Introduction
On 26 September my son left for Iguala [to commandeer buses for the annual commemoration of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre]. In the last call he made home, he said: ‘The police are attacking us.’ I went to his college [in Ayotzinapa] as soon as I heard this and stayed there all night without sleeping, without knowing what to do. We wonder why this has happened to us, because we are not involved with cartels or the government; we are poor farmers, growing corn, who want to live a quiet life, nothing else. What happened has changed our lives. We look for our sons from sunrise to sunset.Footnote 1
Bernabé Abraján, quoted above, is the father of a missing person and member of the collective known as the ‘Padres y Madres de Ayotzinapa’ (‘Fathers and Mothers of Ayotzinapa’) – the parents of 43 disappeared students from Guerrero. These young men were abducted by municipal police on 26 September 2014; three other students and three passers-by were killed in the same incident.Footnote 2 The anger of the ‘Fathers and Mothers’, together with that of other relatives and friends of Mexico's victims of violence, has swept the country in recent years.
Here I consider how this activism sustains the ‘political afterlives’ of Mexico's dead and disappeared, and how the afterlives associated with the disappeared pose a challenge to Mexico's material culture of the dead in the Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). By ‘political afterlives’ I mean the contentious processes that unfold after violent deaths or disappearances, and the public memories the grieving families of the dead and disappeared evoke in public space and through material objects such as public altars and commemorative slabs laid in paving stones, which maintain the social and public relations of victims.Footnote 3 The term ‘political afterlives’ casts light on the complex legal, political, social and cultural aftermaths of violence, by highlighting the agency of collectives of relatives and object–human interactions, and I use it as a theoretical tool to improve our understanding of such sustained posthumous memory politics and activism.Footnote 4
Since the families of the disappeared often insist that their missing relatives are still alive, the disappeared are associated with certain taboos which I will refer to as ‘necrotaboos’, such as not commemorating them in the Day of the Dead. Therefore, I argue, it is possible to observe an emerging distinction between the traditional material culture of the dead and an alternative material culture devoted to the disappeared, which can be seen, for instance, at new memorial sites in Mexico City.Footnote 5
Mexico is currently living through a period of violence, with street warfare involving both state actors and rival narco cartels (criminal organisations specialising in trafficking drugs which fight for control over the smuggling routes to the United States). As the death toll has skyrocketed, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between criminal infighting and forms of state or corporate violence. Since the government launched its ‘war on drugs’ in 2006, more than 200,000 people have been killed and approximately 90,000 kidnapped and disappeared by both the gangs and police officers; very few of these cases have seen justice done through proper police investigations or court convictions.Footnote 6 Many researchers interpret the drug-related violence as neoliberal warfare that facilitates diverse forms of capital accumulation, or focus on the ‘proven complicity between state institutions, organized crime, and the mafia economy’.Footnote 7 At the same time, the state's portrayal of the violence as crime related and as the result of the ‘war’ being fought by law enforcement agencies against criminal narco cartels allows victims to be written off as mere criminals, when many are not.Footnote 8
The relatives of Mexico's victims are fighting for justice, truth and an end to the killings. Field research carried out with these relatives provides the basis for this article, in which my intention is to cast light on how Mexican activists use the Day of the Dead in social campaigning or relate it to their dead relatives. I draw attention to the tensions between the grieving families’ representation of their missing relatives and their representation by others for social justice activism in solidarity with them, arguing that new necrotaboos make the inclusion of the disappeared in the festivity more difficult, even unacceptable.
Once a year, Mexico celebrates the famous festival of the Day of the Dead – a community fiesta for the return of the souls of deceased relatives – with food offerings to the dead in household altars in private homes and cemeteries or other public places. These are decorated during the religious holiday, which begins at midnight on 1 November and lasts until the end of 2 November, taking in the Christian holidays of All Saints (1 November) and All Souls (2 November) Days.Footnote 9
I argue that the political afterlives displayed in the Day of the Dead seek to subvert state-sponsored ‘necrogovernance’ – that is, the state's institutional power over and management of death.Footnote 10 Social justice activism, in my view, often sustains the political afterlives of victims of state violence as part of the protest repertoire.Footnote 11 We see this across the Americas from the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement in the United States, to the ‘Marielle vive’ (‘Marielle Lives’) protests in Brazil, and the ‘Vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos’ (‘They Took them Alive, We Want them back Alive’) rallies for the 43 disappeared students of Ayotzinapa, Mexico, with respect to whom there is an ongoing truth commission.Footnote 12
Grieving families evoke violent memories and recall tragic deaths strategically in their protests through ‘various “social uses” of the dead’.Footnote 13 This practice can be traced back to the ‘Madres de Plaza de Mayo’ (‘Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo’) of dissidents disappeared during Argentina's military dictatorship in the late 70s, and the annual protests for justice following the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968 in Mexico City, which continue to this day on 2 October.Footnote 14
I argue that in Mexico it is common to make use of the Day of the Dead's already existing material culture of the marginalised dead – particularly their political afterlives – as a powerful subversive means to counter state-sponsored necrogovernance.Footnote 15 I explore such political afterlives as ‘a necrosocial repertoire of contention’, drawing from the idea that a repertoire of claim-making routines applies to claimant–object pairs (such as citizens–state).Footnote 16 Since repertoires respond and often correspond to power regimes, they give ‘a diagnostic of power’.Footnote 17 The necrosocial repertoire of contention that makes use of political afterlives in public space contests necrogovernance within Mexico's wider necropolitics. It is here that the politics concerning the disappeared is especially contentious and associated with taboos.
Lexicon of Necropolitics
I use the term ‘political afterlives’ for thinking about the importance of subversive community-based forms of agency within necropolitics.Footnote 18 This concept might be helpful for the consideration of the role of the ‘symbolics of memory’ in the contentious politics that may unfold between different stakeholders in the aftermath of violence.Footnote 19 The analytical approach of the political afterlife builds on Katherine Verdery's exploration of the material culture of statues and sculptures as indicators of state policy,Footnote 20 but what is in focus here is the opposite condition: the subversive afterlives of the marginalised dead and disappeared in visual culture in order to garner support from the wider public to put pressure on state institutions. The approach seeks to contribute to the literature on the protest repertoires of grieving families in the aftermath of violence as a response to the repressive forms of necropolitics practised by the state in its policies of necrogovernance and necropower.Footnote 21
‘Necropolitics’ is an umbrella term for the struggles over the dead and the management of death to indicate disputes over forensic evidence or other claims regarding the dead or disappeared.Footnote 22 Achille Mbembe, who coined the term, uses it to develop Michel Foucault's concept of ‘biopower’, which he sees as insufficient to ‘account for contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death’.Footnote 23 He uses the term ‘necropower’ to refer to the state's power to decide who may live or die owing to its capacity to take lives through police or military violence.Footnote 24 The terms ‘necropower’, ‘necrogovernance’ and ‘necropolitical regime’ are often used interchangeably by scholars to refer to forms of state repression, terror or dehumanising processes directed at vulnerable communities.Footnote 25
I use the term ‘necrogovernance’ to refer to the state's capacity to take lives or to state control over forensic processes and police investigations.Footnote 26 This builds on Isaias Rojas-Pérez's term ‘necro-governmentality’, which, in his view, manifests itself on three material levels: (1) the level of the dead body and how it is located and identified; (2) the level of the geography of violence and memory as remains are excavated from mass graves and transferred to new memorial sites ‘to govern the memory of the war’; and (3) the level of language and discourse of trauma and rights ‘for a controlled recovery of the past’.Footnote 27 But while necro-governmentality is understood here as a system that successfully structures things such as language and memory, I will in contrast stress how both governance and ritual order break down amid confusion over ambiguities in the victims’ status.
Some observers use ‘necropolitics’ to indicate how collectives of relatives of disappeared persons and victims of police violence fight against power regimes such as necrogovernance.Footnote 28 Necropolitics then is a contested field of politics with conflicting interests, where activists’ counterstrategies compete with the state for the power to decide who dies and lives, how death should be handled and who is deemed worthy of being mourned or having a proper burial.Footnote 29 Mexico is currently witnessing contentious public struggles with different stakeholders (e.g. state institutions, federal prosecutors, international forensic experts, narco cartels, corporations and social movements) fighting for control over the narratives surrounding the dead.Footnote 30
My concept of political afterlives captures the different strategies activists use to reclaim ownership of the dead and disappeared. It sheds light on how activists construct a material culture to talk back and rebel against ‘the role of state control [over] the social life of the dead’.Footnote 31 However, the families of the disappeared presume their missing relatives to be alive. While the unlawful technique of making people disappear seeks to prevent criminal charges and silence close relatives out of fear of causing the death of (presumably kidnapped) loved ones, the families’ insistence that they may indeed be alive causes problems for Mexico's cultural rituals associated with death and the rebellious afterlives – afterlives which rebel against state power – that they might otherwise enjoy in the Day of the Dead. Contentious necrotaboos around the disappeared lead to what their families deem to be inappropriate ways for wider society to engage with their loved ones, the victims of disappearances.
Mexico's popular Day of the Dead tradition, whereby the dead are honoured with special days and public street altars, gives the dead visible afterlives through material culture. It comes with a plethora of community-created necrosocial objects that may be used to render the deceased visible or to conjure up dark humour and strong identification with them.
An Ethnography of the Necrosocial Repertoire of the Day of the Dead
My line of reasoning in this article is based on 16 months of participatory fieldwork with Mexican activist groups between 2014 and 2015. During this time, I befriended the ‘Fathers and Mothers of Ayotzinapa’; the ‘Movimiento por la paz con justicia y dignidad’ (‘Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity’, MPJD), a social movement of relatives of victims; and the mothers of disappeared girls involved in the ‘Nuestras hijas de regreso a casa’ (‘May our Daughters Return Home’) organisation. They all carry out protests and campaign for justice and truth for their lost loved ones.
The MPJD and ‘May our Daughters Return Home’ participated actively in creating public street altars during the Day of the Dead celebrations that I took part in; the ‘Fathers and Mothers of Ayotzinapa’ had a more complex relationship to the festivity, as demonstrated further below.
Although Day of the Dead traditions vary across different states within Mexico, in most cities there are street altars in public places such as squares or parks.Footnote 32 Some families cook the favourite dishes of their deceased and place them at the altars, accompanied with a drink, often tequila or mezcal, and salt, which is said to purify the soul.
Other altar objects include marigolds, the ‘flowers of the dead’, sold across the country in street markets and generally to be seen decorating houses and public places at this time of year. Copal (tree resin) is burnt in chalices at the altars: this gives off a distinctly pungent smoke and, like salt, is thought to purify the soul. Photographs of the deceased are generally displayed in altars inside private homes and in cemeteries and public places. A special pan de muertos (bread of the dead) is eaten during the holiday and is omnipresent on the altars, popular for its sugary taste. Calaveras (small sweets in the shape of skulls), papel picado (colourful paper with holes cut out of it depicting skeletons) and religious objects or personal belongings to which the dead were particularly attached also make up the altar offerings.
Newspapers publish short rhyming poems, also known as calaveras (skulls), that mock death or satirise the powerful and wealthy, usually referring to events of the past year. Satirical cartoons have their own distinct tradition in the Day of the Dead and frequently refer to the famous figure of ‘La Catrina’, created by cartoonist José Guadalupe Posada (1852–1913). La Catrina is a skeleton on show at various sites as a life-sized female dandy wearing an upper-class outfit and hat over her white skull. She tends to represent death – a woman in Mexican tradition – during the festivity. Santa Muerte (Saint Death) – also addressed as a ‘she’ – has begun to replace La Catrina at some sites across the country.Footnote 33
During the celebration, families travel to their local zócalo (square) during the day; they buy confectionery calaveras and gaze at the carefully decorated and colourful altars set up by the municipality or people living in the area. They also visit graveyards and decorate the tombs of their deceased, offering food and drink, lighting candles, burning resin and praying for the souls of their dead. In Mexico City, as in the rest of the country, families construct altars in the home, and also spend time at those set up in public spaces and cemeteries; all three sites are given at least some attention in terms of decoration and attendance.
The tradition of offering food to ancestors has pre-Columbian roots, but the Day of the Dead is an offshoot that has integrated Mexico's indigenous legacy with Catholic customs.Footnote 34 Today, the Day of the Dead is characterised by its humorous and macabre nature.Footnote 35 Dressed-up skeletons and cartoons provide a parodic twist of ‘memento mori’ (‘remember that you shall die’),Footnote 36 which captures the democratic spirit of death in the tradition of Posada's political criticism of inequality.Footnote 37
While the Day of the Dead has tended to be examined for its role in shaping Mexican identity and by tracing the roots of its macabre iconography through history, often in a critique of the idea of a homogenous national Mexican view of death,Footnote 38 contemporary activist altars devoted to victims of violence rather illustrate how the Day of the Dead – with its ancient tradition of nourishing deceased ancestors to please the dead and gain their blessings in life – sustain the political afterlives of the dead in public space, which enable them to influence worldly affairs in new ways.Footnote 39 The Day of the Dead's taboo-free tradition of visualising death and the dead in public life has long been linked to the centralised governance of death.Footnote 40
Apart from its role in shaping national identity or ideas about mexicanidad (Mexican-ness), the Day of the Dead may play an important role after actual deaths in today's ongoing narco war, in the epoch of human rights.Footnote 41 This, as we shall see, reveals how the Day of the Dead is so much more than just a joyful annual celebration.
The Day of the Dead's rich material culture offers celebrants a chance to independently create their own political satire by displaying altar offerings in the name of their dead. This provides a culturally specific spectrum of available actions to draw on when activists deploy the collective repertoire available to them at any given time and in any context to make their demands heard.Footnote 42
The Day of the Dead, as we have seen, includes a wide range of objects that one can use to create political satire: interactive elements which aim to be looked at and to provoke reactions and laughter from onlookers. In recent years, political street altars critiquing or making jokes about state and narco violence have become common. These altars lend themselves particularly well to political protest for victims of violence, since the ritual is associated with the social obligation to respect and remember the dead.Footnote 43
The national crisis of disappearances has created a problem for how Mexicans deploy well-known cases of victims of violence in satirical homemade altars in their memory. These victims pose a challenge to the Day of the Dead and to celebrants who seek to honour them since it is not clear whether the disappeared are in fact dead or alive; thus there is a great deal of ambiguity regarding how society should deal with them.Footnote 44 Disappearance as a category is itself produced at ‘a point of convergence of debates and actions of actors and institutions that are constituted around a regime of truth’, which makes it inherently uncertain.Footnote 45 This raises several critical questions: where do the disappeared belong? Who has the right to deploy or evoke the dead, especially victims of violence and the disappeared, in public spaces? What can the Day of the Dead do for those families who have suffered a violent death or disappearance in recent years?
In exploring the question of what the Day of the Dead can do for families who have suffered a violent death or disappearance, I also shed light on what these political victims do for the Day of the Dead. This focus casts a new light on the well-researched traditional festivity, interpreting it from an alternative angle by exploring how politicised and violent deaths are incorporated in the festivity, and how they might be updating its political criticism. The problem of how to address the ambiguous souls of the disappeared in fact tests the very capacity of the remembrance festivity: whom it can honour, and whom it must not celebrate.
The Dark Humour of Political Afterlives
Posada's axiom – that death is democratic – has been interpreted as a playful ethical reversal of life's conditions on earth, since life in a country like Mexico is defined by huge inequalities between rich and poor, while death becomes the equaliser. During the Day of the Dead – as in most rituals – things can be turned on their head. This ethical reversal is a core theme of the festivity's playful satire, ‘when the humble classes … have spoken, in a bold and visible, but humorous way, to the ruling class’.Footnote 46 Humour in the Day of the Dead is expressed through the calaveras – the rhyming poems accompanied by satirical cartoons published in newspapers around the holiday – and through the macabre skeletons built and displayed in public street altars that may have ironic messages attached to them. There are thus two types of humour: that associated with papier-mâché skeletons in public altars, and the literary humour of calaveras (skull poems).Footnote 47
Typically, death and the dead are deployed to satirise the vanities of the upper class through eloquent altars, skull imagery and irony in the skeletons dressed up as La Catrina. But today, for a Mexico that is living through narco street warfare, with mass killings, disappearances, corruption and criminal impunity haunting the nation, there are new themes lending themselves to political satire in opposition to the nation's elites.
In recent years, the Day of the Dead has seen a surge of black humour that satirises and directly challenges the legitimacy of the Mexican state and those who run it, with a critique of homicides and impunity, and defence of the honour and memory of the nation's victims of violence. Mexico's narco violence, corruption and its especially infamous cases – such as the massacre of 22 people in Tlatlaya in June 2014 committed by the army, of 193 migrants in San Fernando in 2011 attributed to the Los Zetas narco cartel and of the 43 Ayotzinapa students – have been frequent topics of black humour and satire.
Consequently, the dark jokes I came across during the Day of the Dead in 2014 and 2015 did not primarily focus on the vanities of the rich, nor was the most prominent humour defined by the soft satire of class relations, when the poor have fun by declaring that the rich also shall die one day. This has long been the dominant interpretation of the festivity's humour in ethnographic descriptions.Footnote 48 Instead, in recent years, the Day of the Dead has seen the rise of a political satire that casts light on a divided nation.
These grim jokes reveal political division and different attitudes in society over the contentious treatment of the nation's contemporary victims of violence. Recent satire has focused on the state's failure to take responsibility for victims by making macabre jokes about its complicity in their unjust deaths. This black humour comes with a fierce political critique that challenges the legitimacy of the state and its use of force. Take a calavera on the topic of the 43 disappeared students from Ayotzinapa as an example:
Calaveras de Ayotzinapa
La nación pedía a la flaca / justicia en Ayotzinapa. / ‘Acaba con tanta rata / que todo queman y tapan.’
La muerte, que es justiciera, / atendió la petición, / y construyó su trinchera / en el centro del panteón.
El primero de la lista / era el ‘Gober’ de Guerrero …Footnote 49
Calaveras for Ayotzinapa
The nation asked the ‘skinny lady’Footnote 50 / for justice in Ayotzinapa. / ‘Finish off all the rats / who burn everything and cover it all up.’
Death, who is just, / attended to the request, / and built her trench / in the centre of the pantheon.
First on her list / was the ‘governor’ of Guerrero …
Skull poems like this tend to be accompanied by macabre and humorous cartoons with politicians portrayed as naked skeletons digging mass graves or running off with money and the victims’ bones. During the autumn of 2014 – in the wake of the attack on the Ayotzinapa students – such poems were not merely soft satire. Hundreds of thousands Mexicans took to the streets behind Bernabé Abraján and the other ‘Fathers and Mothers’ as they marched through Mexico City calling for the resignation of then President Enrique Peña Nieto, shouting ‘¡Fuera Peña!’ (‘Peña Out!’), accompanied by the protest chant ‘¡Fue el estado!’ (‘It was the state!’).Footnote 51 They congregated at El Zócalo, the capital's main square, outside the National Parliament, in an unsuccessful attempt to force the government out. Satirical skull poems on the topic formed part of these efforts to pressure, if not topple, the government of Mexico and – as the ‘Fathers and Mothers’ of the disappeared students shouted at their protest rallies – to ‘Bring them to justice!’ In the words of one of the ‘Mothers of Ayotzinapa’:
We raise our voices and do not stay at home. Forty-three students and thousands more disappeared people are missing. We take to the streets. This is the moment to raise our voices and change this country, change the government which tells us lies. We demand that every one of us govern and not the government with its weapons.Footnote 52
While speeches delivered by members of the victims’ families tended to be serious in tone, in contrast to the black humour used in Day of the Dead celebrations, both form part of a profound political indignation and activism that challenges Mexico's political system. Exploring this political humour allows us to move away from narratives that focus on suffering, embodied pain and psychological trauma in the wake of violence.Footnote 53 Black humour is another, and, in Mexico at least, pervasive response from wider society in the wake of atrocities.
The Day of the Dead provides an annual space for such political satire in the middle of public debate to continue activism against homicides. It allows the dead to be deployed in public debate for political gain. Dark humour is an additional way of expressing political solidarity, participation and engagement in support of the nation's many victims of violence.Footnote 54 Here, in the Day of the Dead, victims may be deployed and evoked by others outside of the family but this, as we shall see, may lead to controversy and disapproval from close relatives. Nevertheless, the political afterlives of these victims – sustained in public memory through their evocation in public altars or skull poems – tend to echo demands for social change and add to the pressure on the state in public debate.
This social justice activism takes place outside the actual Day of the Dead as it insists that there must be truth and justice for victims and that they must be remembered. This discourse aims at shaming non-compliant state institutions through ‘an essentially Foucauldian path, in that it seeks to institute new norms by publicly identifying immoral … behavior as an object lesson of what societies ought not to be’.Footnote 55 Making fun of them is an old and tested tactic for doing so.
A Ritual of Rebellion with Activist Altars
Political altars devoted to victims further illustrate how calls for justice and truth after violent deaths appear to have become an integral part of the Day of the Dead in recent years. Street altars were placed on public view in Mexico City at places such as the Alameda Park outside the Palacio de Bellas Artes (Fine Arts Museum). On my first celebration of the Day in 2014, I was struck by the protest messages on the altars before me at the park. Some mentioned the specific police patrols that had allegedly taken part in the murders of civilians or named the different state institutions that had failed to provide justice after the death of the dedicatee.
One set of altars was devoted to members of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army for National Liberation, EZLN), who had suffered violent deaths. The Army took up arms against the federal government in Chiapas in 1994, and later signed a peace agreement with the Mexican state. The EZLN has since suffered violence at the hands of paramilitary groups in the region.Footnote 56 In the Zapatista altars, the confectionery skulls were dressed in the pasamontañas (balaclavas) favoured by the rebels. Socialist red stars covered the ground; the red campesino scarves worn by the EZLN were placed in the altars or tied around the necks of the skulls in humorous and politically suggestive ways. But these street altars also marked and conjured up a past injustice, calling for something to be done about it so that the onlooker, supposedly, would engage in the struggle against the injustice done to these dead people. Some of these altars made explicit calls for ‘¡Justicia!’ and had the word written all over them.
Another site with activist altars was the fashionable southern area known as Coyoacán, a popular destination for thousands of Mexicans during the Day of the Dead, where people come to dine, drink and be entertained; altars included full-sized skeletons dressed up in cloak and scythe. The public altars on show here were devoted to las muertas (dead women or girls), the victims of femicide abducted and murdered throughout the country during last decades.Footnote 57 They were lined up along a pathway leading up to the centre of the zócalo of Coyoacán. They were political in a blunt direct sense, with small white gates marking them out, as if they were actual graves rather than street altars with gifts. Inside the altars there were pink crosses, the symbol of the mothers fighting for justice for their muertas. The crosses had ‘Ni una más’ (‘Not one more’) written on them in black. On top of one of the large altars a sign read: ‘I didn't lose my life, someone took it away from me.’
Rather than amusingly dressed-up lady skeletons, these activist altars displayed headless mannequins cut off below the waist, so constituting only a female torso. Photographs of the faces of the murdered women covered the breasts.
Arlen, the mother of a victim of femicide and member of ‘May our Daughters Return Home’, described her altar activism in the following way:
We are carrying out this protest because we want to put an end to the murders and disappearances of our girls. They are killed or disappeared with impunity. A year has passed without us knowing where she is. I'm here doing this for my daughter's sake. She was fourteen. We want answers. The newspapers only give us the lies of the criminals. The authorities ask us to wait, nothing happens. They don't know how much this hurts. We wanted to go public but then we received telephone threats … The investigation hasn't come to anything. Last week my sister went to the police again, but they told her she would come back, but she hasn't; they [the police] don't care about this kind of cases.Footnote 58
These altars to the victims of femicide are problematic, however, in that many of the girls and women whom they are meant to honour are missing, not dead. Araceli – a middle-age women and activist who created altars at the site along with Arlen – said, in answer to my question about this, ‘As you see, the altars here have photographs and names of the homicide victims … it's clear and precise … and we put up the [pink] crosses’, which more unambiguously signified that death had occurred.Footnote 59 As Araceli said, these activist offerings shone the spotlight on the political problem of ‘violence and impunity’ in a broad critique of ‘the failure of state institutions to guarantee justice and security for women in Mexico’, and also specified the dead who were being remembered and commemorated in the altars.Footnote 60
Other activist altars seen across Mexico during the festivity in recent years tend to critique government institutions in the same way by protesting against violence, and are quite different from those of earlier anthropologists’ descriptions, which seek to show the world Mexico's popular philosophy of living with death by mocking it.Footnote 61
Mexico's contemporary political altars devoted to victims of violence come with a different message. They want us to discuss other things. These altars, with texts such as ‘My life was taken away from me’, remind us that the dead whom they commemorate have not yet received justice, and are seeking a reckoning with state institutions and criminal perpetrators. To my mind, these activist altars are making the old debate about the role of the Day of the Dead in shaping the national identity outdated. Rather, they invite us to consider the potential of altar offerings for voicing serious political critique and the role they can play in the expression of grievances on the part of close relatives. Listen to a member of the MPJD, the mother of four murdered sons, as she explains the organisation's ceremonial activism and use of altars: ‘We feel this rage, the rage of having someone that you love ripped away, taken from you, from the world. Our families have been destroyed. We are crazy with grief. But it helps that they [the souls of the dead] are here to symbolise that pain.’Footnote 62
In addition to providing comfort to the family, activist offerings and related actions seek to mobilise Mexicans in the interest of the maltreated dead; in doing so, they parallel the very essence at the heart of the traditional commemorative festivity: to honour the dead and invert power relations on earth.
Political altars to victims of violence teach a moral lesson: by displaying a theatre of unjust deaths to which the authorities have unfulfilled commitments, they seem to be saying that society still has moral obligations to these dead. Activists can turn the Day of the Dead into a ‘ritual of rebellion’ that exemplifies cultural resilience in times of violence.Footnote 63 These altars demand that the dead be properly honoured according to the festivity's strong ethics of commemoration, and thus defend the rights of the dead to be recognised and remembered. Altar offerings provide the dead with a space to display their rebellious afterlives, so these souls can talk back to power. Rather than casting the Day of the Dead in the light of the state management of death,Footnote 64 activist altars – as I understand them – illustrate the ungovernability of Mexico's dead.
Political altar offerings truly express the rebellious spirit of ‘unquiet souls’.Footnote 65 When these unquiet souls are welcomed back to our world through the public theatre of the Day of the Dead, they enter the public sphere, where they can continue to press their claims for justice. Families of victims and others who construct political altars to the dead thus strategically exploit ‘the tremendous moral and magical power of the unquiet dead’Footnote 66 by deploying them and letting them reclaim public space.
The Day of the Dead may in this way grant public recognition to the souls of the unjustly killed by securing a place for them in the nation's spotlight. The institution of the altar is discovered to simultaneously be a guardian of tradition and a space to talk back to power. Altars and skull poems comment on the changing contemporary political circumstances of death.
In contrast to what scholars have come to believe, the Day of the Dead does not take away the symbolic power of death by mocking it and making it visible so that it loses the fear factor that is said to dominate Western cultures’ relationship to death.Footnote 67 It makes use of it, puts it to work, by sustaining a symbolic potency of the dead when they return to the world of the living. When Mexico's dead are remembered, ‘they turn the world upside down … They are not forgotten, and they are not out of sight’, making the unnamed ‘dead and the underprivileged … the focus of attention’.Footnote 68 This important work of the Day of the Dead in the wake of violent death reveals exactly why the ritual is not just a happy fiesta. For here are Mexico's dead ‘stripped down to the bones, having come back to haunt you and bite you back’.Footnote 69
Controversies over Altars Devoted to the Disappeared
In the days that led up to the Day of the Dead in 2014, some of my Mexican friends were involved in setting up a huge altar to the 43 students who had shortly before been disappeared by the police in Guerrero. Their disappearance had caused protests throughout Mexico in a nationwide cry of indignation led by their families in October, the month before the festivity. By now it seemed likely, to outside observers and to those who had participated in the rallies in their favour, that they would not be found alive – as the protest slogans would have it, ‘They took them alive, we want them back alive’. This was not something anyone wanted to say out loud, though, since it would have denied their families’ hopes of seeing them once more.
My friends, at the time students at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM), wanted to pay tribute to their 43 disappeared comrades from the south. Those involved in making the altar had participated in the protests and some had organised sit-ins and strikes at the university in solidarity. The case of the missing students was all over the news during these weeks and completely dominated public debate. Public altars typically comment on and refer to the topics currently in vogue.
To make an altar one normally goes to a local market, preferably a ‘mercado de brujerías’ (witchcraft market), to get the cartonerías (papier-mâché sculptures) and everything else that one needs. By far the most famous witchcraft market is the Mercado Sonora, situated on the south-eastern outskirts of Mexico City, a smoke-filled bazaar devoted to brujerías and the occult. I accompanied my Mexican friends to the bazaar in the days before the celebration to buy what was needed for the public altar at UNAM and for the private altars to be set up in people's homes. At the bazaar we bought resin and chalices, and in a conventional market in the Pedregal de Santo Domingo neighbourhood, where I lived at the time, we found marigolds at a good price, and filled our bags with confectionery skulls, pan de muertos and other necessities for both public and private use.
When it was finally ready at the UNAM campus, the altar to the missing students covered almost 10 m2 and was marked out by long rectangular lines of marigolds and the names of Adnan Abraján and his disappeared friends on white paper next to the confectionery skulls inside it. There were incense to attract their spirits, chalices with burning resin and candles to light the way for the dead upon their return. Inside the altar, colourful palm prints marked out the staircase against which it had been constructed and there were red marks on the ground, like a trail in blood leading from the crime and the abducted bodies – or at least this is how my friend Jorge described it: ‘It's the hands of the dead reaching out to us from earth below.’
On its completion, we chanted slogans in the big crowd that congregated around the altar: ‘They took them alive, we want them back alive!’ The inauguration of the altar ended when all the 100 or so people present at the site counted from one to 43 out loud and then shouted ‘¡Justicia!’ People took photos of the tribute to the disappeared students, posting them on social media and spreading word of the altar devoted to them to the outside world.
The fact that we shouted that we wanted them back alive was, of course, a paradox. The dead are believed to return during the days and nights of the festivity but our call was for a permanent return, not only for their souls to come back for a short visit but for them to come back with their bodies intact, alive once more. As previously mentioned, the ambiguous status of the disappeared makes it unclear whether they should be honoured with altars or not, since the offerings are devoted to the dead. In October 2014, when the nation followed the search for the 43 missing students and the news reported on one mass grave after another being uncovered in the violence-torn southern state of Guerrero where they had gone missing, it seemed highly unlikely that they would be found alive. My friends and I, like other student activists who wanted to show solidarity with the missing, were to be forgiven for portraying the disappeared as dead without the authorisation of their parents, just as many other people and political movements did throughout Mexico that year. We always meant to honour them, express solidarity with them and maintain political pressure on the authorities.
Their ‘Fathers and Mothers’ did not like the offerings devoted to their disappeared sons. After the annual festivity, they complained about their use in public altars, telling the public repeatedly in their speeches at protest rallies that there should not have been any in the name of their sons. When I got the chance to ask Bernabé himself about this in a quick private conversation as the ‘Fathers’ were staging a short hunger strike during the Christmas holiday in the capital, he told me in no uncertain terms: ‘Well, we didn't like them [the altars], because our sons are not dead. We are still searching for them.’Footnote 70 Understandably it had upset the parents to see their sons publicly portrayed as dead rather than missing.
Moreover, at the centre of the country's contentious necropolitics at that time a battle over the definition of the truth was unfolding. The Federal Prosecutor's Office – then under Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam, in charge of overseeing the investigation into the fate of the 43 students, and the former head of the police investigation, Tomás Zerón, currently facing extradition from Israel under suspicion of covering up what really happened to the students – claimed that the students were dead. Meanwhile, the parents refused to accept that the case was closed and, trusting neither Zerón nor Karam, could not let go of the hope that their sons were still alive as long as independent forensic experts had not confirmed them to be dead. Let us listen once more to the words of one of the ‘Fathers and Mothers of Ayotzinapa’ herself:
I am the mother of José Ángel Navarrete González. After eleven months we don't know anything about what happened to our sons. We hope to find them alive … The government wants us to believe all their lies, but thanks to the Argentine team [Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense (Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, EAAF)] they had to retract everything they said happened at the Cocula garbage dump [the crime scene Zerón is now accused of staging]. They wanted us to believe that they [the bodies] were our sons. But they [the EAAF] arrived and helped us. And thank God they were not our sons, but other people who have relatives looking for them. The government with its lies wanted us to believe that they were our sons, but they weren't. The PGR [Federal Prosecutor's Office] also concealed evidence and didn't display it, but thanks to the independent experts [GIEI; see Footnote footnote 2] and the Argentine experts [the EAAF], they failed … The pain of not knowing anything about one's child is unbearable. And as I said to them, we will continue to struggle and to cry out, because it was the state who took our sons. The state took them alive, and we want them back alive. They will come back to us. As a mother, I feel that my son is alive, I feel it in my heart. I won't remain silent … A mother does everything for her child. We will continue. We won't tire until we find our sons alive … Even though the government had said that they've given us money, but for us our sons don't have a price … Our sons are not for sale.Footnote 71
The public altars to the disappeared therefore played into the hands of the Federal Prosecutor's attempt to close the investigation in order to quell the protest movement that had begun to blame the federal government for its handling of the case:Footnote 72 these altars were meant to put pressure on the federal government for its acts of state violence; instead they had unintentionally come to parallel government discourse by depicting the disappeared as dead and devoting ritual attention to them during a festivity explicitly intended to commemorate the nation's deceased.
In the weeks leading up to the Day of the Dead the following year, when it seemed even more likely that the still missing students were in fact dead rather than being held alive somewhere, we altar-makers had learnt from our mistake. The ‘Fathers and Mothers’ of the students declared publicly, and repeatedly, from podia and at protest rallies in the weeks before the Day of the Dead that they did not want altars to be erected to their sons. Epifano Álvarez, one of the ‘Fathers’, for example, said: ‘There should not be any altars to our sons, to our students, because they are alive and not dead.’Footnote 73 The ‘Fathers and Mothers’ therefore told their supporters in civil society that devoting Day of the Dead altars to their missing sons was not an appropriate way to pay tribute to them.
This unambiguous message was adhered to by student activists and other political collectives. The following year (2015) I did not see any altars at all in Mexico City devoted to the 43 disappeared students, although the city had been full of them the year before. Now they were suddenly excluded from the celebrations, due to their unclear status. This shows the contentious sociality surrounding and taboos associated with those who are ‘displaced in death’. The Day of the Dead could no longer guarantee recognition and remembrance for the 43 disappeared students, nor provide them with a space in the middle of the public sphere and debate that represented their rebellious afterlives. Their ambiguous status as ‘disappeared’, and the police tactic to seek to close the case by declaring them dead, made their families insist that they were alive and thus not appropriate subjects for the Day of the Dead.
Necrotaboos: The Hierarchy of Death and Duality of the Days
Relatives of Mexico's disappeared who call for ‘no altars’ for their missing relatives want their victims of violence not to be included in the Day of the Dead due to the circumstances of their death. Some bodies remain displaced in death – disappeared as it were – stuck between the land of the living and the land of the dead, belonging then to neither realm. The Day of the Dead cannot under such tragic circumstances display what I called the ungovernability of the dead, nor can its altars form part of a straightforward ‘ritual of rebellion’.
Instead, the necessary exclusion of the disappeared from the festivity points to an inherent tension in the Day of the Dead's ritual legacy. This problem derives from what we might call ‘the ritual hierarchy of death’: that is, that death differentiates insiders from outsiders. Death tends to be structured by a strict symbolic hierarchy between those dead who have been endowed with funerary rites and buried, and whose souls have thus symbolically found their way to the land of the dead, and those who have not, who remain unburied, condemned as it were to ‘roam the earth for ever’.Footnote 74 Those who have not enjoyed proper burials are stuck in a state of perpetual liminality.Footnote 75 Consequently, it appears as if the Day of the Dead cannot adequately incorporate such souls. Those who are displaced in death have no clear place in Mexico's traditional necrosociality, the principle of social triumph over death and its longstanding horizontal ethics of commemoration. Instead they come with strict necrotaboos.
The problem of the ambiguous souls of the disappeared thus shows whom the Day of the Dead must not celebrate, in the minds of grieving family members at least. Relatives of the disappeared deny their death, and thus such contentious souls pose a new challenge for society in addressing their commemoration. Mexico's more than 90,000 disappeared need their own material culture and new rites devoted solely to them, outside of the Day of the Dead.Footnote 76
One could argue that refusal to include the disappeared in festivals of remembrance like the Day of the Dead is exactly what the state would have wanted – for the disappeared to be forgotten and made invisible – if it were not for the fact that they have shown up elsewhere with a new idiosyncratic material culture, such as in the new unofficial memorial site the MPJD has created at Estela de Luz, right next to Chapúltepec Park in central Mexico City. Here the disappeared are commemorated in metal slabs placed in paving stones that tell their stories in the first person. The disappeared call for justice for the crimes committed against them and maintain that they are not dead and can still come home alive:
i am mayra elisa remess de la vega. i was kidnapped and remain disappeared since the fifteenth of july 2013, in orizaba, veracruz, aged only 23. I like to go to the gym and listen to music, and I love my little dogs. I called my mum before I left home and told her that I was on my way to the gym as usual, but I never arrived because members of a criminal group kidnapped me. My mum has asked all the institutions, prosecutors and authorities for help in finding me but … they only make promises they don't keep! I demand that they seek out the truth and find me. I want to return home now, I miss my family and my dogs. I do not like this life that they are making me live, so the day they become careless I will escape and run away to find refuge … in the arms of my mum!!! I demand that the Mexican state search for the thousands of disappeared people, and I ask the people to help our families; we need Truth and Justice to be able to live in Peace.Footnote 77
Mexico's necrogovernance poses new problems for, and new forms of, its necrosociality.
The nation's strong social obligation to care for one's dead and the taboos associated with the disappeared are opposing forces the grieving families must try to come to terms with. The anthropologist Stanley Brandes argues in Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead that the Day of the Dead's tradition of cooking for and offering food to the deceased in a household is a way of caring for the dead. At the heart of this is a reciprocal exchange between the living and their lost loved ones that maintains relations after death, when children can give something back to the deceased parents who once cared for them.Footnote 78
If children die before their parents, hence breaking this genealogical continuity and reciprocity of care, they can still be commemorated on the Día de los Angelitos (Day of the Child Angels).Footnote 79
These two days, or, more specifically, the night and day structure of the Day of the Dead celebrations – the duality of its days, we might say – appear to correspond with ‘the duality of death’; that is, the cross-cultural tendency to differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ death in some way.Footnote 80 What is seen as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ death may vary over time and across cultures a great deal but there tends to be a symbolic continuity in that ‘Good death is a socially constructive and regenerative death … The body that experiences a bad death – the untimely death of a child, for instance – takes up the opposite meaning.’Footnote 81 Souls who have suffered from ‘bad’ deaths are often thought to linger on earth as ghosts that haunt the living, are often hard to deal with, and may pose a threat to the principle of ‘social triumph over death’.Footnote 82
The Day of the Dead's dual ritual structure mitigates this common symbolic hierarchy between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ death. It embraces both forms of death by also honouring and devoting one day, or night as it were, of the festivity to ‘the untimely death’ of children, the Día de los Angelitos. In other words, the Day of the Dead includes troublesome cases of ‘nongenerative’ death in its celebration of the continued bonds between the living and the dead, a celebration that symbolises the regeneration of life and its continuation in the afterlife. That is to say, this death rite celebrates the family's and society's triumph over death as much as it celebrates the dead and mocks the soon-to-perish mortals. This inclusion of premature (or ‘bad’) death in the festivity – death that would otherwise risk being ‘nongenerative’ and threaten the festivity's capacity to overcome the death of the individual – has made it possible to achieve regeneration out of troublesome tragic death.
The Day of the Dead thus has a horizontal ethics of commemoration at its core that does not differentiate between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ death, hierarchically excluding the former. Instead it is characterised by a clear democratic ethics that welcomes back all the dead and invites them to the table to eat with the living, together again, if only for a night. Its duality of days – the Día de los Angelitos and the Día de los Difuntos – has endowed the festivity with the capacity to also deal with problematic, uncommon forms of death and suffering souls, without losing its celebratory spirit as a community fiesta. Members of the Aztec-descended Nahua communities even add a third day, known as either the Día de los Accidentados (Day of those who Died an Accidental Death) or the Día de los Matados (Day of the Murdered), to the celebration.Footnote 83 This proves the point that Mexico's necrosociality is traditionally one based on the principle of inclusion, one that demands that all dead be celebrated equally.
This is also why the disappeared pose such a challenge to Mexico's necrosociality. There is no Día de los Desaparecidos (Day of the Disappeared) in the festivity, although this is perhaps emerging around 27 March, the anniversary of the inauguration of the Estela de Luz memorial site, and 25 March, which has been designated the UN Day of the Disappeared and will surely take on growing importance in Mexico.
Mexico's disappeared fall into such an ambiguous category that the Day of the Dead cannot adequately incorporate their souls and celebrate them. Death has its own inherent tension – a ritual hierarchy – because it is only when the dead have passed through death's gates, after the completion of the funerary rites of passage, ‘that society, its peace recovered, can triumph over death’.Footnote 84 What, then, happens to this ‘principle of social triumph over death’, and Mexico's democratic and strong ethics of honouring the dead, if society must ‘come to terms with a historical reality in which [this] ideal has become an almost unattainable goal’?Footnote 85
Social movements of grieving relatives generally have a clear goal of punishment of perpetrators for homicides and restorative justice for victims of violence through court proceedings. The displaced dead are here a double curse for the grieving family: the police investigation is brought to a halt through lack of a corpse,Footnote 86 and ritual closure is postponed indefinitely in the search for the lost soul. These wandering undead are beginning to find new homes outside of the Day of the Dead.
These new homes are still true to the spirit of the Day of the Dead. For if there is something that characterises Mexico's necrosocial repertoire and its long tradition then it is the refusal to let the dead die twice: once when they are taken from our streets and homes, and again when they are taken from our memory. Instead they are resurrected and come back to life.
Concluding Thoughts
This article has analysed the role of the Day of the Dead festivity in ritualising rebellion in light of Mexico's recent lethal violence, throwing light on the ungovernability of the dead and the material culture of sustained political afterlives. It shows how surviving families and activists draw from this necrosocial repertoire of contention to challenge necropolitical regimes.
The case of street altars devoted to disappeared persons illustrated the taboos and ambiguities associated with such missing people: these arise from the fact that the missing are presumed by their surviving relatives to be alive and therefore should not be included in the celebration. The disappeared do not fit the duality of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ death seen in the ritual structure of the Day of the Dead, which divides the celebration into two distinct days, one of which is devoted to commemorating tragic deaths.
Rojas-Pérez has conceptualised the mechanisms of ‘necrogovernmentality’ in the wake of violence. Society tries to achieve a ‘controlled recovery of the past’ and ‘to govern the memory of … war’. Even the language related to trauma and discourse of rights is part of this ‘controlled recovery’, according to Rojas-Pérez.Footnote 87 His focus is on governance and power regimes; this article, in contrast, has shown how such regimes may be challenged. I have proposed the concept of a ‘necrosocial repertoire of contention’ to conceptualise the agency associated with the social movements of Latin America's disappeared and used ‘political afterlives’ to capture the ways in which their activism might deploy the moral power of victimhood.Footnote 88 The political afterlife of the dead is part of a necrosocial repertoire of contention that challenges how death is governed.
The concept of ‘political afterlives’ also casts light on object–human agency and interaction. Recent research has begun to address the material culture of the disappeared and the memories associated with it; the multiple social enactments of the disappeared and of other victims of violence; and the associated taboos and complex legacies beyond the obvious quest for restorative truth.Footnote 89 I suggest that the term ‘necrotaboo’ might be a helpful analytical tool to address some of these processes. Latin America's disappeared people rebel against attempts to govern and classify them as they continue to roam the earth in search of their proper home. They break old taboos but establish new ones.
Mass disappearances have destabilised Mexico's traditional necrosociality. New necrosocial repertoires of contention come with creative articulations. In the case of Ayotzinapa, the police investigation into what happened to the 43 students could not ‘govern the memory’ of the crime, but neither can the Day of the Dead guarantee a ‘controlled (annual) recovery’ of the disappeared in order for their surviving families to find peace. The case casts light on how Mexico's capacity to deal with ‘bad’ death is in the balance. The nation must negotiate a strong popular wish to honour the disappeared with forceful new taboos preventing disappearance from being commemorated. To resolve this contradiction will take years of investigations, truth commissions, and reconciliation, and new sites and new rites.
Acknowledgements
This research was made possible with funds from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. I should also thank Casey High and Magnus Course at the University of Edinburgh and Catherine Whittaker at the Goethe University, Frankfurt for insightful comments on early drafts of the text, and, above all, my research informants in Mexico, especially members of the ‘Fathers and Mothers of Ayotzinapa’, of the MPJD and of ‘May our Daughters Return Home’, who took time to answer my questions and without whose participation this article could not have been written.
