverbanks and trees along hundreds of mass graves, what is it about these photographs, displayed for decades across the wounded geography of this country, that continues to compel us? How has the affective memory of forced disappearance in Mexico been registered, inscribed, and held among the territories and communities that grieve an incommensurable absence? And how do these material memories force us to rethink care, violence and gender as inextricably woven into each other?