Mariana Mora

Through an ethnography focused on cases of forced disappearance in the Tlapaneco, Nahua and Mixteco indigenous regions of the state of Guerrero, Mexico, my proposed research project seeks to analyze the ways that the upsurge in extreme forms of violence since the undeclared war against organized crime launched in 2006, at the beginning of the Calderón administration, potentially fuels long-term and current forms of racialization and structural racism. The project documents how indigenous families of victims of forced disappearance make sense of extreme acts of violence, how they mobilize specific meanings of justice, and in what ways they engage with human rights organizations in their search for truth and redress. The focus on cases of indigenous victims is relevant because, despite multicultural reforms of decades past, official data on indigenous victims and concrete state policies seeking culturally differentiated mechanisms of justice are virtually inexistent. The project seeks to explore if this apparent negation of ethnic-racial alterity in cases of forced disappearance masks the ways that such events may in fact accentuate particular social constructions of indigenous inferiority. The possible contradiction between the negation of alterity and refueling of processes of racialization has important implications for understanding the contemporary Mexican state.