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00:00:00In the program "Abiertamente" today, we speak with anthropologist Aida Hernández
00:00:03Castillo, author of "Exhumar la Esperanza, a feminist
00:00:06ethnography in the country of mass graves." Analysis and
00:00:09testimony, the concepts and the role of the
00:00:13land, love, hopes, and the strength of the searching
00:00:16mothers. When Rosalva began her research with the "rastreadoras" (trackers)
00:00:20mothers of El Fuerte, their response was clear: to
00:00:23accompany, you have to put your body on the line, walk the path
00:00:26together, the search in life, the forensic search. Before which
00:00:30the mothers say: "We don't look for bones, we look for treasures."
00:00:34Let's listen to Aida: What is sorography, how is
00:00:38a sorography of
00:01:30women. "Letter to my disappeared son in Mexico"
00:01:35responds to that writing on women's written by Mirna Medina Quiñones for
00:01:38her son Roberto Corrales Medina on May 10,
00:01:412020. "Today is Mother's Day in
00:01:45Mexico, Roberto, and I can only remember
00:01:49you, from July 14,
00:01:522014. That day changed my life
00:01:57But one is the book of when they disappeared you and I felt like dying. After that, I have lived
00:02:01half-heartedly. Many days I only lived to
00:02:03look for you. I made you a promise to find you, and along the
00:02:07way, I also found hundreds of women who
00:02:11share the same pain. They also
00:02:14seek treasure, just as I sought you, who are my
00:02:17treasure. We women unite to look for
00:02:21all of you, and our struggle was so widespread
00:02:25that one day a journalist, Javier Valdés,
00:02:28whom I later killed,
00:02:31approached me and asked, 'How do you
00:02:35do it? How do you look for Roberto?' I told him, 'I look
00:02:39along the riverbanks, through the tracks, the mountains, and where
00:02:42there are abandoned houses.' He said, 'Then
00:02:46you track.' 'Then you are
00:02:48trackers.' That's how we got
00:02:52our name, the 'Rastreadoras' (trackers).
00:02:55It was on July 14,
00:02:58clandestine graves; they are graves of 2017, three years after they disappeared you, that God gave
00:03:02me the joy of finding your remains. After
00:03:05confronting society, the government, and the
00:03:07criminals, because society
00:03:11re-victimizes you, the government is indifferent, and
00:03:14Segato and crime is
00:03:15to me that it's part of that sorography of unstoppable. It was three long years of
00:03:18uncertainty, of not knowing if you were cold, hungry, or in
00:03:22Fe, from Polanco, from pain. Three years of mourning, and finally we
00:03:25found you. I made you a promise that I could
00:03:29fulfill: 'I will look for you until I
00:03:32And well, the other side of find you,' and we found you, Roberto. My
00:03:35companions, the 'rastreadoras,' were with me that
00:03:38day. You were the 93rd body we
00:03:42found. We found 92
00:03:44bodies, 92 treasures that returned
00:03:48home before you. Sometimes it was
00:03:51desperate to look for you. I had mixed
00:03:55feelings, because in every grave I wanted to find you, and at the
00:03:59same time, not to find you. But when you weren't there, I felt
00:04:03a lot of despair. We have already
00:04:05found you, but we still have many treasures to
00:04:09find, treasures that are waiting for us,
00:04:13the crazy women with shovels, to dig up the
00:04:16earth and unearth the bones that are the most precious thing in
00:04:20this world for us.
00:04:22Roberto, with your disappearance, the 'rastreadoras' emerged,
00:04:25and now we are a pebble in the shoe of a country
00:04:30that didn't want to look at us. Despite
00:04:33all my sadness, I know this struggle is
00:04:35worth it. We fought for a law on the
00:04:39disappearance of people, a
00:04:41National Search Commission, and others in some states of the
00:04:45country. Finally, the government and society
00:04:48recognized that there are disappeared people and that
00:04:52they must coordinate to search for them, find them,
00:04:57Viridiana, you talk about identify them, and take them home. Your memory
00:05:00will remain intact, and my granddaughters, your
00:05:03daughters, will eventually obtain truth and justice
00:05:07for you. I know we are not
00:05:10alone. Besides God, we have
00:05:13each other, the 'rastreadoras' who search for
00:05:16treasures. Today, when you should be
00:05:19celebrating with us, we remember you even
00:05:22more. We know you are there, and we will
00:05:25find you because we miss all of
00:05:28you."
00:05:33Welcome, Aida Hernández Castillo, Doctor of Anthropology,
00:05:37professor, researcher at the Center for Research and Higher Studies in
00:05:41Social Anthropology. Academic and activist,
00:05:44focused on the rights of women and indigenous peoples in Latin
00:05:47America. She is part of the research group in social and
00:05:51forensic anthropology, dealing with clandestine graves and forced
00:05:54disappearances in Mexico. She is the founder of the editorial collective
00:05:57"Hermanas en La Sombra." Aida, it has
00:06:00been a pleasure the half-hour I had the privilege of being with you, and
00:06:04that you are here now. Thank you very much, María Teresa. Just
00:06:08to clarify, I am no longer part of the Research Group in Social and
00:06:11Forensic Anthropology; I am part of its academic advisory
00:06:14committee, and I admire the work that this beautiful group of young
00:06:17women formed. Aida, I read your book with
00:06:21great attention, also with great sorrow.
00:06:25What it conveys is very impressive, and even more
00:06:30those mothers and women live through, and what you experienced
00:06:33accompanying them. You begin by recounting
00:06:36that you wanted to work on forced disappearances, and you came into
00:06:40contact with a searching mother, with
00:06:43Mirna, the one who wrote the letter for her son
00:06:45Roberto. She told you, "If you want to, you have
00:06:49to accompany us. The path is made by walking; you have to take
00:06:53the shovel." How was that, and what did you feel at that
00:06:56moment? Look, we had already
00:06:58been very moved by disappearances, because unfortunately
00:07:02we had a colleague from CIESAS disappear.
00:07:06habíamos estado muy movidas por la desaparición porque lamentablemente
00:07:10tuvimos una colega de ciesas desap.
00:07:15And we were already connected to the research group in social and
00:07:19forensic anthropology. I used to do legal anthropology; I had
00:07:23done expert reports, anthropological
00:07:25expert reports, but I had never done forensic
00:07:29search in the field. And that was Mirna who told us, "Okay,
00:07:32come, but the debut is in the field."
00:07:36And the truth is that for me, I have a knee injury, and
00:07:40I have a prosthesis now, so I didn't have it
00:07:43then. This challenge of going to the field with
00:07:47them was something that I didn't think about much. It was: this is where
00:07:50we have to be, this is it. And
00:07:53really, well, it was an, that first
00:07:56experience in northern Sinaloa, in the Aome
00:08:00area, well, it was an experience, my debut, she says.
00:08:04Mirna still tells the story, that I didn't think about it much, but it
00:08:08allowed me to see the strength that the
00:08:10community has. When you are with them, you feel safe,
00:08:14I felt cared for, right? Since they knew I had an injury, they were always
00:08:18attentive to me. And well, it was the
00:08:21beginning of a journey. It's the first collective I started walking with
00:08:2410 years ago. Now I've walked with many other collectives; they continue
00:08:28to be my teachers. And something I also narrate
00:08:32in the book is that my family is from northern
00:08:35Sinaloa. So it was, and I had never worked in that
00:08:39region. I have Mayo-Yoreme roots, and I have always
00:08:43worked in Mayan territory in Chiapas. So I had never approached the
00:08:46desert peoples. And it was the "rastreadoras" who led me
00:08:50back to my roots. So there was also a cultural
00:08:54empathy. My mother's sayings, her styles,
00:08:57I re-encountered them with them. So I immediately
00:09:00felt part of the pack, right? I
00:09:03felt part of the group, I felt welcome, and
00:09:07I realized that it wasn't a research project, that
00:09:11it was a life project. A life project, that's how you convey
00:09:15it in your book. And when you arrived, one doesn't
00:09:19imagine the number of things that the searching mothers
00:09:22and women have had to learn, and that you had to
00:09:25learn. That's right. The truth is that
00:09:29it's an ambivalence that runs through the
00:09:32book, and on the one hand, it's the admiration for
00:09:36all that they have managed to do in this country. As Mirna's letter
00:09:39says, from bringing about an entire legislative change, which was
00:09:43thanks to them. It wasn't a state concession, but rather
00:09:46the search law, the victims' law.
00:09:49But at the same time, it's terrible that they have
00:09:53to do that, right? Yes, because they have appropriated forensic
00:09:56knowledge. Mirna was there. How did
00:09:59that happen? You know, Mirna Medina, in this
00:10:02specific case, this has happened now, 10 years have passed since
00:10:06what I'm starting to tell you, but she was one of the first to go to
00:10:10Guatemala with the forensic research group of
00:10:14Guatemala, and they freely offered
00:10:17support to start training them. In other
00:10:20groups, it was the Argentine Forensic Anthropology team, and more
00:10:24recently, the Mexican Forensic Anthropology
00:10:27team and the GIASF. Most of these groups, something that is
00:10:31also very interesting, as I narrate in the book,
00:10:3595% of the relatives who search are
00:10:38women. And most of the autonomous forensic
00:10:41teams are mainly made up of women.
00:10:45Unfortunately, many of them are committed academic women, very
00:10:49precarious, who are willing to risk everything, right?
00:10:53So they start training
00:10:55because they realize something they shout in their slogans is:
00:10:59"Why do we look for them? Because only we find
00:11:01them." In that letter we just heard,
00:11:05Mirna Medina tells us about 90 people who have
00:11:09been found and returned to their families. Currently, there are
00:11:12more than 600 that only the
00:11:16of which about 480 have been successfully
00:11:19identified and returned to their families.
00:11:21So there have been disappeared people throughout Latin
00:11:25America; there have been relatives taking to the streets and
00:11:28shouting for their relatives. The Mothers of the
00:11:31Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, the Mutual Support Group
00:11:34in Guatemala. Something that is unique to Mexican
00:11:38territory is the appropriation of forensic
00:11:40knowledge, and the way these women and
00:11:44some men have made forensic search a
00:11:48form of struggle. And I believe that this is
00:11:51an example, a learning that much.
00:11:58You, naming what forced disappearances have been in Latin
00:12:01America, use an expression that I would like you to
00:12:04tell us about, and give us a little history. You call it
00:12:08the disappearing device.
00:12:11Look, this concept, which I largely take from Pilar Calveiro, who
00:12:15is an Argentine colleague, refers to the fact that we are not just talking about a
00:12:19group of bad perpetrators who take people,
00:12:22but about a whole
00:12:25device that includes bureaucratic
00:12:28and forensic disappearances. It includes
00:12:31the entire network of prosecutors' offices that
00:12:34are complicit. It includes cultures that
00:12:37stigmatize through media outlets
00:12:41that also create certain people
00:12:44as disposable, right? Those bodies that are
00:12:47criminalized, which are generally poor and
00:12:50racialized. So it's a very complex framework that not
00:12:54only includes the perpetrators, but
00:12:57this context that enables impunity,
00:13:01that builds social imaginaries of indifference,
00:13:05is part of the complicity that allows us to have
00:13:08currently in Mexico almost 136,000
00:13:11disappeared people, right? There are characteristics that make one
00:13:14think that no one will look for them.
00:13:18I, another element that runs through the
00:13:21book is the perspective of the
00:13:24territories, racialized geographies,
00:13:27because I say that they are a certain type of people,
00:13:31generally people, although it is very diverse and each region
00:13:34has its characteristics, but they are
00:13:37generally poor and racialized
00:13:41men and women. If we had 136,000
00:13:44disappeared people from Santa
00:13:47Ibero, this country would have trembled. Right? Who
00:13:51are those who mobilize and who do it?
00:13:57the coin is also that where there are prior organizational
00:14:01processes, as in the case of the 43 of Ayotzinapa where the
00:14:04Ayotzinapa normal school had its own organizational processes,
00:14:08there are many more possibilities to mobilize and take to the streets, even
00:14:12if we don't find them. But there are many
00:14:15regions, for example, a topic that is talked about
00:14:18little is that of indigenous disappeared people. Not
00:14:22just the activists we sometimes hear about, but young people
00:14:25who are kidnapped, who are often
00:14:29used as slave labor
00:14:32for illicit businesses, and who often
00:14:36also get involved through drugs, but keep consuming, and
00:14:40when they are no longer useful, they end up in a grave,
00:14:42right? And for them, we don't see marches,
00:16:15very interesting point you were making. You talk about poverty and
00:16:18racialization.
00:16:21Look, something that I develop in the book, but which has
00:16:24been part of my historical political activism, is the
00:16:28recognition of racism in Mexican
00:16:31society as
00:16:35inequality. So what I mean when I talk
00:16:38about racialized territories is that
00:16:41certain bodies are located in certain territories where the
00:16:45budget is distributed unequally. So it's not and
00:16:49where violence is also concentrated unequally,
00:16:53right? So you have regions in the mountains of Guerrero, for example, where
00:16:57there are no hospitals, where prosecutor's offices are very far away,
00:17:00where there are no rehabilitation centers for people with
00:17:04addictions. And in these same regions, you have a
00:17:07very strong concentration of violence. So they are
00:17:10certain people and they are certain lives that are
00:17:13constructed as disposable. So I believe
00:17:16that, besides others, these are multifactorial elements. There
00:17:20are many reasons why someone can disappear, but this
00:17:24structure of racism that marks inequality in Mexico
00:17:27is not always named, right? And I think it's very
00:17:30important, and with this I don't mean that people
00:17:33disappear because they are indigenous or that people disappear because
00:17:37they are Afro. Rather, this structure that is
00:17:41there creates contexts of vulnerability. There is less
00:17:44security, there is less possibility, for
00:17:48example, to get support in matters of
00:17:51addictions. If you are a victim of violence, there is less
00:17:55possibility of seeking support, because resources in
00:17:58Mexico are distributed very unequally. So
00:18:02I believe that we must name these
00:18:05terrible violences that are afflicting Mexico. While it is true
00:18:09that they can also kidnap an entrepreneur, and they do kidnap them, and they can also
00:18:12disappear them, those cases also happen, I'm not saying they
00:18:15don't. But this large
00:18:18number of people we now have in Mexico, and the people who are
00:18:22appearing in the graves that the "rastreadoras" find,
00:18:26in another of the cases I address in the book, are the graves of the
00:18:29Morelos Prosecutor's Office in Jojutla and
00:18:32Tetelcingo, which are not
00:18:36the prosecutor's office where more than 200 bodies
00:18:39have appeared, where it was reported that there were 30 investigation files,
00:18:43and many of these people from these graves
00:18:46are poor people whose lives
00:18:50were seen as of little value and were sent, still, if
00:18:54there is no investigation, we won't know how they got to those graves.
00:18:57Of course, but we do know that the state is responsible, and in this
00:19:01case, the state is clearly responsible because these are graves of the
00:19:05prosecutor's offices. The state says: "Here we have 30 investigation
00:19:09files, here are 30 bodies." The families of
00:19:12Morelos, it's a long story that I narrate here. They
00:19:16know that bodies are being hidden there. They take the case
00:19:20because they are also human rights activists, to the UN
00:19:23Commission on Forced Disappearances. They manage to get a recommendation to open the
00:19:27prosecutor's office graves, and, oh surprise, where the prosecutor's office had
00:19:31said there were 30 bodies, there are more than 200
00:19:34bodies, dressed, tied up,
00:19:37without investigation files. That is, it's a clandestine grave
00:19:41under state custody, right? And
00:19:45something I comment on in my public lectures, but also in the
00:19:48book, is that when it was discovered, first there were the graves of
00:19:52Tetelcingo. We all thought it was Graco
00:19:55Ramírez's government. We said, "The governor will fall."
00:19:59That is, in any democratic country,
00:20:02discovering that government graves are used to hide
00:20:05bodies implies
00:20:08something very serious at the investigation
00:20:11level. Well, right now, no, there are
00:20:14lower-level officials who have investigation files, but bodies keep
00:20:18appearing. The graves of Jojutla have not been fully
00:20:21exhumed. There have been six seasons of exhumation, and
00:20:24those exhumations, which were thanks to the pressure from the collectives of
00:20:28Morelos, the collectives of Morelos
00:20:32are sitting around the grave, sitting
00:20:35because they are mostly women, and several in the zero zone with their
00:20:39astronaut-like suits, the Tyvek suits, supervising that the
00:20:43state forensic experts do their job, because they know that
00:20:46if they don't supervise, those bodies can disappear again. And I'm
00:20:50talking about shifts of up to 6 weeks, from 6 in the
00:20:54morning to 6 in the evening, sitting
00:20:57smelling death around a grave to
00:21:00supervise that these people
00:21:03can return to their families. That's where I
00:21:07talk about this pedagogy of love, right? About how they
00:21:10teach us, these are anonymous dead because many of their
00:21:13children disappeared elsewhere. Yes, people whose son
00:21:16disappeared in Chacahua are right in front of the grave, because they know
00:21:20that these people are someone's sons and daughters, someone's brothers,
00:21:24sisters, who are waiting for them. And they want
00:21:27to take care of these anonymous dead so that they can return
00:21:30home. You take up a concept that seemed
00:21:34very beautiful to me and that comes from sorority, right?
00:21:37From this construction of support
00:21:40among women. You call it sorography,
00:21:46hope. The concept of
00:21:50sorography, I mean, above all, this is a play
00:21:53on words that, in dialogue with some of my students
00:21:57who have been working as colleagues,
00:22:00Lucy Bell and Joey Whitfield, who were my students
00:22:03in Cambridge, about ethnography,
00:22:06writing. But what happens when this writing, when this
00:22:10ethnography is done from sorority? That's when we talk about
00:22:14sorography. And I refer not only to my
00:22:18sorography, which I, as an anthropologist,
00:22:20do, but to their experiences. Like the letter we just
00:22:24heard, it's an example of sorography, because although it is
00:22:27Mirna Medina's testimony, it is testimony
00:22:31that arises from collective action. And in the
00:22:34book, I address two experiences of books
00:22:37written by them, not by the academic who writes about
00:22:41them, but written by them themselves, accompanied in
00:22:44activist research processes.
00:22:47the "Rastreadoras del Fuerte" called "Nadia, Detiene el
00:22:50Amor," stories of life from relatives of
00:22:54disappeared people in northern Sinaloa. And
00:22:57they are their stories and their children's. There is Mirna's
00:23:01story, and they write
00:23:04from workshops we did on memory, they read each
00:23:07other's stories. This builds, although they are personal
00:23:10stories, they are stories of a collective reflection that
00:23:14builds community. So the sorography of
00:23:17hope is the right to
00:23:20representation, to appropriate writing, but not to
00:23:24do it from the story of the
00:23:27individual heroine, but from
00:23:31collective construction. That's why it's sorography. Yes, I
00:23:34also saw it in many details that seem
00:23:38very small, but they are not. At one point you narrate that
00:23:42you accompanied the mothers to these
00:23:46endless sessions where images of bodies are shown on a screen,
00:23:50of clothing for them to recognize. You say that
00:23:54you met this mother, and you held her
00:23:57hand. Those, those types of
00:24:00gestures, your narration is full of those types of gestures. It seems
00:24:05hope. No, yes, it's the case of Angélica
00:24:09Rodríguez Monroy, she is looking for her daughter Viridiana.
00:24:13She has become one of the most important affections in
00:24:17my life. We are no longer just companions in the fight, we are
00:24:20sisters, and I had the privilege
00:24:24of going with her to Guadalajara on a search in life that also
00:24:27ended up in the forensic services, and yes, those
00:24:31details of holding hands are a way
00:24:34of reminding us that we are not alone. And
00:24:38sororography was about writing about this gesture, but also in the writing
00:24:42of Angélica. Angélica, along with other
00:24:45companions, wrote her own book called "Memory Healers."
00:24:49The two books, "Nobody Stops Love,"
00:24:52"Memory Healers," "Exhuming Hope," can be downloaded for free from
00:24:56the internet because it is part of the political project
00:25:00that knowledge should be shared, and "Memory Healers" is an example
00:25:04of sororography. They
00:25:07built this book from a
00:25:10workshop taught by women from the
00:25:13"Sisters in the Shadow" collective, which I am also
00:25:16a part of, who are women who experienced prison violence. And now
00:25:20they are free. They have appropriated writing,
00:25:23but they are also promoters of
00:25:26sororography by giving writing workshops
00:25:29because there is a lot of fear of writing, and in Mexico
00:25:32it is thought that writing and the right to publish, not
00:25:36just writing but also the right to publish, is for the
00:25:39elites, and the proposal of "Sisters in the Shadow" is that
00:25:43we can all write and publish, all of us
00:25:47who have something to tell, but it is also very important, because this
00:25:50writing, this sororal writing, this writing of love and search, is
00:25:54the essential antidote against
00:25:57another writing,
00:25:58writing on bodies.
00:26:03Writing on mutilated bodies, right? Which I think
00:26:07since the beginning of the femicides in Ciudad
00:26:11Juárez, it became very clear to us, there is
00:26:14writing on bodies, and it carries a
00:26:17message, and these
00:26:20humanizing projects
00:26:22are indispensable, they bring us closer to the idea that there are other
00:26:26ways of living and that we can
00:27:18Aida Hernández Castillo, professor and researcher at the Center for Research
00:27:22and Higher Studies in Anthropology.
00:27:25Aida, then we were talking, you were talking to me about pedagogy,
00:27:28you were
00:27:32thinking about how this book, like "Memory Healers,"
00:27:38bodies. Yes, in this writing on women's
00:27:42bodies, this Argentine anthropologist Rita Laura
00:27:44Segato spoke to us about a pedagogy of cruelty.
00:27:48What she tells us is that what you mention about writing on
00:27:52bodies teaches us something, and what do those writings on women's
00:27:55bodies teach us? They teach us who controls
00:27:58the territory, they teach us silence, they teach us to be
00:28:02afraid. And this pedagogy of cruelty,
00:28:06my argument is that it is being confronted with this
00:28:09pedagogy of love that is teaching us something else,
00:28:13it is teaching us to break the silence, to break the silence with
00:28:17writing, with "Memory Healers," with "Nobody Stops Love," with the
00:28:20letters, with the embroidery we talked about earlier, silence is broken.
00:28:24They are also teaching
00:28:27us how to reconstruct community
00:28:30networks, because they not only search, they also create
00:28:33awareness and build community. Here I show several examples of how
00:28:37this is done. They are teaching us that these bodies
00:28:41that were treated only as marks of the territory are
00:28:45people whom they rehumanize, sacralize
00:28:49the territory. The graves with their
00:28:51rituals are no longer just spaces of
00:28:54extermination, no, they are sacred spaces. And
00:28:58spirituality is another important element that I work on here. So
00:29:02they move in different ways, they do several things at once. A lot of emphasis has
00:29:06been placed, and it is not the only theme of the book, on forensic search,
00:29:10but they do many things besides forensic search, right? And
00:29:13I would like to go back to when you talk about Rita
00:29:17the pedagogy of cruelty, something else she says very clearly
00:29:20is, and that writing when it comes to women's bodies is
00:29:24to tell us our place and where we should move from, and in
00:29:28that sense, mothers and searching women have
00:29:31moved to the most unimaginable places.
00:29:34That's right, that's right. I wanted to ask you this that I'm
00:29:38not very clear about, because there is the forensic search that you
00:29:42talk about, but there is the search in life,
00:29:45what is the fine red line?
00:29:48Look, there are groups like "The Trackers
00:29:52of the Fort" that from the beginning they, because
00:29:55they knew there were too many clandestine graves, the
00:29:59origin myth of how forensic search began is that when the
00:30:0243 were being searched for in the Guerrero
00:30:05area in Iguala, more than 100 clandestine graves were found,
00:30:09and they were not the 43. So
00:30:12many relatives said, if they are not them, who are they? Of course,
00:30:16they could be our children, and that's how they started looking for clandestine
00:30:19graves, but this does not imply that they abandon the search in life. What
00:30:22does "search in life" refer to? It does not refer only to the search flyers that
00:30:26we now see everywhere, and that even today I realized that Bancomer is also
00:30:30putting the flyers on its web pages. Those flyers
00:30:33are very important, but they go to addiction centers, they go
00:30:37to schools, they go to Ceresos
00:30:40to social rehabilitation centers, they
00:30:43visit hospitals, they go on searches with homeless
00:30:47people. That's what I wanted to ask you, it seemed
00:30:51very interesting to me, I would never have thought of it. You talk
00:30:54about it when you help, you are searching with your friend, sister, mother of
00:30:59the...