Search

This text explores artistic practices in Mexico that aim to bring attention to the issue of forced disappearance and challenge official narratives. One project, Monumento a los desaparecidos, creates an online platform where visitors can share the names of missing people, giving them a voice and creating a repository of voices for public protests. Other artistic projects and forms of solidarity support the search work of family groups and use digital technologies to facilitate these efforts. The article also discusses the challenges of constructing a counter-narrative to the state's representation of the crisis and emphasizes the importance of memory and resistance. It concludes by examining the impact of the "war on drugs" in Mexico and the role of organized civil society in responding to forced disappearance. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores the crisis of disappearances in Mexico and the efforts of families and advocates to challenge the government's control over the issue. It highlights the high number of officially recognized disappearances in the country and the flaws in the government's counting methodology. The article also discusses the obstacles faced by families in reporting disappearances and the dismantling of key institutions responsible for addressing the crisis. Mexican anthropologist María Sánchez Domínguez-Guilarte emphasizes the stigmatization of victims and the need for search collectives to directly narrate their stories to the public. The project El Bosque de la Esperanza aims to create spaces for collective memory work and advocate for justice through a digital platform and a WhatsApp chatbot. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Arenal.Revista de Historia de las Mujeres is the property of Arenal. Revista de Historia de las Mujeres and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Chuj people is a Mayan people with presence in Mexico and Guatemala, their contemporary history integrates different affronts to their cultural life and constant usurpations of their rights and territories. As a survival strategy, they have needed to move and integrate into hostile and adverse contexts as a means of physical and psychological resistance. Based on the historical reconstruction and collective memory of Chuj members, this article reconstructs and analyzes political, social and cultural components imbricated in three different historical moments in the southern Mexican border, with the objective of understanding and making visible the trajectory of the Chuj people in Mexico, their stories of resistance, reconstruction and hope in the face of multiple physical and epistemological displacements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Documentación de las Ciencias de la Información is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Reducing vulnerability is the aim of flood risk management plans, yet their success depends on acceptance and implementation by their community. It is important, then, to study approaches that encourage societal participation in decision-making. The present study combined three participatory methods to capture and understand local knowledge on flood vulnerability reduction in a coastal town in southern Mexico. As a feasibility outcome, we found that these kinds of approaches involving community participation and consultation are attainable and easy to integrate into the local planning processes of vulnerability reduction and flood risk management. On process outcomes, we found that the community is aware of the flood risk given by their spatial location, has taken actions to adapt, and proposed other actions to reduce their vulnerability. We found no quantitative relationship between the levels of flood delimited by the participatory geographic information systems approach and the community's socioeconomic characteristics obtained by the house survey. Still, qualitative analysis of the three methods revealed that the collective memory of experiencing a flood plays a significant role in the measures the population takes to adapt and reduce vulnerability. • Community perceptions are essential to reduce vulnerability. • Community engagement allow an integrated vision in flood-risk reduction planning. • Participatory methods are attainable and could be used in different situations. • Complementarity of the methods allows to understand the local flood-risk knowledge. • Collective memory plays a significant role to adapt and reduce vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Estudios Politicos (01215167) is the property of Universidad de Antioquia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Food memory has been determinant in the survival of social groups, the causes of its activation are varied (e.g. feelings, identity, need or challenge) and it is transmitted from generation to generation. These interactions have given rise to an ethnic food heritage that responds to cultural processes and territorial specificities. It is in this logic that this study is proposed, which aims to explore the dynamics between food, memory, and identity of two ethnic groups in the state of Puebla in Mexico in a context of health disruption. The experience of these two groups shows how food identity and memory is particularly strategic in the face of adversity, as is currently the case with the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a brief overview that seeks to make a series of approaches to an undeniably complex topic: the struggle of indigenous peoples in the context of colonialization processes worldwide, national and local scales. This survey first characterizes, systematizes, and relates the efforts made by some 350 million people worldwide (including more than 15 million indigenous people from Mexico) to safeguard their unique historical and cultural identity in the face of their respective mainstream society over the past sixty years. This will provide a basis to look at the challenges that a country like Mexico faces in preserving the spatial or territorial matrix that guarantees the sustenance and survival of these peoples, and their beliefs, traditions, ways of life, and deep knowledge regarding the conservation and regeneration of natural resources for the benefit of all of human society. At this level of analysis, this study seeks to gain deeper insights into strategies for preserving and regenerating habitat used by an ancestral Zapotec community living in the Chinantla Highlands region, in the northern mountain ranges of the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. The paper concludes by highlighting the strengths of a historical memory that hews to epistemological categories utterly different from those prevailing in Western culture in the day-to-day engagement of these cultures with their land and their natural surroundings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The general objective of this article is to analyze the activities of the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Center (Frayba), a non-profit civil organization located in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, in terms of memory and archival practices. Information was gathered through interviews and documentary analysis. In particular, we endeavor to understand and discuss how Frayba workers document and analyze human rights violations (not just judicially), based on victims' testimonies and on how they classify and curate their archive. In our opinion, Frayba's human rights activists are "memory entrepreneurs" (E. Jelin) working in a violent context. A distinctive feature of their registry, collection, and archival practices is political activism, which underlies their political project that builds, and reconstructs, a troubled past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with a historiographical review focused on primordial titles elaborated in the viceregal period, as inexhaustible sources in understanding the historical reality of the Indians towns. Likewise, it presents an analysis of the content of the primordial title of Xicalco, which is integrated by pictographs and writing. It has been problematized about the circumstances of its elaboration, based on the historical memory of the ancient foundation and its long-term significance. The originality of this work lies in the fact that the content of this manuscript has not been studied, a discourse that seeks to demonstrate and corroborate the ancestral origin of this third-generation population. The latter forms the narrative that emphasizes the recognition of the space of the people and of the patron saint, both as an instrument of identity and legitimation of its existence as a political corporation. Thus, we have verified that the inhabitants of Xicalco, through the primordial title, dated 1640, and the 2018 Declaration, recovered the historical memory to ensure their power over their land. During the viceroyalty they had to face the advance of the Spanish farmers, on the territory of ancestral inheritance; in the 20th century they faced intra-urban immigration, the sale of land and communal assets that threatened the customs of the inhabitants of Xicalco. For this article we have consulted two primary sources, one of them located in the General Archive of the Nation (agn), the primary title of San Miguel Xicalco, which is part of the branch Collection of Documents and Land Titles that were transferred to this site from the Secretariat of Agrarian Reform of Mexico; the second is the Declaration of the original towns of San Miguel Xicalco. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the beginning of 1980, one of the most intense and atrocious military repressions in the long history of political violence of Guatemala was unleashed. Within the framework of the disputes of the Cold War, the Mayan peoples became internal enemies of national projects and, therefore, they were the targets of strategies of terror, forcing them to migrate in order to protect their physical and cultural lives. Although the state violence marked a rupture, experiences such as those of the Mayan Chuj people are an example of physical and symbolic resistance. With the aim of contributing new data for analysis and reflection concerning the violence exerted over the Mayan peoples in Guatemala, this article conducts a historical reconstruction of those events, revisiting aspects of the historical and collective memory of the Mayan Chuj people. To this end, the quality of the political, social and cultural interactions of the essential aspects that unleashed, accompanied and marked the context of the armed conflict, the forced displacement, protection and refuge in Mexico are analysed, as well as the return and repatriation of the Mayan Chuj people to Guatemala. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Architecture is an experiential, experimental and collective expression process which is ruled by different pattern language characteristics from different physical, social, economic and cultural contexts. The main objective of this article is to unveil the living pattern language of the Mexican town of San Antonio Guadalupe through a graphic method based on the theories of Christopher Alexander and Richard Sennett. Type-forms studied are: General distribution; Growth and orientation; Ceilings and pavements; Transitions; Delimitations; Windows; Furniture; Garden; and Colors and materials. The study of these allows the usage of their results as a catalog of possible design tools to act on any project located in that territory. It is considered that, given the systematization of the method, it can also be used to identify patterns revealed from other places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Ciências Sociais - Brazil is the property of Revista de Ciencias Socias do Universidade Federal do Ceara and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Traditional textiles have been a primary tool in the construction of memory. The collective character of textiles evokes a knowledge that has been appreciated and learned by generations of weavers who inherited a resistance art. The research focuses on the textile centers that emerged at the end of the last century in Peru, and later in Mexico, as cultural and museum spaces where some weavers have been integrated as part of intercultural work teams. This article seeks to reflect on how when the voices of the weavers are taken in consideration in places where they have been historically ignored, the ways in which folk art and the art created by women has been studied are questioned, pondering on how weavers are not seen as imparters of knowledge outside their communities. With an approach based on Latin American art theory and an ethnographic work that includes testimonies and interviews with women who are part of textile centers in both Mexico and Peru, this research hopes to be a contribution on the recognition and appreciation of the different forms of creation that are part of the diverse and plural societies that integrate Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studies in Oral Folk Literature / Estudis de Literatura Oral Popular is the property of Universitat Rovira I Virgili and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The 2016 US elections offer the opportunity for interpretation within a continuum of semiotic processes. This is particularly acute in regards to previous events, such as the visit in August 31, 2016 of US president candidate Donald Trump to Mexico. This paper aims to approach this political event as a cultural text containing several subtexts with diverse layers of meaning production: the mentioned visit as a candidate; Mexican president Peña Nieto's dismissal of secretary Videgaray; Candidate Trump's rally in Phoenix, Arizona, USA. Drawing from Lotman's ideas, special attention is given in this semiotic process to the inflection point where the paths of history cross and become unpredictable (1999; 2013; 2000). Also, it incorporates this theorist views about the concept of text and semiosphere (1996), in particular as container of collective cultural memory, and meaning production, as well as a point of view from a gender perspective. The analysis includes rhetorical devices, such as ad populum and ad hominem arguments, metaphors, as well as pragmatic strategies, such as intensifiers and attenuators to appeal to audience emotions, which make evident a populist right wing ideology embedded in political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a sociological interpretation about the way that space, collective identity and memory embody in the neighborhood La Fama, south of México City. Diverse ethnographic techniques were applied -as in-depth interviews, participant observation, mental maps, tours in the neighborhood with locals-. As we will see, the collective identity of the locals, has a close relationship with several vital places, which in turn are triggers of the intersubjective memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents some results of an ethnographic research, that during the last three years has been dedicated to record and analyse the practices of commemoration of the "dirty war" (guerra sucia) in Mexico. This involves articulating the memories of both violence and resistance. Strategies used by Mexican government during the dirty war, expressed a policy of fear -criminalization of protest, murder, forced disappearance and torture-; at the same time, resistance strategies form civil society such as marches, protests, tributes and commemorative days are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this text I argument several things, to know: 1) there is a different way than the individual to revisit the past, to remember in the cultural frame and this is named collective memory; 2) there are, likewise, imposing ways about what happened in the past, as the silence, which carry to the social oblivion; 3) Mexico was immersed in a sociopolitical context from the 60s to the 70s of the last century, which force participants of social, pacifist and legal movements to take up the weapons; and those guerrilla groups were also repressed by the State; 4) the practice unfolded by the authority to annihilate the guerrilla was named dirty war; 5) in that dirty war there was illegal detentions, clandestine jail, torture, among other practices which consequence was hundreds of political missing in the reviewed case in Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some routes of analyses around the following question: How to incorporate ethically the problem in their daily actions, and similarly, how to avoid the successful strategies of oblivion and indifference? are addressed in this paper. Certain emphasis is made on the gained importance that the popular processes have specially those related to the youth, while, thanks to their narratives, they increase and succeed, on a daily basis, over the authoritarian rhetoric seeking to silence memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows the relation that exists between Latin American countries regarding a shared memory in the region during the second half of the twentieth century. It proposes an axis of integration: struggle-repression-resistance. It also studies the traits of this memory and the elements that constitute it, the ways in which it manifests, as well as how it develops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From a critical-exploratory positioning this article discusses sedimented forms of understanding and mean the "student" figure as well as his/her representations in gender terms in the written narratives of the student's movements in Mexico. A crosslinking of gender, history-memory studies and political discourse analysis is proposed as an alternative mode for the transformation of traditional forms of historical research and as an attempt to contribute to the discussion and revaluation of narratives about these past events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food is more than just sustenance. Culinary habits are an expression of a community's history and culture, an accumulation and expression of its environmental influences, experiences, conventions, beliefs, aspirations and behavior. Food is an enduring element of individual and collective memory. Food also defines a country and helps construct memories of home, real and imagined, longing and belonging, and survival. Ask almost anyone what they think of home and they will invariably answer something related to food. In this sense, food is a multi-faceted element that sways and adapts to the palate. Jewish food in Mexico reflects the places of origin, the recipes and memories that were transported with the immigrants, which were later infused, ladled and adapted with the local delicacies. The end result is nothing more than wonderful concoctions that continue to this day, transmitted lovingly to the newer generations. This article explores what constitutes Jewish food in general and how that has evolved in Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly is the property of Digital Humanities Quarterly and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Historia Mexicana is the property of El Colegio de Mexico AC and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

El artículo presenta un recuento histórico del proceso mediante el cual se oficializó la conmemoración de la batalla de Puebla del 5 de mayo de 1862 como parte de las políticas del gobierno del presidente Benito Juárez en 1863. Algunos temas mencionados incluyen la idea de memoria histórica, la invasión europea a México en 1861 y la figura del general Ignacio Zaragoza como héroe nacional.

Copyright of Historia Mexicana is the property of El Colegio de Mexico AC and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article considers the collective memory developed by the Jewish community in Mexico relating to the granting of asylum to Jewish refugees from Nazism during the mid-20th century. The author comments on the fact that the Mexican government prohibited Jews from entering Mexico at this time, but notes that this has subsequently officially undergone historical revision. She analyzes the formation of a collective memory in contrast to the actual historical events, which have been reinterpreted by both the Mexican government and Jewish community.

This article considers the development and refurbishment of several museums throughout Mexico from 1944 to 1964. It examines the inauguration of the Museo Nacional de la Historia (National Museum of History), the Museo Nacional de Antropología (National Museum of Anthropology), and the Museo Nacional del Virreinato (Viceroyal National Museum). The author analyzes the importance of Mexican nationalism as a main focus of each of these museums, as well as the representation of the national Mexican collective memory and identity.

The use of indigenous maps in central and southern Mexico is well-documented for the sixteenth century but scholars have consistently overlooked later cartographic activities. Although the number of maps made by native hands decreased in the early seventeenth century, a small output of maps at the end of the century and into the eighteenth suggests indigenous mapping practices continued to inform spatial routines in the Valley of Oaxaca. This article examines the case of Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán, a Mixtec town that litigated on different occasions for half a century over a livestock ranch defined by an assortment of trees and stone markers. During one of these phases, officials from the town introduced an old map that required a copy. Copies circulated primarily in the Valley of Oaxaca where competition over natural resources intensified after the 1680s revealing the way social actors engaged with, maintained and generated collective memories about the past to negotiate the natural environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two-sided folding screens, called biombos, produced in Mexico City in the seventeenth century, bring together bird's-eye views of the city with historical scenes of the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest. This article links the biombo scenes to the festival culture of the Hispanic capital, particularly that of Corpus Christi; both their iconography and the modes of viewing they inculcated helped to shape collective memory among elite city residents. But when set against the practice of mitotes, or ritual dances, by the city's indigenous residents, the biombos point to a different set of collective memories operating in the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Historia Mexicana is the property of El Colegio de Mexico AC and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Anagramas is the property of Editorial Universidad de Medellin and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Through the analysis of two exemplary sources pertaining to the genre of the Nahua primordial titles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the aim of this essay is to contribute further to our understanding of how this distinct Nahua colonial genre can be used for the study of Nahua social memory during Spanish colonial times. More precisely, what this present essay endeavors to identify the subtextual and supra-textual layers in these two sources. Second, it aims to highlight the replicated memory formulas applied in these specific texts; and third, to analyze the role of Christianity in these memory plots. By way of these three aspects, the task of this present study is to demonstrate that customs of remembrance, deeply rooted in the practice of a collective social memory were still cherished and kept vibrant during the mid colonial period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the politics of memory at work in both Mexico's dirty war against political dissidents and the failed attempts to prosecute political leaders responsible for the atrocities. Utilizing information recently made available by the National Security Archive's Mexico Project, it explores how power relations influence public memory, and how this memory shapes democratic futures. A critical engagement with Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx informs an analysis of how the past lives on in ways that challenge political attempts to achieve closure. Through this encounter, the article advances a line of questioning about what constitutes a democratic relationship to time capable of resisting a politics of amnesia. I argue that a more democratic conception of time departs from the conventional metaphors of understanding temporality by seeking an ideal where multiple experiences of time can be present concurrently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the politics of memory at work in both Mexico's dirty war against political dissidents and the failed attempts to prosecute political leaders responsible for the atrocities. Utilizing information recently made available by the National Security Archive's Mexico Project, it explores how power relations influence public memory, and how this memory shapes democratic futures. A critical engagement with Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx informs an analysis of how the past lives on in ways that challenge political attempts to achieve closure. Through this encounter, the article advances a line of questioning about what constitutes a democratic relationship to time capable of resisting a politics of amnesia. I argue that a more democratic conception of time departs from the conventional metaphors of understanding temporality by seeking an ideal where multiple experiences of time can be present concurrently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents elements of symbolic discourse that contribute to the maintenance of cultural memory in Peninsular Mayan immigrants to Cancun, Quintana Roo, Mexico. I refer to certain (rituals, legends and conceptions) that allow immigrants of this ethnicity to continue reproducing and perpetuating their sense of being Mayan in Cancun, a city which is a magnet for national and international tourism. The testimonies presented are taken from five interviews carried out with women from the eastern part of Yucatan (X-Can, Temax, Espita, Tunkas, Dzitas, Chemax and Valladolid), carried out during research for my doctoral dissertation. The reflections for this article emerged from this research process and later field observations, in which it was possible to explore further the narratives about the chaa chac and hetz-mek rituals, the Xtabay legend, the meaning placed on the heart and the metaphor I have named "deer eyes". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is attempted to show how the communication of meanings and contents of collective memory in the zone of the Valley of Toluca, State of Mexico, Mexico, allows treasuring the lake past and contrasting it with the current industrial environment. This enables us to construct an alternative narration of what nowadays has gone missing with respect to the past, providing, with a critical meaning, the occurrences along time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]