Mariana Mora

MARIANA MORA, CIESAS, Mexico City, Mexico, was awarded funding in October 2019 to aid research on “Forced Disappearance, the Production of Justice and Racialized States in Guerrero, Mexico.” During conditions shaped by the Covid-19 pandemic, this research project analyzed the ways that the upsurge in extreme forms of violence fueled by an undeclared war against organized crime fuels long-term and current forms of racialization and structural racism in Mexico. By accompanying two Indigenous and Afro-Mexican women’s organizations that for part of a broader network of Indigenous, Afro-Mexican and mestiza community and academic researchers, it focused on gendered forms of violence in the Coast-Mountain region of the state of Guerrero. It contrasts the narratives of violence expressed by the women that form part of these organizations with those that emerge from virtual local media sources. While media coverage of violence in the region tends to reproduce a ‘color-blind’ gaze, with little to no attention given to the ethnic-racial identity of victims, much less to the types of violent situations that most impact Indigenous and Afro-Mexican women, the narratives of these women’s organizations focus on the effects that diverse expressions of violence imprints of their bodies and daily geographies. Through these narratives emerges a complicated and oftentimes ambiguous understanding of current forms of State violence and that of organized crime as fueling long-term conditions of racialized exclusions.