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Abstract
This article examines the politics of gender in armed guerrilla organizations during Mexico’s Dirty War (1960-1980s) and the role of visual culture in documenting histories of state violence and revolutionary struggle. By centering specifically on Mexican film-maker Luisa Riley’s documentary Flor en Otomí (2012), this article explores the possibilities and limitations of visual culture in representing gendered histories of trauma in recent Mexican history. As one of the few cultural texts that documents women’s participation in the history of Mexico’s armed socialist organizations, the film alludes to the difficulty of audiovisually portraying violence and the tensions that emerge when representing the gendered ghosts of Mexico’s Dirty War. Ultimately, this article argues that the eradication of thousands of (gendered) subjectivities from Mexico’s national consciousness has created a gendered haunting that holds contemporary neoliberal Mexico accountable to its recent violent past.
Notes
1. I would like to thank the University of Maryland, Baltimore County for awarding me their Postdoctoral fellowship for Faculty Diversity (2011–2013). This fellowship provided me with the funding necessary to complete my trip to Mexico in July 2012 where I was able to meet with filmmaker Luisa Riley and former guerrilleras of the Dirty War. I would also like to thank Luisa Riley for her generosity and the guerrilleras I was able to interview in Mexico. I would also like to extend my thanks to Adela Cedillo and Drs. Jennie Daniels, Carole McCann, Sean Dinces and Rebecca Adelman for reviewing drafts of this article and for providing me with critical and insightful feedback.
2. All translations from the original Spanish are mine, unless otherwise noted. A copy of Cárdenas’s testimony can be found in Memoria del primer encuentro nacional de mujeres ex guerrilleras, which provides transcripts of the panels given at this conference.
3. The Mexican government denies any involvement or human rights abuses in the extermination of the guerrilla groups, which has contributed to this lack of public knowledge of the Dirty War history. Indeed, even the terminology used to describe this epoch of Mexico’s political history has been termed ‘Dirty War’ since the 1990s, and there is still much contestation over whether such a term should be attributed to this era. But since the declassification of government documents in 2000, many scholars have researched the history of the Mexican Dirty War (see Herrera Calderón and Cedillo’s Challenging Authoritarianism in Mexico for further information).
4. Flor en Otomí (Flower in Otomí) refers to the translation of Prieto Stock’s first name, which means flower in the Otomí language, spoken by the indigenous Otomí community from central Mexico.
5. The performance artist collective, Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol, has a theatrical piece entitled ‘El rumor del incendio’, which is a theatrical representation of the historical memory of guerrillas of Mexico’s Dirty War and centers on the life of former guerrillera Margarita Uría Hermosillo.
6. While training with members of the MAR guerrilla group, Bornemann describes his encounter with a guerrillera named ‘Angela’: ‘She was short, shapely, and fairly attractive. It was pleasant to hear her speak with her norteño accent. She always projected a sense of warmth and camaraderie. In one of our uphill hikes, we were surprised by a forceful sudden shower. Her wet white blouse revealed a brassiere hardly able to contain her big, firm breasts’ (Citation2007: 36).
7. This is not to say that the guerrilleras were not proud of their identities as mothers, wives, partners, daughters, and so forth; what becomes problematic, however, is directly linking the guerrilleras’ political identity to their experiences in traditional gender roles.
8. It is well documented that the government orchestrated a methodical cover-up of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre and violent repression of left-wing guerrilla groups as part of Cold War era politics.
9. For more information on Latin American documentary film, see Vinicius Navarro et al.’s New Documentaries in Latin America as well as David William Foster’s Latin American Documentary Filmmaking.
10. Elisa Benavides Guevara is one of the surviving members of the Nepantla raid and she discusses the clandestine life she shared with Prieto Stock in the safe house. Although she and the other individuals interviewed in the film are never identified, Benavides Guevara is a prominent and well-known figure in the Mexican activist realm, as she has lived for many years advocating indigenous rights in Chiapas.
11. The film also discusses the impact her political decisions had upon her family members and also alluded to how Prieto Stock’s political involvement seemed to fulfill her father’s own personal political ambitions.
12. This produces what I refer to as a gendered haunting, where the cultural narratives usually portray the men as protagonists of Mexico’s guerrilla history, thereby minimizing women’s involvement in these movements. Although Riley attempts to highlight Prieto Stock’s political subjectivity, she too reproduces gendered norms of Prieto Stock’s character in the depiction of her personal life.
13. As governor of the state of Mexico (2005–2011), Peña Nieto sanctioned the use of Dirty War era tactics of violence against political dissidents, such as the violent repression of protestors in San Salvador Atenco in 2006.
14. This legacy of violence is evident when Riley interviews the witnesses to the ambush in Nepantla; one woman noted that this kind of brutal and hyperviolent response was not atypical in her rural community, as she states, ‘we are used to defending ourselves’ from agents of the state. Riley includes these audiovisual testimonies in order to demonstrate the continued marginalization and repression of rural, impoverished communities in contemporary Mexico.
15. While former officials of the Dirty War era benefit from the impunity and lack of information on these crimes, many survivors are fearful of coming forward to denounce past state crimes as this has led to instances of harassment, fear-mongering and other intimidation tactics.
16. As former student activist of the 1960s Mexican student movement Ana Ignacia Rodríguez informed me, after the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968 many politically active women were terrorized into silence and refused to speak of this violent history.