La ciudadanía social

There are infinite ways of talking about absence. The absence of a person in contemporary Mexico is generally shrouded in uncertainty, and is often associated with criminalit y.

Since 2006, more than 150,000 people have been killed and 30,000 persons have disappeared. Not knowing the whereabouts of a person in a country that is characterised by high levels of violence, state corruption, and systematic insecurity has propelled hundreds of families to start searching for their loved ones, drawing on whatever financial, cultural and social resources they might have. Thus, their understanding of absence is shaped by their continuous engagement with the different materialities they collect and come in contact with, while searching and analysing the last movements and activities of their loved ones.

The analysis of absence in this chapter considers the ways in which a person’s absence can have agency, and can even give life to a process of re-negotiated sense of identity for the absent person, as well as, those left behind, and who might be involved in search strategies (Walter, 1996; Maddrell, 2013). Following from Meyer (2012) who argues for a relational ontology of absences, in this chapter I discuss the different states of absence that relatives of disappeared persons in Mexico experience. I will do so through emphasis on families’ engagement with non-linear temporalities and diverse forensic materialities.

Further, I will show how the relatives of disappeared persons, in their search for their loved ones, share knowledge and spaces with other family members and their closest social networks, gradually expanding their spheres of action as they encounter national NGOs, state institutions, international agencies, and, finally, recognise and advocate for other people’s absences.

154 Drawing on work from the field of cultural geography that emphasises the embodied experience of absence and its social and spatial dimensions (Meier et al., 2013, p. 423;

Meyer and Woodthorpe, 2008; Sigvardsdotter, 2012; Maddrell, 2013; Frers, 2013; Parr et al., 2013, 2014, 2015), in this chapter I will analyse families’ experiences of absence-presence and its embeddedness in their bodies through their everyday practices of search.

Thus, experiencing absence is understood as something or someone as present, rather than something or someone being simply recalled (Meier, et al., 2013). Further, I will explore the re-negotiated identities that the relatives of the disappeared acquire each time they experience the absence of their loved ones. Since absence is always relational, whenever a different category of absence emerges, the new category not only affects those left behind, but also has consequences for the understanding of the absence itself. The identit y of the absent, as well as the identity of those who remain, is mutually shaped:

[…]it is the now absent [person] having continuity of presence, through the experiential and relational tension between the physical absence (not being there) and the emotional presence (a sense of still being there). […] Absence is not merely a “presence” in and of itself, but rather the absent is evoked, made present, in and through enfolded blendings of the visual, material, haptic, aural, olfactory, emotional-affective and […] invoking a literal sense of continued “presence”, despite bodily and cognitive absence. (Maddrell, 2013, p. 505)

Maddrell explains how the absent can continue to be evoked, to have presence through distinct material and immaterial experiences. The ways in which families or the state decide to evoke an absent person have consequences in how the absence is perceived, and the claims that can be made in the public sphere. In the case of Mexico, authorities have systematically criminalised absence, or have dismissed the risks associated with absence in a country with high levels of violence. Thus, the ways in which these absences are discussed by the state and its experts in the public sphere differ from the ways in which families evoke the absences of their loved ones. There is also a political dimension to

155 absences. The spaces where people and things are made present matters as much as the spaces from where people and things are absent. Absences are, then, continua l ly

“negotiated and contested” (Meier et al., 2013, p. 426).

Forms of landscape transformation and everyday memorialization, such as Memorial benches, domestic private shrines, painting city walls with the face of their absent kin, are examples of how absences are evoked and lived by family members (Edkins, 2011and 2010; Maddrell, 2013). However, families in Mexico are not only engaging with these activities of remembering in order to evoke the presence of their loved ones in their everyday lives. Rather, they are creating new ways of evoking presence “in and through enfolded blendings of the visual, material, haptic, aural, olfactory and emotiona l-affective” (Maddrell, 2013, p. 505). For instance, families are learning by experience how to locate, trace and identify their disappeared.

Families have been collecting, analysing, and making sense of materialities and technologies. Their investigations have included the analysis of organised crime networks, geolocation, transport data, phone records, drone mapping, social media, bone fragments, statistics, songs, CCTV images, body fluids and forensic reports. The collection of this information requires mobility, and the navigation of uncertain spaces.

Through mobility these groups and individuals engage in knowledge-making and knowledge-expanding processes. Following on Ingold: “Knowledge is ambulator y”

(2010; 2009). We engage in knowledge making practices as we walk. Walking is, in itself, a process of thinking and knowing: “we know as we go, not before we go” (Ingold, 2010, p. 239). Thus, for families, the disappearance of one of their members is the starting point of their wayfaring practices. They will have to learn how to navigate the judicial and state security apparatus in order to evoke the presence of their absent loved one, and to imagine possible futures.

156 Drawing on these ideas, I argue that the particular kind of absences that are experienced in Mexico are a form of technology, and can be understood as a myriad of practices organised to produce certain outcomes. For example, as relatives of the disappeared have discovered, it might be strategic to report an absence as a kidnapping, which immedia te ly recognises the possibility that a crime may have been committed, and, as a result, triggers police action and a search. Or, if the absent person has been missing for a significa nt period of time, then it might be useful to report the individual as dead in order for the family to obtain a death certificate. The capacity of an absence to travel through differe nt spaces and to be rearranged to make particular claims is what makes it a fluid technology.

A fluid technology can travel, is not too rigorously bound, is adaptable, and can change and mutate over time. A fluid absence takes on the capacity to retain continuity through transformation. And its fluidity opens up spaces for transformation and to become political.