Fue el estado (‘It was the state’): Embodied practices of memory and the re-writing of Mexico’s genealogy of violence

Abstract

In the midst of the activism outburst after the Ayotzinapa crisis, the Mexican collective ‘Rexiste’ wrote the phrase ‘It was the state’ in Mexico City’s main square. I define such action as an embodied practice of memory, which re configurates Mexico’s history of violence. Based on an affective approach, I delve into the kinaesthetic of the performance to show how the action is summoning archived repertoires of Mexican activism post-1968. I first refer to the foundation of human rights committees in the late 70s and their main repertoire of action, hunger strikes, to then consider the funeral re-enactments of the late 1990s after the Aguas Blancas and Acteal massacres. Through this unarchiving I want to analyse how the unresolved past re-emerges in the creation of a non-teleological temporality of state-fostered violence.