2This article aims to contribute to a growing field of research that puts memorials for the disappeared and the struggles and difficulties for their representation at the center of the analysis. The organizations of relatives and search collectives have added the often-ephemeral intervention in public space or creation of memorials as a vehicle of public memory to their central protest forms. Thus, analyzing the multiple historical and artistic layers of these sites and current memory struggles allows us to understand the difficulties and challenges of representing disappearances. The relationship between conflicting narratives about the disappeared, and particularly how these narratives interact in a political context of almost total impunity, demonstrates the prominent role grass roots activism has in countering the often stigmatizing and discriminatory official narratives around the disappeared, expressed in symbolic interventions.

The Roundabout of the Disappeared in Guadalajara

3Our example is geo-located in a central square, officially called Monumento de los Niños Héroes («Monument to the Heroic Children»), situated where Chapultepec Avenue—one of the busiest streets in the city and the center of nightlife and distraction, full of restaurants, bars and nightclubs,—intersects with the Avenues of the Heroic Children and of Mariano Otero. There are also life-size statues of soldiers installed along the avenue commemorating the six Niños Héroes.

4On March 24, 2018, about three thousand people attended a protest march at the traffic roundabout of the Niños Héroes-monument, among them students, relatives and members of search collectives of the disappeared. The reason was the disappearance of three students five days before, —Javier Salomón Aceves Gastélum, age 25, Marco Francisco García Ávalos, age 20, and Jesús Daniel Díaz García age 20, as well—all of them from the Universidad de Medios Audiovisuales (CAAV), the Cinema School, located only a few blocks away from the memorial. While this is not the place to go into detail about their disappearance that involved the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (Jalisco Cartel New Generation, CJNG) in Tonalá, where the film students had been working on a movie project, it is presumed that they were mistaken for members of the competing local drug cartel. Their bodies were never found and, according to the official narrative, were dissolved in sulfuric acid, leaving no trace of their human remains.

5Their disappearance generated a series of unprecedented protests—12 marches within 27 days—that prompted civil society to re-appropriate and rename the monument. During the marches, the demonstrators put up a banner with the legend Glorieta de las y los Desaparecidos, and the name was even altered on google maps.

The official history of the monument

7In order to understand the changed meaning, it is necessary to go back into the history of this massive statue. The Monumento de los Niños Héroes, built in 1950, represents one of the most important national myths of Mexican history: the six young cadets who defended their country against the invasion by the US-army. At the bottom from a wide circular esplanade with two ramps, a column of approximately 50 meters is visible from afar. At the top of the stele we find an allegorical representation of the homeland, the female-maternal figure, that symbolizes this historical episode of the national heroic history. At the base of the monument, there is a sculptural group of young soldiers in bronze, representing the six cadets, one of them is carrying a Mexican flag with an inscription: “They died for the Homeland”, with the name of each of them engraved.

Different forms of contested commemoration

10Apart from their local anchorage, the demands of memory and justice have gained greater prominence on a global scale in the last years, when we have witnessed waves of dismantling of statues worldwide. In what follows, an attempt at categorization is made to untangle the terminology of commemorative forms, particularly of disappearances in current Mexico, that is for sure not exhaustive, but that is presented here for discussion, as a brief classification.

11First of all, the dominant and established concept in Mexican debates about current urban intervention as protest is that of the (1) anti-monument defined as a constructed memorial, typically placed during a popular march or protest, that seeks to remember a recent violent event or to claim justice for crimes to which the government has not given a satisfactory response. By drawing attention to social grievances, it can be understood as a claim directed against State violence and impunity.

12The case of the Roundabout of the Disappeared can be understood as a form of (2) appropriation of territorial markers where, as in this case, plaques, banners or posters of the disappeared are installed at an already existing memory site, which search collectives also place all over the city that often are taken away almost immediately by the authorities. The (3) re-signification, as in the case of the Glorieta de las y los Desaparecidos, when a new meaning is added, for example through a name change or symbolic intervention, needs to be differentiated from forms of iconoclasm or dismantling of statues in the sense of its destruction, since in our case, the monument itself remains intact. Re-signified spaces, denouncing enforced disappearance similar to the Glorieta, were also installed in Mexico City and Monterrey. Often, these forms of re-semantization include (4) interventions, such as graffiti, performance, or spontaneous assemblies, that are associated with ephemeral ways of commemoration, as protest marches and demonstrations, which can be related to certain (5) commemorative dates that ritualize the protest over the year. For example, Mexican women and mothers organized in search collectives, have redefined Mother’s Day, on May 10, by turning it into a day of protest at the Glorieta. Additionally, on August 30, the international day against forced disappearance, massive marches take place here.

13This quick overview—surely incomplete—seems useful when trying to contextualize the Roundabout of the Disappeared within the mosaic of urban markers, a phenomenon with globally recognizable aesthetic forms of memory work and protest practices, which travel and circulate transnationally, having their symbolic origins in the resistance against the military dictatorships in Southern Cone of Latin America, as for instance the ostensibly displayed photographs of the disappeared.

Re-signification as a strategy of counter memory

14Within their massive protests, people began to place banners and features with photos and data of the disappeared persons of not only Guadalajara, but the State of Jalisco, at the monument. This change in the meaning in public commemoration established a counter memory “from below”, relatives of disappeared from all over Jalisco have permanently appropriated the space.

15The images—which often show the disappeared persons cheerfully in everyday situations—are a powerful tool of visualization and mobilization as an attempt of re-humanization. They are also a way to raise empathy and to increase solidarity, in order to pressure the Mexican authorities to act. Visual images are in essence the tool used in public space to question the underlying logic of disappearance, challenging the notion of a “disposable person” that deserves to disappear, blaming the victims and denying the State’s responsibilities.

16People have taken the memorial to transform it and denounce the current humanitarian catastrophe that is affecting the social fabric as a whole. The monument erected to honor the Niños Héroes, now commemorates victims, that so far have been excluded from official memory culture: the disappeared who have lost their lives at the hands of a crisis of violence and inequality, without these crimes having been properly and effectively investigated, prosecuted and punished nor being officially recognized. The protests converted the monument into a contested heritage site: on the one hand, with the layer of the institutionally authorized meaning of celebrating the national Independence and, on the other hand, a new meaning that emerged from social resistance, denouncing current enforced disappearances.

17When in Guadalajara the memorial dedicated to the memory of the historical teenage soldiers has been re-signified, this change has not occurred institutionally, but arose spontaneously by actions of civil protests, denouncing the multiple disappearances which point to the action of criminal drug trafficking groups, and the complicity of different levels of government with those crimes. Grass roots protests intervened in the appearance of the monument, turning it into a contested urban space, a memorial under permanent construction, as the violence is still ongoing and the number of disappearances increases.

18The memorial has become a meeting point to demand the search for the disappeared as relatives have symbolically appropriated it to demand truth and justice. In this way, the re-signification of the space becomes a performative, continuous process, together with tools and repertoires of collective mobilization. Relatives of the disappeared have permanently re-signified the memorial, showing that at any time—depending on the political context of the present—monuments can be questioned, re-appropriated and re-politicized.