Imagining social action in times of despair: Mexico

Abstract

The text presents a cookbook like no other. Recipes to Remember (Recetarios para la Memoria) (2023) features the favorite dishes of people who have disappeared in Mexico. The recipes are shared by mothers, wives or sisters who used to cook for the delight of their loved ones, now missing, and the cookbook was made by their families and members of search brigades from Guanajuato, central Mexico. In this op ed, I invite readers to think about novel forms of social action in times of despair. I ask whether rage hinders our ability to envision and enact meaningful change. I suggest that sustained social engagement, through cooking or embroidery for example, might prove to be crucial as means of fostering care for the missing and for those who search.

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©2024 Society for Applied Anthropology

Keywords:

• Care
• disappeared
• food studies
• social action

Acknowledgement

This text was written thanks to a visiting fellowship awarded by the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London in 2023.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Search brigades are established by families looking for their missing loved ones. Doing the work of the state, they look for clandestine graves in the hope of finding the truth and the bodies of their loved ones.

Additional information

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Abril Saldaña-Tejeda

Abril Saldaña-Tejeda is a feminist scholar that focuses on the social determinants of health, genomics, and postgenomics. She is currently exploring the social, legal, and ethical implications of human genome editing and stem cell research in Latin America. She is an associate professor of Sociology in the Department of Philosophy, Universidad de Guanajuato, Mexico, and a member of the board of Human Organization.