Enforced disappearance in Mexico has been represented in cinema, on stage, in music, in performance, and in literature. This ‘artivism’ is demanding truth and justice and inviting society to feel compassion and empathy, to give a face, a life story, to the numbers, to the digits of violence in Mexico.
This article was translated from Spanish for LAB by Isabel Cancian.
The actresses were not actresses. Rather, they were mothers searching for their sons or daughters who were victims of forceful disappearances.
They performed in October 2025 with a conference-performance during the 53rd edition of the Festival Internacional Cervantino, a major international arts and culture festival held annually in the city of Guanajuato.
This conference-performance or artivism, titled A Guanajuato Collective, combined art with activism. Throughout the play, the protagonists staged the painful process of searching for the disappeared with picks and shovels, digging their tools into the soil; because in Mexico, it is mothers who search, or sisters, or fathers, ‘because if I do not look for you, no one will.’ That is how they refer to what they label as a lack of action from the authorities to account for the disappearance of more than 130,000 people in the country’s recent history.
‘Nobody should disappear, people do not disappear; they are enslaved bodies, exploited bodies, free labour, bodies to be used as means of exchange,’ the mothers say during their conference-performance. They invite the public in forensic terms to do an ‘inventory’ of their own distinguishing characteristics — a tattoo, a scar, a birthmark — ‘to be able to identify you [the audience], in case one day you disappear.’
An empty chair in the middle of the stage represents the 26 searchers and family members of the disappeared who have been murdered in Mexico since 2011. The audience holds within their hands LED candles to represent the absence, the search, and the hope of return. There are sobs in the half-dimmed room of the Teatro Cervantes in the city of Guanajuato. A woman cannot hold back her tears. Silence. She breaks the silence with a powerful instruction: ‘porque vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos’ [because they took them away alive, we want them back alive].
Elsewhere at the Cervantino, that same theme was addressed by a traditional music group from Veracruz, a southern state in Mexico that occupies the fourth place in the list of disappeared people in the country, with more than seven thousand people missing and unaccounted for as of 2025.
A woman’s voice, a deep voice, singing, a lament of sorrow, accompanied by harps and jaranas, was heard in the cold night of Guanajuato in the Alhóndiga de Granaditas: ‘If one day I do not return, give my mother this kiss, and, in the face of fierce violence, let prayer and weeping also be acts of resistance. Now, do cry your heart out, because I did not return. Look for me under this sky where I sang my feelings, and demand justice in my name.’
Art as Testimony and Resistance
The issue of enforced disappearances in Mexico has been represented in cinema, on stage, in music, in performance, and in literature. Through various means of artistic expression, a demand for truth and justice is made, inviting society to feel compassion and empathy. It is a call to give a face, a life story, to the numbers, to the digits of violence in Mexico. It is a call against revictimisation.
When a young person disappears, social doubt is cast upon the victim and their family members, a searching mother from the collective Hasta Encontrarte (Until I Find You) explained.
‘As mothers, we are blamed for not having looked after the young people who have disappeared. Immediately, it is speculated that if the boy or the girl consumed illegal substances, it was the parents’ fault. In this way, we, the families, are victimised again.’
A documentary produced by the Universidad Iberoamericana de León (IBERO León), Guanajuato, titled The Place of Memory: Return to Salvatierra, accompanied the discovery of the biggest clandestine mass grave in the country in October 2020, which was located in Salvatierra, Guanajuato.
In the film, entire families describe what it is like to live with the stigma of being relatives of someone who was forcibly disappeared. Because it is commonly assumed that if someone was disappeared, they ‘must have been involved in something,’ relatives are forced to repeat, again and again, that their missing relative was a good person in order to be seen as legitimate in the eyes of society
By insisting that victims are somehow to blame, both society and governments seem to forget that every victim of enforced disappearances has also been a victim of serious violations of their human rights. Their cases are rooted in social dynamics, structural gender and political violence, and broader forms of systemic abuse, not only in criminality.
Performing Absence, Performing Memory
A couple of months ago, a recital was held at the Goethe Institute in Colonia Roma, Mexico City. En Primera Persona (First Person Point of View), is a compilation of six monologues in which the life of a missing person is represented until the point of their disappearance or murder.
Another play that was presented at the Santa Catarina theatre, in Coyoacán, towards the south of Mexico City, was a monologue titled Hasta Encontrarte (Until I Find You). The performance consisted of physical theatre that tackles the emotional, physical, and psychological impact on family members of enforced disappearances.
The play follows the story of Alma, a mother searching for her missing daughter. It is a journey of pain, rage, and transformation, during which the main character discovers her own strength and resilience. This representation depicts the feeling usually shared by searching mothers: ‘in pain is where I find my strength,’ they say, or ‘they took away my child, but also my fear.’
Enforced disappearances are also found in literature, a medium that likewise offers space for protest and reflection. In the most recent edition of the Hay Festival in the city of Querétaro, a cultural event also held in Colombia and the UK, the Mexican author Alma Delia Murillo presented her work, Raíz que no desaparece (A Root that Does Not Disappear), a hybrid between chronicle and fiction about a mother orphaned of a son.
‘Disappeared people are ours; they belong to all of us. We need to let go of the prejudice that if they disappeared, “they surely were involved in something”, because indeed, they were involved in something: they were involved in life, and often looking for work.’
In a conversation with the public, Murillo stated that Mexico has lost a feeling of safety and that the delirious reality of the thousands disappeared in the country has transitioned through governments of every political party.
‘It is not only one government that has turned a blind eye and attempted to deny that over 130,000 people have been victims of enforced disappearance in Mexico. Regardless of who is in government, administration after administration, they have all been indolent, negligent, and omitting.’
Recently, the government of President Claudia Sheinbaum rejected the conclusions reached by the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED), which considers that there are indications that enforced disappearances in Mexico are a generalised and systemic practice.
The Mexican government ensures that those declarations lack evidence, and attributes the disappearance of people to organised crime, while also ensuring that it is working on a National Strategy of Construction of Peace and a National Registry of Missing and Unlocated Persons.
Main image: from the Facebook of Un Colectivo Guanajuato
