Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo

I was seventeen years old when I came to Mexico City from the north of Mexico to attend the National School of Anthropology for my undergraduate. I was raised in a traditional Catholic working class family that was apolitical. When I arrived at university, in 1982, there was the dictatorship of José Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala, and refugees were entering the south of Mexico. Officially, they wrote 40,000 refugees from Indigenous Maya communities. I didn’t know anything about what was going on, and I held a very folkloric view of anthropology. Some of the students of Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala fled to our national school because their departments were shut down and their professors were either in exile, disappeared, or dead.
I started to learn by reading and conversing about these issues. One of my friends was Maya Kaqchikel, his name was Doroteo Hux. He advocated for Indigenous rights, and for this he was tortured by the Guatemalan military (he became the Major of his town, San Martín Jilotepeque, after the war). He did not have any fingernails when we met. For a seventeen year old girl, seeing this left a firm impression. Fingers without fingernails. I read about the military presence and interventions of the U.S. and Israel: they sent the Green Berets, the CIA, and the Israeli Defence Forces to instruct the military and to organize the police force. The Carter and Reagan administrations provided millions in aid and supplies, and endorsed Ríos Montt. I became politically conscious through this, not Movimiento Estudiantil or the Tlateloco massacre, which happened in my childhood and left no mark.
The counterinsurgency plot in Central America was ‘quitarle el agua a los peces’: to take the water out of the fish. The guerilla movement was able to survive because the peasant communities would feed them; therefore, the military decided, if we cannot catch the guerilla, we must destroy the peasants. We scorch this earth. Around 450 rural communities were massacred for this cause in Quiché, Huehuetenango and Baja Verapaz. It was a genocide. Later, the International Criminal Court found this was true but we all already knew. This is very similar to what we’re seeing in Palestine, a policy of quantum destruction of communities under the premise of seeking Hamas guerillas, the Qassam Brigades. It was this violence in Guatemala that moved my consciousness. I couldn’t believe or understand what was going on, and I decided to write a paper for a political anthropology course about the impact of militarism on Maya communities.
To get information for this I went to Enfrensa, a press agency that was in downtown Mexico City and founded by journalists in exile who were unable to publish in Central America. I worked in their database and went through the documents in their archives. I eventually offered to help them organize their database. We didn’t have computers, this was 1982. I classified the archive, create a list of topics; they were surprised that this young woman had abilities to help them. They gave me my first job, and I was about to turn eighteen years old. I switched my university schedule to the evenings, and I was working in ENFOPRENSA in the mornings. In this agency I learned to write. I became a journalist. By twenty-one I was already writing for a national newspaper. I was formed by them.

Victoria Amani Mwaniki Kishoiyian

You were reporting from afar, at the office in Mexico City, offering commentary? Or were you travelling to the southern border? How did ENFOPRENSA write about the Guatemalan military’s genocide of the Maya? Was this an advocate press by exiled journalists? Did they publish pieces to serve as documentation, political agitation; did they speak on the side of Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres, of the people?

RA

We travelled to the southern border but could not enter Guatemala because of Efraín Ríos Montt’s military dictatorship. Therefore, we wrote editorial opinions, articles, and reports on our archival research from where we were. They sent me to the refugee camps at the border in the state of Chiapas. When I went I decided I wanted to work with people, not solely documents, because the first stages of journalism for me were through the news. In the borderlands it was weird: I knew so much about Guatemala, their economics, the history of their political parties and militias, their sovereignty and counterinsurgency campaigns. Yet I had never been to Guatemala! Being in the Maya refugee camps helped my knowledge have a human dimension. I returned to Mexico City and asked the press agency to be reassigned to Tapachula, in the borderlands. It was my last year of undergraduate.
In the last year of undergraduate I did long distance: I did all my paperwork from Tapachula and I moved to Chiapas beside the border and wrote my honor thesis about the Guatemalan refugee camps and how the Maya people resisted the cultural integration campaigns. I wanted to know the role of their culture in the survival strategies they developed in the refugee camps. That began my career. When I was working on the dissertation, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was needing people to work in the camps, and I decided to move from ENFOPRENSA to the U.N., I worked for them for two years.
The first book I published came out of this experience: La Experiencia de Refugio en Chiapas, about the relation between Mexican peasants and Guatemalan refugees. I was about twenty-three when I published this book. I was a co-author with two other young scholars. These were very different times in academia. It was possible to get a stable position with an undergraduate degree. I started in the research center where I work. From the bottom, you were hired as a research assistant, but then you could go up as you were getting your degrees. Now, that is not possible.

VK

This is so admirable! You’re a reporter, able to uproot. Otto René Castillo introduced me to the Guatemalan struggle and the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes in the Zacapa mountains. He writes of the bond between peasants and guerillas that you published about as if it’s a duet. I think he said a tender duet—these two shared the same torturers, jailers, policemen, and tried to protect each other from them. What I remember most is his insistence on seeing with eyes that haven’t been born. His are faithful counterfactual poems. A few weeks ago I was reading poems from Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, mostly the Sandinistas and other people of the twentieth century, and all of them were militants. It is amazing that poetry has been a popular political strategy in the region.

RA

It is true—it’s a duet! They have tenderness and exchange their means—these can be guns, vegetables. These people are not distinct. The southern border in Mexico has divided Indigenous peoples that speak the same language and share the same culture. There are around fourteen Indigenous Maya groups: There are five Indigenous Maya groups that were divided by the border. I did that dissertation with the Mam people from the Huehuetenango that were divided by the border in the 19th century. With the presence of the U.S. these borders have begun to be militarized. The U.S. immigration policies have worsened and therefore border enforcement has moved to the south. In the previous administration, the Mexican government became the police of the U.S. for Central America, barring people from crossing through Mexico. My first book in Spanish is called La Otra Frontera, which was also published in English as Histories and Stories from Chiapas, is about histories of the Chiapas border and southern Mexico borderlands identity. I do an ethnographic study of the people in the border.
I was born in the northern border and always thought that my Mexican nationalism was a space of resistance against U.S. imperialism. At the southern border, Mexican nationalism is another xenophobic identity towards Central America. I’ve started to question nationalism not simply in conflict with U.S. imperialism, but what it implies: What is national assertion? How is nation building and borders used to divide people? What is the role of militarism in the construction of borders? I’ve become much more critical of national building projects, they are often patriarchal, racist, and violent. I do think poetry can speak against this nationalistic assertion. Poems are not conscripted!
I want to make a leap to what happened two days ago [on January 20] with Donald Trump in the U.S. That is the use of a nationalistic discourse that is very fascistic and imperialistic, that others immigrants and affirms the superiority of U.S. Americans. He makes an image of a disposable people. If you influence the cultural imaginary of people about immigrants being criminals, this will create problems when people die crossing the border, in the desert, in the river, or by state forces. There will be no solidarity towards those people because they have been dehumanized previously by the political discourse of power. This dehumanization is in Fox News and in CNN. I have seen what racism is able to do with the genocide in Guatemala. There are historical linkages with what we are living right now.

VK

Yes, I have these same skepticisms. It is difficult because nationalism, at least now, in Kenya, holds an emancipatory intent. It denounces tribalism. We’re tribeless. Exclusion is an incident. None of these histories are alone; you think something particular happened in Kenya and it was happening—differently, but with the same dynamics—in Mexico. The history of northeast Kenya, through the Somali borderlands, resembles the history of Chiapas. The violence began from the Gaf Daba—the Shifta War, when the Kenyan Somalis wanted to unite with Somalia. They rebelled through the Northern Frontier Districts Liberation Movement. President Jomo Kenyatta waged a counterinsurgency campaign against them. Newspapers named them separatist bandits. This was a time of high nationalism. It makes sense: it was during the first few decades of the nation. But Kenyan nationalism has become a xenophobic identity against Somalis.
There were three recorded massacres by Kenyatta’s men during the ’60s and ’80s in Isiolo, Garissa, and Wagalla. Each of them claimed two, three thousand people. There are underground papers that say twenty thousand martyrs. Wagalla was a calculated violence, the KDF executed people one by one. Garissa is similar to this scorched earth strategy Efraín Ríos Montt used. They burned the entire village to murder one guerilla. There are refugee camps across the northeast, the biggest in Dadaab, that have migrant Somalis who weren’t in Kenya for this violence, but now are united with them. This is a genocide that isn’t redressed or spoken about because people now associate Somalis with Al-Shabab. The image of the Islamist criminal has circulated, and U.S. imperialism is a culprit here, too. The War on Terror is here, the Kenyan military has occupied Somalia since 2011. The northeast is militarized, and Somali, everywhere in Kenya, are surveilled, harassed. The army and police officers are trained by the U.S. and Israel. All this violence invokes nationalism.

RA

Our nations are built by nationalism. Mexico is made by this rhetoric. Even our most progressive forces in the Left are very nationalistic, and now with what is going on in the U.S., nationalism is only rising as a well to defend ourselves from imperialism. The antagonism. It is a natural defense. I am with you. I still am very skeptical about nationalism because it usually needs another to affirm yourself against; there’s a structure of exclusion. I’m afraid of all kinds of nationalism. This idea of changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to America is strategic essentialism, even though it’s absurd. I believe instead in building an alliance among many people that cross borders. There are Somali in Kenya, and Maya in Mexico. I think that we should reinforce alliances because a fascist nationalism is growing globally. If these structures of power are so global, I think solidarity also should be global.

VK

I agree. we’re all seeking to establish a  ‘we,’ a shared cause, and that’s a poisonous programme. I want a ‘we,’ and this is why patriotism can be somewhat unshakeable. The hurdle, that seems evident to you but is learned for me, might be to internalize that borders came out of British colonial cartography, Spanish colonial cartography. Divide and conquer. All that binds us is this shared situation. National identification is an adherence to history, the noose of history. Do you see all these things as incidents or inevitable?

RA

My PhD dissertation is about what you are saying. It is about incidents. The incident of nationality. When I went to the States, I got a full-scholarship to do my PhD in the Department of Anthropology of Stanford, close by Baja California. When I did my honors undergraduate thesis in the refugee camps, I discovered that they were built in the land of peasants sometimes related with the refugees because of the border split the same Indigenous peoples. They were very poor, almost as poor as the refugees, but there was so much solidarity. There were people with very little who are willing to share this and that.
For the dissertation, I returned to that area and worked with the Mam people. There were then around 20,000 Mam people on this side of the border, and about 250,000 in Guatemala, separated from each other since the 19th century. First, using archival research, I learned of how the border was created; then, using oral histories with elders, I learned of its implications. After the Mexican Revolution from 1910 till 1920, there was land redistribution. In school we don’t learn about how this dispossessed and split Indigenous peoples. This same dispossession and split happened in Russia, following the Russian Revolution. One of my closest friends, Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov from my PhD, found similar effects with the Indigenous of Siberia.
In my research I learned of the campaigns to civilize through clothing. During the revolution, the Mexican government distributed jean overalls in Indigenous communities—the idea was that the industrial working class was the future of Mexico. These Indigenous peoples wore clothes with hand embroidery that held colonial origins but remained symbolically important for them. The government prohibited them from wearing colonial clothing. This was complicated: although the clothes were colonial in origins from the 15th century, it had been appropriated by them and incorporated into their identity. The Mexican government burned these clothes and gave them jeans. Jeans! I laugh because it’s absurd!
I found the documents in which they were distributing the jean overalls in Indigenous communities as part of the civilizing through clothing campaign. I was able to find elders who were children when this campaign happened, and they had memories of how it was like a witch hunt—they were taking the people, stripping their clothes away, and making them naked. The Mam language was prohibited and they imposed Spanish as the national language. Indigenous schoolchildren who spoke their language were spanked by professors. I have testimonies about those children because now they don’t speak those languages.
Before that I tried to do my dissertation about North African migrants in Spain. I did a summer fieldwork there, and I was studying Arabic for awhile, as I thought they would be speaking Arabic. I discovered this was not so when I went there.

VK

That is absurd. I’m picturing these government officials going door to door delivering hundreds of pairs of jeans. How would a room of schoolchildren respond to the enforcement of jeans? A friend of mine from Russia showed me this project by Tania Bruguera; she solicited former Bolshevik secret police or KGB agents to use their psychological warfare training to counsel random people who answer her advertisement. It was absurd. These bureaucrats don’t realize how ridiculous their campaigns are. Her project points at the state and says, ‘this strategy, really? Look at how absurd you look.’ But it works, these tactics work and what do we have—our laughs?
I didn’t realize you wanted to work with migrants from the Maghreb. Did you identify with them? Was travelling to Spain your first time out of the Americas? Where were you, in Melilla and Ceuta, the Spanish colonies in Morocco?

RA

No. I didn’t go to Spanish Morocco. I did this in Granada, Spain, in a rural town called Zafarraya. I laugh and laugh at myself—I was speaking Modern Standard Arabic. That’s how I got involved with the student movement for Palestine in the 80s. I was studying Arabic under a Palestinian professor. The issue was studying formal Arabic. When I went to work with the workers of Zafarraya, they were from the Sahara and Senegal, speaking Darija and Tamasheq and Tamazight and Wolof. My Arabic was useless. I joke: it was like learning Latin to work with Maya communities in Mexico.
I kept studying Arabic to learn about the Arab world. My heart is there. In Zafarraya and across the region. I identify with it, yes. I have been to Palestine, to Birzeit University in the West Bank. My experience in the south of Spain showed me that borders and immigration in different ends of the earth share problems. So has this conversation. I went to Granada with one of my closest friends from my PhD, Liliana Suarez, and I convinced her to do a joint dissertation. We had Renato Rosaldo as the chair of our anthropology department. He was a progressive professor and accepted our joint dissertation: it would have been the first and only dissertation at Stanford written by two people! We went to the field together, and then I decided that I didn’t have use there. Liliana stayed, and she’s written about migration through the Mediterranean.

VK

It is great that the two of you went, that you tried. It is so sweet to find where your heart resides! You never realized how affectionate you are to a place until you leave and realize: Ah! I left my heart! A joint dissertation is an incredible idea! I would do it with my friends! I studied very, very little Arabic. Here we try to introduce Levantine, Egyptian, and Maghrebi dialects, at least a little bit, but then it becomes the case that you’re learning four languages! They will give you tables with the word in each dialect, and all the words will be different from each other. Al Jazeera is broadcast in Modern Standard, so you’ve got that. That’s great.
A few years ago, this must have been June or July of 2022, I was reading about border enforcement in Spain and northeastern Morocco. This was after the Melilla massacre, at the Barrio Chino crossing of the  Morocco-Melilla border. Thousands climbed Mount Gurugu, scaled the wall into Spanish territory. They were Senegalese, Sudanese, Amazigh. Moroccan police threw stones and fired at them, and the Spanish at the checkpoint triggered teargas. I learned how the European Union outsources policing and imprisoning migrants to Morocco, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Niger. The same playbook that has the Mexican government working as a U.S. proxy against Central Americans. I don’t know if how common this is makes it any less.

RA

On every end of the earth they are doing this. It is common and terrible. It is betrayal by capitalism. I haven’t heard of Melilla. You know the workers in Zafarraya didn’t know even a little Arabic; their languages weren’t even linguistically related, we were lost in translation. I did not learn any dialects at university. When I was there, I realized I was rooted in Mexico, that I should stay here. A professor of mine, Professor Rodolfo Stavenhagen, spoke very critically of the methodological nationalism of Mexicans, as Mexicans usually solely study Mexico. He was one of the reasons why I decided to go to Spain. The dissertation is a long term commitment—not only an intellectual concern. It requires your heart to be there. My heart was in southern Mexico. I came back in 1993 to do my filmmaking. On January 1, 1994 the Zapatista had an uprising in Chiapas that marked me. I was right. It happened in 1994 and I was there.

VK

Before we go back to Chiapas, can you tell me about student advocacy for Palestine while you were in university. This is the 1980s, during the First Intifada? How did you become knowledgeable about the political struggle in Palestine? What kind of networks existed between Mexicans and Palestinians? What did you think you were capable of as a student?

RA

It was a time with the Palestine Liberation Organization and Arafat. He was an important political figure for Latin America. The PLO had an office in Mexico City long before Palestine was recognized by the majority of Latin American countries. Due to the Mexican Revolution, the government had a very progressive external policy: they sided with the colonized. However, we had one political party and it ruled for seventy years, enacting terribly policies internally. When I was a student, I was able to go and listen to the ambassador of Palestine speaking. The genocide in Palestine in the 1980s was not as terrible as it is presently. It was evident that the Israelis were genocidal: they trained the Guatemalan army troops who committed the Maya genocide.

VK

Was Israel involved in the School of the Americas? Were students organizing against military collaboration and weapons manufacturing? God! I’m asking again about identification.

RA

Not in name. If we follow the weapons, through the School of the Americas, the source was the U.S., Israel. All the apparatus used for espionage also comes from Israel. They trained the dictators. Not only Guatemala’s Ríos Mott. In Bolivia, Hugo Banzer Suárez; in Panama, Manuel Noriega; in Argentina, Leopoldo Galtieri; in Haiti, Raoul Cédras. They are responsible for so much bloodshed. At a young age, I read the history of the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian resistance. My sympathies were there. These struggles are transnational. Hope and skepticism came with the Oslo Accords, similar to the U.N. peace agreement in Guatemala. I grew disenchanted in those years against the revolutionary militants. People must defend themselves against genocide. However, after the U.N. agreement, the same militant men in the Guatemalan Left killed more people, and then rose to be politicians. One of the tragic paradoxes is one of the commanders of the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca, Pedro Pablo Palma Lau (Comandante Pancho) defected and ran on a ticket with Ríos Mott dictatorship. When I was in Birzeit University, people spoke of Hamas critically and honorably. The paradox is not the same I hope.

VK

I know this disenchantment, I understand. Do you ever think despair or disenchantment is traitorship, though, at least towards children? And can you talk a little bit more about going to Birzeit University?

RA

I visited Birzeit for one week. They invited me to a special conference about the role of women in settler colonialism. It was 2019. Donald Trump announced that the embassy of the US will be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. There were mobilizations all over, and the first day of the conference was canceled because there was a boycott and a strike in Ramallah. The day after I arrived, one of the symbolic doors to Jerusalem was closed in a strike. The professors that organized the conference invited us to the strike. I crossed the border and saw the different kinds of citizens that have been created by the Israeli apartheid state. Many of my friends were Palestinians born in Jerusalem and therefore able to go in and out from Jerusalem without a problem. Those born in Ramallah couldn’t enter without a permit.
At the rally most of the attendees were children, not teenagers, but ten, eleven year olds. The Israeli police were mounted on horses. The kids threw stones at these police, and the police ran their horses over them. Suddenly these elderly women who wore long dresses surrounded the kids to protect them, almost making a tent out of their fabric. I was so impressed, and felt so much confidence in the children’s spirit. We went to some of the back streets as the police intensified. I was crying. Many of the kids were snatched by the police. It was a small glimpse of what was going on with Palestinian children every day, the small things the news will not cover. How are these children growing up? I have not been able to communicate with professors I met there, and I’m wondering: How are they living? How are the students living? I don’t know how to have hope. Birzeit was created after the Oslo Accords with funding from the Nordic countries. It is a university for upper middle class Palestinians. Do you have any contact with those in Birzeit?

VK

Not in Birzeit. I know there they have the issue of student detention, the occupation forces will patrol campus, and settlers attack students on their way to the university. At the checkpoints they hold students to prevent them from pursuing education, but this has failed. Palestinians are among the most well-educated and literate people on earth.
There is an Emergency Committee for Universities in Gaza. This includes Al Aqsa University, Al Azhar University, and the Islamic University of Gaza. Their buildings were demolished by Israeli bombardment but they are determined to remain on the land, to resume teaching, studying. Harvard, as the wealthiest university in the world, has a responsibility to these schools. Our university administration is not against scholasticide; they aren’t concerned with education systems outside of the U.S. unless they’re profiting off it, in image or money. Trump will make what little solidarity is permitted harder. It is a bit naive of me but I don’t know—I believe that a university that says so much about its commitment to education can care at the least about these schoolchildren out of school, these schools without equipment or electronics. I am so naive though.

RA

I didn’t know about students being stopped at checkpoints. They only want to attend university. The West Bank and Gaza are so bound, many students have relatives there. Even if they aren’t suffering the atrocities of Gaza, it must affect the university atmosphere. They know their peers in Gaza cannot go to school, too. I wonder if the students are mobilizing or if the repression is too strong.

VK

I think there are protests against the Palestinian Authority. It is difficult for us, far away, to study while witnessing the genocide, so it must be infinitely harder for students throughout occupied Palestine. What tactics were you using in the national universities to show solidarity with Palestine? What were people feeling?

RA

In Mexico, we’ve created a coalition through Colegio de Mexico, a public university made by the Spanish exiles. It is only master and graduate students attending. The university president and entire academic body broke relationships with universities in Israel; they support our call to boycott. It surprised us, because it didn’t come to the more working class universities, but from El Colegio de Mexico. This moved other universities, and we have a solidarity network  of public university centers  for Palestine. My center, the Center for Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology, belongs to it. I’m part of the organizing committee. One of my PhD students is working with junior high school students in Puebla, and her students ask her why the children of Palestine are being murdered, why their schools are destroyed. She’s surprised because it is such a remote place; the internet transmits this information everywhere. She told them more about the history of Palestine, and the students wrote letters for Palestinian kids in Nahuatl. She translated the letters to Spanish. We’ve made a mural of those letters. We are trying to pressure our institutions not to buy computer equipment from Intel, which is linked to the Israeli state. We don’t have as steep investments as Harvard, it is easy for our institutions to break agreements as there is little money involved. It is important nevertheless.

We spoke again two weeks later, on February 6th, continuing at her return to Mexico from the south of Spain, the start of the Zapatista rebellion.

RA

I was doing my dissertation fieldwork in the border with the Mam people when the Zapatista rebellion started. I had been interviewing Indigenous women through a women’s shelter and some feminist organizations. On January 1, 1994, the day Mexico entered the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Zapatista took over several municipality buildings, including San Cristobal de las Casas, and disseminated a pamphlet with a Women’s Revolutionary Law. This was new in the revolutionary movements in the Americas. In the ’80s, the autonomous movements of Central America were influenced by Marxism and Maoism. All of those found feminism to be a bourgeois ideology of division; they didn’t attend to it. The Zapatistas’ regard for women was a surprise.
We learned through an interview with one of their main spokespeople, Comandante Marcos, that this law came out of consultation with 400 Indigenous communities, people who’d migrated to a jungle, Mestizo peasants. The law demanded for the Mexican state to recognize the sovereignty of Indigenous communities, to recognize that women have the right to a health system, to education, to inherit land, to participate in the governing body and justice system, to decide who you marry. These were basic rights that racist policies had barred from the Indigenous. Within the Zapatista commanders, there were also demands: asking for the right to hold high ranks in the Zapatista Army, to be part of the different structures of the Zapatista military corpus. This was called La Ley Revolucionaria de Mujeres.
We published on it in a volume entitled Dissident Women. It was so special: this was the first time women’s demands were included in central demands. I was a young feminist with dilemmas about moving between collective and women’s rights, and held critiques about how feminism could be a colonial ideology imposed on rural political contexts. What I saw in the Women’s Revolutionary Law was a different way of demanding a dignified life for women that wasn’t caught in colonialism. It marked a new cultural climate for the political struggle of Indigenous women. Before, when they said, we want to decide whom to marry, they were accused of being acculturated or betraying their culture, of becoming urban, of denying their community. Zapatista defended autonomy. We couldn’t postpone the struggle against patriarchal violence until after the revolution. It had to happen simultaneously.

VK

That’s incredible. What was the aftermath of the the Women’s Revolutionary Law? How did this change your work? Were there many female militants in the Zapatista? Was this around the time of La Via Campesina?

RA

A little bit later. This was different because it wasn’t about only the peasantry or agricultural autonomy and dispossession. Zapatista was revolutionary; Campesina is about international unionization. A small Zapista woman, soon became so important. She was masked, as they all covered their faces, and she wore traditional embroidery from San Andres Sacamch’en de los Pobres. She was outspoken about Tzotzil, her language, and about women’s rights. The Zapatisas are paradigmatic: they only had direct military weapon struggle for two weeks before beginning peace talks. Since then, all their struggles have been political, non-military. Comandanta Ramona was there at the negotiation tables.
The government invited supporting advisors, and so did the Zapatista, and I had the honor of being invited by the Zapatista women. I was part of the Grupo de Mujeres de San Cristobal Las Casas. We were there as symbolic figures in the advising committee. We learned. They were challenging our liberal conception of rights. I started to criticize my own internal colonialism while at this committee. They made it clear that racism was critical to the colonial structures persisting in contemporary Mexico. Since those negotiations, I discussed with our feminist organizations: How do we challenge our strategies against domestic violence? How can we think in a different kind of strategies that will consider not only a punitive conception of rights in which domestic violence cases will not only be taken to the Mexican justice system, but also the Indigenous authorities and local justice system? How can we incorporate the many customary laws of Indigenous women? How can we make alliances with them? My work as a legal anthropologist was marked by these dialogues. Any agenda that is thinking about justice and rights must consider local epistemologies, and consider legal pluralism. How can we move between different justice systems? How do we weigh them?

VK

Woah. I’m glad you and them got to be in attendance. You had to return from Spain. Did you write about these things? How did you go about answering these questions? What did your life look like?

RA

Yes. You can see a lot of my research topics were not chosen by me; reality makes me shift. I listen to my surroundings. While I was in Chiapas, I started working onissues of sexual violence, which was used as a repressive tool against our feminist movement. My closest friend and roommate was raped by military police. I started to organize through that terrible experience, and we created a woman’s group. We made the shelter I mentioned while we were accompanying the Zapatistas at peace talks. In 1996 there was the Acteal Massacre, the mass murder of Indigenous women and children sympathetic with Zapatista by paramilitary groups. I wrote about this in a volume entitled The Other Word: Women and Violence in Chiapas Before and After Acteal. As I was finishing the book on Acteal, many pregnant Indigenous women were killed and their fetuses were removed from their bodies. I was pregnant, too. It was difficult to learn about how the bodies of pregnant women were used, while also being pregnant myself. The paramilitary were proclaiming in the streets that they would kill the seed. This was precisely what the Guatemalan military said during the Maya genocide: kill the seed from the womb.
I left Chiapas because of my pregnancy and the violence going on. I requested to change my position to Mexico City, and moved to Tepoztlán, an hour and a half from the city. The first seven years of my child’s life happened there. At the Center for Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology, we started a collective project to explore how Indigenous women were dealing with their customary law and the national law in issues of domestic and gender violence. We worked in different regions when a rural movement opposing the construction of an airport in Atenco was repressed, and their leaders were jailed. Seventeen women were raped by the police during detention. I immediately went to Atenco. That’s when I started working in prisons, through these two women from Ateco.
One I had been acquainted with previously: she was an undergraduate anthropology student from the National School of Anthropology. Her name is Mariana Selvas. She took the case to the Inter-American Court, and it became very public. The other woman was Magdalena Garcia Duran, a prominent Mazahua leader of artisans. They were recognized as prisoners of conscience. I went to visit them in the state prison to see what I could do as an activist and as an expert witness. They were held in the north of Mexico City. When I went, I saw there were many, many Indigenous women in prisons for drug-related crimes, and because of the stigma on drugs, there was no solidarity. Feminist were moved by Mariana and Magdalena resisting dispossession, but these poor women were forgotten. In many of the cases, their husbands or their sons were growing marijuana or poppy flowers, opium. The army came, saw what they were growing, and took the person in the house: the woman. Fifteen years ago this visit happened. I was thinking about the state system, the use of penal law and how punitive conceptions of justice are marked by racism. This is part of my book, Multiple Injustices, Indigenous Women: Law and Political Struggle.
In this research, I found that there is a lot of pressure against the Mexican government to sever drug networks. Instead of attacking the heads of these networks, they went straight to the bottom to attack poor, racialized women, in many cases smugglers of small amounts of natural drugs. They were given high penalties so Mexico could demonstrate that it was serious about the War on Drugs. But this is not fighting the drug cartels. These statistics reflect poor women without translators, who can’t speak Spanish. I started to call them political prisoners of a policy against drugs that was weaponized against the Indigenous. I learned about prison abolitionism and prison studies, and am still working in prisons as an activist. That’s how we started Hermanas de la Sombra, an editorial house in prisons where inmates write and publish their own books. It’s a political project.

VK

I wish that wasn’t the way you experienced pregnancy. God. That is vile: ‘kill the seed from the womb.’ I imagine moving to Mexico City was difficult. You did not know what would happen to the friends left there. How do you write about these things without letting them engulf you?
What you’re saying is very, very important to me—calling these women political prisoners. This term is not used enough; most of the imprisoned, in every nation, they are in some way political prisoners. This term denies the validity of law, and it has serious political utility. People picked for petty stealing are political prisoners; people picked by border agents are political prisoners.
I want to ask you about your work on femicide in Juárez. There are thousands of cases of femicide there— decades have passed without any state prosecution. Beyond masculinity, machismo, femicide is an economic and political problem. It happens when you see impunity extend all the way up to the president down to the policemen in the street, harassing you every day for small monies, and down to the toilet guards, forcing you to pay to use the bathroom. Everyone has their domain of power, and for many their domain is the family. I know this is not unprecedented; these patterns existed in the century before, and before that one, too, but it is intensifying.

RA

Women have dealt with femicide in every end of the earth. What’s new is the amount of weapons available due to militarization. Power is now easy to come by. I’m talking about militias, paramilitaries, gangs, cartels. I think about this when working with Indigenous and Afro-Mexican women in shelters. A woman will come who is a victim of domestic violence, and then the man will come, scream, wielding a gun. Many of these macho men have an entire cartel or gang behind them. Shelters are in danger, and situations of domestic violence end in femicide because of guns. Patriarchal violence is everywhere, in Kenya and here, in Mexico, but it’s also part of a market, it’s well-paid. There’s a young Mexican I like, Sayak Valencia from Tijuana, she wrote Gore Capitalism. She argues that the capitalist system is promoting certain subjectivities in which to be somebody in the world, to hold value, you have to consume certain things. You must have a car, a phone, and a great majority of racialized poor men cannot have those things, they don’t have the opportunity. In this market, their lives are precarious, but they are training labor force in one area: violence. From a young age, they learn to exercise violence. Capitalism makes killing a kind of labor. She works with men that become hired arms.

VK

Goons?

RA

In Spanish we call it Sicario, somebody that is being paid to kill. Her analysis is appealing to me. So many young men are becoming killers in Mexico. It is not that we are a barbarous society but a militarized nation that demands violence to dispossess, to control populations. We have a weapons market that needs people to buy and use weapons. Femicide follows this. The amount of men with weapons is only rising. In prison, we find women who are sacrificed by lovers or husbands in the violent drug circuits. It’s difficult to say no to a man with a gun. Behind those men, there is a terrified woman who pays her life, in prison or in murder. There are women, too, who use violence, I don’t want to idealize. Most are men, though: 98%. Of those searching for the disappeared, 98% are women. We have a gendered reality in the context of violence. I don’t have the right words but it is good to speak to you because it’s obvious this is a global problem with different manifestations. It is not a local problem of Mexico. It is not indigenous.

VK

I agree. It’s dangerous to think of these things as indigenous. Dealing with disappearance, it’s a woman’s burden. How do you ward off fear?

RA

It’s part of the same circuit of capitalism and gendered labor—the perpetrators of disappearance are men that exercise patriarchal violence. When people ask me how I started working with disappearance, I say, as with all my research topics, it’s because reality knocked on my door. One of my colleagues in CIESAS was disappeared. She appeared in Nuevo Leon, very far away from my town. Disappearance used to be a way of controlling territory. The military culture of the dictatorships in Central America used disappearance in their war on drugs and against common dissidents. You can track the names of some young soldiers who were in the war against dissidents, they are now captains in the army. It is a counterinsurgency tool.
The reason for state disappearance is to demonstrate that they can; they have weapons and impunity. There are people disappeared to be trafficked as slave or sexual work in the international market. Disappearance is a continual violence, even if these people are lying in mass graves. As long as you cannot find the person, the torture goes on — it is a psychological warfare on the population. The data declares that there are 122,000 disappeared people in Mexico. Another popular form of disappearance is through drugs; chemicals such as fentanyl are used to recruit young poor people to work for them. The cartels give them the drug for free, and then when they grow addicted, they use the drugs to get free labor, and they keep consuming until it corrupts their brains. Once the person is useless, they kill them.
Disappearance is a common phenomena in our society. Many women spend their lives searching. I was in the prison project when a group of young scholars, archaeologists and physical anthropologists mainly trained to work in Mesoamerican culture, were contacted by families of disappeared people to ask them for a training in forensics to help them in their search. This team didn’t have tenure; they were hired by hours, it’s a precarious labor situation. They contacted me because of my activism and legal authority, I held a senior professorship, tenure. I embraced this project. We created an independent group called the Research Group on Social and Forensic Anthropology. We got the recognition of CIESAS. I knew nothing about forensics. I was a legal anthropologist so I helped them that way: providing expert reports in cases of disappearances. My report on the case of the disappearance of  the Alvarado family was taken to the Inter-American Court. I also was an expert witness report for the rape of an Indigenous Me’phaa in Guerrero by members of the Mexican Army.
I work in a memory workshop for mothers of the disappeared, the Trackers, to show the world that the disappeared are not numbers, nameless. The mothers write their life stories through methodologies we’ve made as a group. Something that is beautiful is the linkage between women searchers and inmates. The searchers want to publish a book, and I proposed they create it with Hermanas en la Sombra. I brought the stories from the women searchers to the inmates, and they were moved. They realized they shared so much.
Many of these women are victims of the police-cartel linkage. They suffer different kinds of separation. They wrote letters and poems to each other for years, exchanging them through me. They wrote a book together, Nadie Detiene Amor, or Nobody Stops Love, about their sons and daughters, disappeared or separated from them through prison walls. I can send it to you in Spanish. The inmates designed it, and they invited an artist to paint each mother with their sons and daughters. Every testimony has an accompanying painting. Mother Trackers is in the state of Sinaloa in the north, and the prison is one hour from where I live, in the state of Morelos in the center of Mexico. These women don’t know each other, but two, three years ago, there was a National Search Brigade, in which organizers of mothers of disappeared children visited other states. When they came to Morelos, I invited them to the prison, and they all met for the first time. They read the poems. We use writing for healing and denouncing violence, for self-representation. I have been able to get more funding and we’ve published a second book. It has chronicles from the memory workshops. I edited it. I’ve been trying very hard to make linkages among women in different contexts bound together by racist violence. The National Search Brigade has a slogan, “Buscando Nos Encontramos: Searching, we encounter each other.” This can mean in Spanish, “Searching, we encounter ourselves.” That is what I thought when the women of Sinaloa met those in Morelos. I’m not afraid because we are many.

VK

Woah. Your work is so affecting, bringing these women together. It’s basically a way of communicating: You are in company. We are many. These linkages are invaluable. There are few, few avenues for justice, fewer each day it feels. You can’t track down the disappeared. You don’t have the means to fight the police, and each day the plainclothes police force grows. You struggle to advocate for the detained or imprisoned, their bail is high, and the lawyers and the law students are under threat, and the law itself is not compassionate. What is possible is speaking to other people. You know: conversation. There are few people I can think of who’ve made conversation a life’s work, deliberately making bonds, educational and intimate bonds. The discipline of anthropology seems like context and conversation.

RA

Thank you. We are doing that work now. We are having a conversation.
When I started studying anthropology at seventeen, I was very naive about the discipline. I thought it was a tool to understand the Other, to understand the history of my own country. As I studied I discovered its colonial history in Africa. The classical works, by Bronisław Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, worked for colonial administration who needed to understand the native to control them. Imperial states invested in this new science. It was used for state building, too. Mexico needed to integrate the Indigenous into the nation and made state policies informed by genocidal ethnic anthropologists. I felt ashamed by the role of anthropology. I think there are many dissident anthropologists working in a different direction. I’ve been lucky to see anthropology change loyalties. This discipline is similar to psychology, which was used in wars, prisons, and counterinsurgency. Anthropologists are very self- and discipline-critical. I want to claim my anthropological genealogy in Mexico: Mercedes Olivera, she saw women’s knowledge as central and created an independent research center on women; Renato Rosaldo, he criticized the epistemic colonialism passed to students through the humanities. Anthropology has given me the tools for activism, the kind of knowledge I appreciate. I don’t want to be arrogant. I hope I have changed lives. The power structures remain. I have tried to do a little something, and have been able to do my something because of anthropology.

VK

It’s so promising that the discipline can be purposed in this way. And I think that shame seems really useful, and all these people who’ve educated you, the women from Morelos and Sinaloa, Mercedes and Renato. I don’t think anyone who has participated in your programs would think it was in vain. You know: passive, small or insignificant. I think, Especially us young people, have this issue where none of our actions can be a stone throw. It has to be of this seismic importance, an escalation. It is hard to see people thinking input and output will have anything in common. You can push and push and it’ll still be a stone throw. That doesn’t make it a disservice. You just have to devote your life in one direction or another.
Now I want to ask you about dissemination. How information travels, and becomes popularized, feels at the forefront of my mind: What do you think of transmitting testimonies, academic reports through Twitter, the radio stations, the television? When you have something you want to inform people about, what media do you look to? What is the exchange for you? How do you approach the decision?

RA

You are fluent in the new networks. I am pre-digital! I did my thesis dissertation on a typewriter. I was formed as a journalist, writing throughout my undergraduate, and have always tried to report for the national media, the progressive newspapers. That is a way of serving people for me. I don’t know how to adapt. I’ve begun doing radio and podcasts. I’ve just finished a documentary film about violence against Indigenous women in the border state of Guerrero, that borders Morelos, where I live. I’ve done other documentaries about the forensic work, about the memory workshops. I always try to create alliances. These networks are now controlled by big capitalists, by power, and are antagonistic to younger generations who don’t produce propaganda. You have to make new methods of dissemination yourselves. The book I finished at Harvard, about activist work with women searchers, was supposed to be published by a feminist independent press in Spanish. I want free access so I’m now learning about new chains of knowledge, how to go beyond the academic presses, academic language. I try to say dense things in simple words. There’s such knowledge to be gained in dialogue.

VK

Could you tell me where your conviction comes from? This can be my last question. Thank you so much for saying so much.

RA

We have an intergenerational dialogue, you and myself, and I see conviction in you. With the kind of questions that you’re asking me, with your concern to open your mind beyond Kenya, beyond the US, and learn about the projects here in Mexico. The little we can do is something. I see new generations of young scholars that do not conform, that want a different kind of academia. They use their privilege in a different way. I am still in the chat of Harvard for Palestine that I joined while at Radcliffe. I decided to stay because I wanted to know what was going on. Today they posted Keffiyeh Thursday, refusing to forget our reality of genocide. There are now only few of you, not like when I was there and the stairs were full. In those few I see conviction. As soon as there is one person standing on the Widener stairs against genocide, there is possibility.

Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo finished Digging for Hope: A Feminist Ethnography in the Land of Mass Graves while a 2023-2024 fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. The book is about her activist work with women searchers. It is supposed to be published in Spanish by Bajo Tierra Ediciones, a feminist independent press, as Exhumar la esperanza. Una etnografía feminista en el país de las fosas.