Outlining a Cultural Trauma: The Ayotzinapa 43

    I am not saying anything new by stating that attending college is an enormous privilege. For a cost, students dedicate the grand majority of their time to their studies whether they be for a primordial intellectual gain or for a more specialized understanding of their potential field of work. Jhosivani Guerrero de la Cruz, rural native of Guerrero, Mexico, sought out both at the nearby Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College when he enrolled in the hopes of earning a teaching license to later return to his hometown of Omeapa and serve his community there. The College afforded him housing accommodations, meal plans and what is central to Jhosivani’s story: the camaraderie and deep social support of his peers. It would be this budding solidarity that would bring young Jhosivani together with a robust group of his companions on September 26, 2014 to organize a caravan into Mexico City for the upcoming commemorative demonstration of the October 2nd Tlatelolco student massacre. In their typical fiery insurgency, the students would end up forcibly taking a handful of charter buses from the bus station in nearby Iguala for their trip, but unbeknownst to them, this decision would end up throwing them in the middle of the lion’s den of feuding drug cartels and corrupt state and federal police. 

    “The pain doesn't numb you, and it doesn't end. It just grows…” - Margarito "Don Benito" Guerrero, father of Jhosivani. The localized pain of Jhosivani’s disappearance within his family is representative of a larger cultural trauma that extends beyond the personal and familial. First, Jeffrey Alexander defines cultural trauma as occurring “when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways…” (Alexander 2011: 307). The horrendous event in this case is the mass kidnapping of the 43 students, including Jhosivani, in Iguala, Guerrero believed to have been perpetrated by police officers in collusion with local drug cartel hit men. Although Don Benito’s words speak to the enduring psycho emotional “marks” left on his memory and consciousness due to the kidnapping of his son, these are “marks” that are also felt at the group level (Alexander 2011: 307). 

    One way this cultural trauma has manifested itself in the lives of the families and friends of the missing is in the hunger strike that they carried out in Mexico City for 43 hours in the days prior to the 1 year anniversary of their forced kidnapping. To continue following Alexander’s theory on cultural trauma, events do not inherently carry with them specific meaning. Instead, he clarifies that it is “collective actors [who] ‘decide’ to represent social pain as a fundamental threat to their sense of who they are, where they came from, and where they want to go…” (Alexander 2011: 308). Alexander is essentially describing the trauma process here which is extremely relevant to the ways in which the loved ones of the 43 missing students organized themselves to publicly protest the Mexican “state futility” plaguing the citizenship (Corchado 2015). As majority low-income rural families facing the forced kidnapping of their sons, this group of collective actors was forced to reckon with their positionality in creating a response to the Mexican government’s lack of accountability. Their hunger strike was one way to respond, and it was done so in preparation for a meeting they had arranged with then President Peña Nieto which speaks to their decision of “where they want to go…” (Alexander 2011: 308). Especially within the context of the students being kidnapped while trying to commemorate the brutal massacre of the students at Tlatelolco in hands of the police 46 years prior, the trauma process is as central as ever to understanding these forced kidnappings as part of the ongoing attacks on Mexico’s insurgent (or student) population. 

    By enacting the trauma process and “constructing cultural traumas,” collective actors simultaneously take on a “moral responsibility” surrounding the identified “source of human suffering” (Alexander 2011: 307). In the words of Maureen Meyer, a senior associate for Mexico at the Washington Office on Latin America, an NGO that promotes human rights and social justice, “everyone deserves to know the truth about what happened that evening and to see those responsible be brought to justice” (Corchado 2015). Meyer’s words evoke a sense of “moral responsibility” as she makes it clear that the truth behind the forced kidnappings must come to light for the loved ones of the disappeared and for the general public as well in order to achieve a semblance of justice.

References

Alexander, Jeffrey. 2011. "From: Toward a Cultural Theory of Trauma'." Pp. 307-310 in The Collective Memory Reader, edited by J.K. Olick, V. Vinitzky-Seroussi, and D. Levy. New York: Oxford University Press. 

Corchado, A. 2015. "Year after Ayotzinapa, a family’s pain has yet to numb." The Dallas (TX) Morning News, September 26, 2015. Retrieved April 25, 2022. (https://libproxy.kenyon.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nfh&AN=2W6720936734&site=ehost-live)

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