A Review of Las Luchas por la Memoria: Contra las Violencias en México

Las Luchas por la Memoria: Contra las Violencias en México edited by Alexandra Délano Alonso, Benjamin Nienass, Alicia de los Ríos Merino and María de Vecchi Gerli (El Colegio de México, 2023, 595 pages).

They would place the names of their missing loved ones on a glass statue located in the center of the plaza. Only when all the disappeared return and remove their names from the statue themselves, will the statue be transparent again as a state’s actions should be. Over the decade that followed, the plaza of the disappeared, or la plaza de las y los desaparecidos, became a major destination for all seeking to gather to protest, to mourn, to remember. “This is not a memorial,” they stated then. This statement raises a central question in contemporary Mexico: what is a memorial?

Alexandra Délano Alonso, Benjamin Nienass, Alicia de los Ríos Merino and María de Vecchi Gerli, editors of Las Luchas por la Memoria: Contra las Violencias en México (available for free download in Spanish only here), note that social groups most often build memorials as a means of symbolic reparation in the aftermath of violence. In the case of the plaza, developed in the chapter by Dairee Ramírez, as well as dozens of other examples documented in the 20 chapters of this edited volume, memory activists are seeking to commemorate victims amid ongoing violence and impunity. Moreover, the Mexican state has become invested in creating memorials as well. Indeed, different political parties in power since President Felipe Calderón escalated the “war on drugs” have pursued commemorating victims of violence from previous terms as a means of deflecting attention from the violence occurring under their own administration.

What is the function of commemoration in the absence of peace and justice? The editors and authors of this volume convincingly argue that “memory activism” of the kind illustrated above is a means of “resisting the State’s impulse to create memorials to bring closure,” when justice has not been served. In Mexico, memory-making is a terrain of struggle in which activists, artists and civil society are charged with challenging state narratives as a means of “prefigurative politics,” of enacting a state that is accountable to its citizens.

One of the main strategies of memory activists to achieve these goals, outlined in multiple chapters, is to call out continuities in state violence in Mexico over time. For example, they establish links between state impunity in the contemporary “war on drugs” and state violence carried out in the 1970s. In the process, the authors reveal the specific struggles and tensions memory activists face as they seek to build these ties over time and across activist groups while seeking to maintain their differences, and the specificity of their human losses, visible. Memory activists also face the challenge of reinventing what a memorial—most often equated to death—means in a context of disappearances in which the search for justice and the disappeared is ongoing and the hope that the disappeared are living is very much alive. In addition, they face the fear of residents who dread that these spaces might attract violent retribution. Throughout the volume, the authors remind us, these activists work in a context of great human mobility in which migrants are particularly vulnerable to crime and particularly invisible to broader Mexican society. Taken together, the result of these thorough analyses is theoretically rich, offering new approaches and concepts to advance memory studies and transitional justice research, especially in sites of ongoing violence in and beyond Mexico.

Methodologically, the strength of this edited volume lies in the variety of voices that are represented, the multiplicity of sites, and the depth of evidence provided. This edited volume brings together a diverse group of authors—family members of the disappeared, academics, artists, architects—writing from different parts of Mexico and utilizing different formats to express themselves. It is fitting that a book about collective action is truly a collective product. As an avid reader of this emerging field, I find it particularly powerful to see an academic analysis written alongside the very subjects that are the focus of the study.

What sets The Struggle for Memory against Violences in Mexico apart from recent works detailing the struggles of the families of the disappeared in Mexico is its framing centering memory and memorialization processes as a site of struggle. Memorials are only mentioned in passing in other works, as the background to a scene rather than the object of study. The editors and authors show us that justice is at stake in how we remember, in who gets to remember and be remembered, in what is remembered, when, and where. They reveal the politics at play in memory-making and their transformative potential.

In brief, memorials have been largely dismissed as sites of mourning when looking for sites of political transformation. The authors and editors of this book want us to look at them more closely and in a new light. Amid black-and-white pictures of the disappeared, amid the candles and the chants, in the naming of the missing and the dead, state narratives are being contested and demands for state accountability are being embroidered into the collective consciousness. Activists and families of the disappeared are forging slowly, painfully, but also steadily, and increasingly, an underexamined path forward for civil society. This book offers a new approach to understanding multiple struggles against violence through the lens of memory and memorialization, highlighting its potential for social and political transformation.

In the editors’ own words, “their resistance and struggle maintain a radical hope of building another present, another future with justice and dignity.” It is radical to be hopeful in contemporary Mexico. It is also human. This book tells the story of how Mexicans, including some of the worst-hit by this violence, are reclaiming their right to hope in the face of mass violence and impunity. Beyond inspiring, it is a powerful and necessary call to action. This book will help readers see a fuller picture of violence in Mexico through incorporating memorials as important sites of political and social transformation. Thinking beyond this project, the editors and authors could further develop the broader lessons this book carries for the study of memory-making elsewhere, where memory-making too has become a terrain of struggle. The project was nonetheless to center Mexico, and this book provides the most detailed, nuanced and rigorous account of memory-making in the face of pervasive and ongoing violence available to date. More broadly, this book will inspire readers to reclaim their right to remember and hope in the face of multiple forms of violence that might be closer to them.

Ana Villarreal is Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston University and 2025-2026 Madero Fellow at DRCLAS. She studies social responses to violence and is the author of The Two Faces of Fear: Violence and Inequality in the Mexican Metropolis (Oxford, 2024).

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