(Un)earthing cartographies, racial necro-economics and politics of absence
About the talk
Four years ago, on the night of September 26, 2014 in the town of Iguala, in the state of Guerrero, Mexico, police forces, armed forces and members of organized crime violently attacked public transportation buses on which were travelling students from the teachers’ college of Ayotzinapa to take part in the October 2 commemorations of the 1968 Tlatelolco plaza student massacre in Mexico City. During the course of the night, three students were assassinated and 43 students forcibly disappeared, their whereabouts to this day unknown. The talk focuses on the case of Ayotzinapa in order to critically analyze the ways that extreme forms of physical violence and (il)legal economies engender particular expressions of racialized state formation. It reflects on how both narcotic and extractivist economies produce disposable feminized and masculinized bodies, expressed not only in the disappearance of the 43 students but in the ripple effects across the social body. The talk suggests that such disposability has particular racial effects that need to be rendered visible so as to comprehend the depths of the grievances as well as a sense of justice. In a geography shaped by necro economies, where the case of Ayotzinapa figures alongside the more that 35,000 disappeared in the country since 2006, the talk focuses on the struggles for truth and justice by family members, the role of human rights regimes and the political agency of those absent.
About the speaker
Mariana Mora is associate professor-researcher at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) in Mexico City. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.A. in Latin American Studies from Stanford University. Her research focuses on struggles against the continued processes of colonization as part of state formation in Latin America, including in indigenous regions in Mexico; violence; critical race and gender studies; decoloniality and the political. She is author of the book, Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race and Decolonial Research in Zapatista Communities (2018). Her recent scholarship centers on violence, gender, race and human rights regimes as part of struggles for justice in cases of forced disappearance and territorial dispossession. She is a part of the continental Anti-Racist Action Research Network (Red Investigación Acción Anti- Racista, RAIAR) and the Decolonial Feminist Network in Mexico.