“When people vanish in Sinaloa, they’re almost never seen again. Sometimes drug cartels are responsible; in other cases state security forces are. Often the two sides are colluding – Mexico’s police and military are notoriously corrupt. People are taken because they work for cartels or because they refuse to. Because they buy drugs, sell them, or get in the way of the business. Because they’re in criminal gangs or are believed to be. Because they might be worth a ransom. Because they’re simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“More than 90,000 husbands, sons, and fathers, wives, daughters, and mothers haunt Mexico. They are los desaparecidos – the disappeared.”
(Annelise Jolley. “A Feast For Lost Souls” The Atavist Magazine, No. 121. November 30, 2021.)
Freelance writer and editor Annelise Jolley writes in The Atavist Magazine that “enforced disappearances” – the legal term for the abduction of individuals and the concealment of their whereabouts – have plagued Latin American countries for decades. The syntax of the problem is strained by necessity: People don’t disappear, which implies they have a choice in the matter. Rather, they are disappeared, by forces beyond their control.
In Mexico, more than 90 percent of disappearances have occurred since 2006, the year then president Felipe Calderón enlisted the military to fight drug cartels. Today a maelstrom of gang and cartel conflict, as well as government and police corruption, continues to sweep up civilians, most of them poor and male. Impunity exacerbates the problem: According to national figures, there were roughly 7,000 disappearances in 2019, but only 351 legal cases were opened. Of those, two were prosecuted.
One day a person is there, and the next they are gone. Their loved ones are left to search for something, anything, tangible to mourn.
The impulse to bury the dead is ancient. It may even predate our species: In South Africa, paleo-archaeologists discovered fossilized bone fragments of Homo naledi in deep, nearly inaccessible cave chambers, hinting that pre-humans as far back as 300,000 years may have deliberately laid one another to rest.
Jolley shares …
“Burial is seen as the final physical act of tenderness the living can offer the dead. It provides a sense of completion, of having accompanied someone as far down the road of life as we can go with them. Funerary rites enshrine stories of faith, love, and sorrow, and graves offer the grieving a place they can return to again and again.
“'Just as the living need places to inhabit, so it is often in the nature of our memory-making to wish to be able to address our dead at particular sites of the Earth’s surface,' writes Robert Macfarlane in his book Underland: A Deep Time Journey. 'The grief of those who have been unable to locate the bodies of their loved ones can be especially corrosive—acid and unhealing.'”
“This is the double cruelty of enforced disappearances: First comes the loss of a life, and then comes the denial of any chance to lay the body to rest.
“In Sinaloa, Mexico, women recover the bodies of missing loved ones—and cook to keep their memories of the dead alive.”
(Annelise Jolley. “A Feast For Lost Souls” The Atavist Magazine, No. 121. November 30, 2021.)
Jolley traveled to Sinaloa to meet a women-led collective determined to reclaim that chance. They call themselves Las Rastreadoras del Fuerte (The Trackers of El Fuerte), and they are part of a long legacy of civilian women leading campaigns to find Mexico’s disappeared.
Formed in 2014, Las Rastreadoras is one of these groups. It has some 200 members, most of them women from El Fuerte, a municipality in northern Sinaloa. They’ve all been touched in some way by enforced disappearances. Many have lost husbands or sons.
Jolley explains …
“Criminal groups across Mexico dispose of bodies in distinctive ways—some burn them, others dissolve them in acid. In El Fuerte, the disappeared tend to be buried in shallow unmarked graves in the countryside. So Las Rastreadoras search the landscape with basic tools: shovels, machetes, spades, picks. The women dig in the dry earth, knowing that to properly bury their dead, they must unbury them first.
They don’t call what they’re looking for bodies, corpses, or remains. To Las Rastreadoras, the dead are tesoros—treasures.”
(Annelise Jolley. “A Feast For Lost Souls” The Atavist Magazine, No. 121. November 30, 2021.)
The idea to compile a cookbook arose. Photographer Zahara Gómez Lucini had spent time documenting Las Rastreadoras, and together she and the women came to a realization: “The problem with a decades-long issue like los desaparecidos is that the public grows weary of it – of hearing the names of the missing, of fathoming their ever growing numbers, of seeing photos of bodies and watching mothers weep.” How, then, could Las Rastreadoras push back against the erasure of their loved ones? How could the women resist oblivion?
Food was the answer. All the women had memories of their missing that were tied to cooking and eating. They decided to gather recipes for the dishes their loved ones had enjoyed most. They would invite cookbook readers to taste their loss. The recipes would be reminders of the bonds the dead shared with family and friends, of the tables they sat around, of the pleasure they took in eating. The dishes would be proof of lives lived and lost, and portals to empathy.
“Feasting allows the loneliness and terror of existence to be forgotten, at least momentarily,” anthropologist Gina Rae La Cerva has written. “Such pleasure brings us into that raw, mad, deep love of life.” Feasting can also be a venue for the sharing and salving of pain.
Recetario para la Memoria (“The Memory Recipe Book”) was published in 2019. In addition to the recipes, it features Zahara’s images of Las Rastreadoras preparing meals – of women creating the means of their physical and emotional survival. Many of them were photographed cooking their chosen dishes for the first time since their loved ones were disappeared.
(Annelise Jolley. “A Feast For Lost Souls” The Atavist Magazine, No. 121. November 30, 2021.)
Fifty percent of the proceeds from each book purchased go directly to the Rastreadoras. Each of the thirty dishes in the book speaks through its local ingredients and flavors, and is named after the loved one to whom it is dedicated.
Take, for instance, “Las Pizzadillas Para Roberto” – a type of quesadilla made with braised beef and shredded cheese that is accompanied by refried beans, salsa, and a cucumber-lettuce salad. “It’s very simple, but it was my son’s favorite,” Mirna Nereida Medina Quiñonez explained in an interview. “He called them ‘pizzadillas’ (‘little pizzas’) because I’d use two tortillas, instead of just folding one in half. Then, my son would cut it into four pieces, just like pizza slices.”
(Sabrina Mandanici. “Zahara Goméz Lucini, Recetario para la memoria.” Collector Daily. April 15, 2021.)
Historical Note:
The Day of the Dead (el Día de los Muertos), is a Mexican holiday where families welcome back the souls of their deceased relatives for a brief reunion that includes food, drink and celebration. A blend of Mesoamerican ritual, European religion and Spanish culture, the holiday is celebrated each year from October 31-November 2.
The roots of the Day of the Dead, celebrated in contemporary Mexico and among those of Mexican heritage in the United States and around the world, go back some 3,000 years, to the rituals honoring the dead in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.
While October 31 is Halloween, November 2 is All Souls Day or the Day of the Dead. According to tradition, the gates of heaven are opened at midnight on October 31 and the spirits of children can rejoin their families for 24 hours. The spirits of adults can do the same on November 2.
Conclusion
“They lie in clandestine graves strewn across the desert, mingled in communal pits, or hacked to pieces and scattered on desiccated hillsides.
“Buried without a name, often all that’s left once their bodies are gone are the empty casings of a person: a bloodied sweatshirt, a frilly top, a tattered dress.
“All over Mexico, mothers wander under the scorching sun, poking at the earth and sniffing for the tell-tale scent of decomposing flesh, hoping for a scrap that points toward their missing son or daughter.
“For most, the answers never come.”
(Oscar Lopez. Photographs by Fred Ramos. “Gone.” The New York Times. October 03, 2021.)
Government officials won praise from human rights advocates when they announced a plan in late 2019 to assemble a team of national and international experts with the aim of identifying all the bodies and even bone fragments.
The latest setback has been COVID-19, which has officially killed nearly 200,000 people in Mexico.
“The expectation, generally, was that the subject of disappearance and of identifications would be one of the top priorities of the federal government,” said Humberto Guerrero Rosales, a member of a citizens advisory board on the issue formed in 2018. “But then came a global pandemic.”
Notwithstanding Covid-19, 2019 showed a record 34,648 murders in 2019.
The effort has stalled amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the realization that the forensic challenges are more daunting than anticipated.
“Few cemeteries — almost none — have a good registry of the location and quantity of people who are buried there,” said Roxana Enríquez Farias, a founder of the Mexican Forensic Anthropology Team, a nonprofit that has aided with state-level exhumation plans.
(Maya Averbuch and Kate Linthicum. “Where are Mexico’s disappeared? Many have been in government graves all along.” Los Angeles Times. February 28, 2021.)
Awash in los desaparecidos amid the unbearable grief and the pain, Mexican people have Las Rastreadoras, Recetario para la Memoria, and their precious food. Mexican cuisine is a complex and ancient cuisine stemming from three main Mexican cultures: Mayan, Aztec, and Spain,
In 2010, Mexican cuisine was inscribed by UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) on their Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. UNESCO describes Mexican cuisine as “elaborate and symbol-laden,” and goes on to explain that this culinary tradition is exceptional in its ability to “express community identity, reinforce social bonds, and build stronger local, regional and national identities.”
Spanish-Argentinian photographer Zahara Gómez Lucini, whose work aims to explore violence from the memory of the territories that have suffered it, says …
“Let's allow the act of cooking to become an excuse to speak the unspeakable; to bring back those who have been taken away from us. Let's allow cooking to become a survival mechanism to face their absence.”
Readers, please remember Las Rastreadoras – who are mostly housewives in their 40s and 50s – literally scouring the nearby grasslands, deserts, and jungles with shovels in hands hoping to make a discovery – a bittersweet finding of a loved one they know as their “treasure.”
Someone tell me if they
have seen my husband,
Asked the madam.
His name is Ernesto X.
He is forty years old.
He works as a caretaker, in a car
dealership business.
He had a dark shirt and light pants.
He went out the night
before last night and he has not returned
And I don't know what to think
anymore,
Because this had never happened to me before.
Oooo...
Where do the
disappeared go?
Look in the water and in the bushes.
And why is
it that they disappear?
Because were are not all the same.
And
when does the disappeared come back?
Every time you have him (or
her) in your thoughts.
How do you talk to the disappeared?
With
a gripping emotion inside you.
From "Desapariciones" (English Translation) by Rubén Blades. Album: Buscando America (Looking for America), 1984
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