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Victim Activists in Mexico: Social and Political Mobilization amid Extreme Violence and Disappearances examines the collective action of the courageous family members of the disappeared in the midst of Mexico’s ongoing humanitarian crisis over the last decades. Yael Siman and Matthew Hone analyze this grassroots mobilization and argue that the activists have created rutinary, contentious, and innovative types of resistance through building local and trans-local links of support and solidarity that reinforce their struggle. This mobilization from below has contributed to constructing transitional justice including laws, public apologies, and memorials. The combination of internal and external factors impacting the collectives and their environment has enabled significant changes in the institutions, state responses, and the victimhood narratives in the country. This book adds to the scholarship on the collective action of grieving families by focusing on both the social and political aspects of mobilization.
This book explores the current human rights crisis created by the War on Drugs in Mexico. It focuses on three vulnerable communities that have felt the impacts of this war firsthand: undocumented Central American migrants in transit to the United States, journalists who report on violence in highly dangerous regions, and the mourning relatives of victims of severe crimes, who take collective action by participating in human rights investigations and searching for their missing loved ones. Analyzing contemporary novels, journalistic chronicles, testimonial works, and documentaries, the book reveals the political potential of these communities’ vulnerability and victimization portrayed in these fictional and non-fictional representations. Violence against migrants, journalists, and activists reveals an array of human rights violations affecting the right to safe transit across borders, freedom of expression, the right to information, and the right to truth and justice.
Over the past two decades, increased criminal and state violence has profoundly transformed everyday life in Mexico. In The Two Faces of Fear, Ana Villarreal draws on two years of qualitative fieldwork conducted during a major turf war in Monterrey, Mexico to trace the far-reaching impact of fear and violence on social ties, daily practices, and everyday spaces. Villarreal brings two seemingly contradictory faces of fear into focus--its ability to both isolate and concentrate people and resources, deepening inequality. While all residents of one of Mexico's largest metropolises confronted new threats, the most privileged leveraged vastly unequal resources to spatially concentrate and defend one municipality more fiercely than the rest. Within this defended city, business, nightlife, and public space thrived at the expense of the greater metropolis. The book puts forth a new approach to the study of emotion and provides tangible evidence of how quickly fear worsens inequality beyond Mexico and the "war on drugs."
Here in America, we know that the drug war is tearing Mexico apart, but it feels distant, removed from our day-to-day lives. What is it really like to live on the front lines? Featuring original work from award-winning Mexican writers, "Blood Calls to Blood" presents a gripping yet intimate account of a crisis that has brutally claimed at least 50,000 people since December 2006. With stunning first-person testimony and insightful commentary, this book collects writing from ZYZZYVAthe acclaimed San Francisco literary journal dedicated since 1985 to publishing the best work from West Coast writers, poets, translators, and artists. Among the nonfiction and fiction in this volume, you will find ...
In Transformative Violence, Erica Marat explains how certain violent acts can trigger unprecedented levels of mobilization in defense of the victims. Marat shows that cases of violence that spark large public reaction share a similar set of traits. They include mobilization of both grassroots and national-level activists, a type of victim that resonates with the broader public, and a visual narrative of the victim's suffering. While all three occur independently, it is the union of these events that captures the attention of the public at large, prompts it to act, and eventually leads to policy changes.
Around the world each year, millions of citizens turn out to vote but leave their ballots empty or spoil them. Increasingly, campaigns have emerged that promote “invalid” votes like these. Why do citizens choose to cast blank and spoiled votes? And how do campaigns mobilizing the invalid vote influence this decision? None of the Above answers these questions using evidence from presidential and gubernatorial elections in eighteen Latin American democracies. Author Mollie J. Cohen draws on a broad range of methods and sources, incorporating data from electoral management bodies, nationally representative surveys, survey experiments, focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and news sourc...
Breaking the Cycle of Structural Violence in Northern Mexico: Toward Integral Peace explores how large-scale economic interests and local power dynamics all play a role in creating a climate of violence against women, migrants, and other stigmatized groups in Northern Mexico. By using case studies and interviews, Juan Jaime Loera Gonzalez and Horacio Almanza Alcalde analyze the asbestos industry's role in causing cancer, structural gender violence, the high levels of risk faced by migrants, and how the government fails to address malnutrition among indigenous people. This book investigates conditions and the manifestations of structural violence and illuminates how these issues interconnect and perpetuate systemic injustices. This volume also offers a comprehensive framework for action by proposing strategies to dismantle oppressive structures and foster genuine peace.
At the crossroads of ethics, poetics and politics, this innovative book outlines a series of notes to decolonize political theology. The author proposes counter-hegemonic forms of reading, which deconstruct domination by embracing fragility. The book opens with a diapason of prejudicelessness as a decolonial key, focusing on prejudices that hinder critical attention to a colonial political theology that perpetuates hatred. The first set of notes aims to ‘de-orientalize the Semite’ by reading midrashic and biblical texts in the present context, the second seeks to decolonize language by exploring the power of translation, and the third ponders decolonial theo-logics to outline a justice o...
This volume explores works from Latin American literary and visual culture that question what it means to be human and examine the ways humans and nonhumans shape one another. In doing so, it provides new perspectives on how the region challenges and adds to global conversations about humanism and the posthuman. Contributors identify posthumanist themes across a range of different materials, including an anecdote about a plague of rabbits in Historia de las Indias by Spanish historian Bartolomé de las Casas, photography depicting desert landscapes at the site of Brazil’s War of Canudos, and digital and installation art portraying victims of state-sponsored and drug violence in Colombia an...
In recent decades, Mexico has been one of the most dangerous democracies for journalists. Their coverage of the war on drugs, abuses of power, and human rights violations has led to harassment, threats, and violence by powerful cartels and corrupt officials. This book provides a ground-level view of how Mexican journalists have navigated this perilous environment, offering insight into how they protect themselves while reporting on the most critical and sensitive subjects. Based on in-depth interviews with reporters, editors, activists, and officials, Mexico’s Resilient Journalists examines the strategies that media workers have employed in pursuit of both personal safety and the public in...