| Abstract |
As part of a wider crisis of generalized violence in Mexico, ‘disappearance’ – including enforced disappearance (deprivation of freedom, in an unknown location, by public authorities) – shapes the everyday lives and political behavior of ordinary Mexicans. The current government of Mexico, led by the Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (MORENA) party, now acknowledges more than 110,000 unresolved cases of disappearance. Advocates and activists for victims of disappearance argue that this number, which keeps growing, is almost certainly an undercount. Disappointed by the government’s apparent incapacity to correct conditions of almost total impunity in relation to this violence, mobilized victims, and advocates and activists for victims of disappearance, also observably converge around a shifting repertoire of collective action. It is through this repertoire (e.g. citizen-led searches for the disappeared, cooperative investigations, large and small demonstrations of disgust with generalized violence) that people with diverse life experiences and relationships with constituted power pursue justice for victims of violence with impunity. The production of vulnerability to violence, including disappearance, is felt more intensely in some sub-national regions and states, especially since former president Felipe Calderón’s declaration of war on narcotrafficking in 2006. Despite legislative victories and constitutional changes made possible by committed advocacy and activism during the past two decades, there persists an almost total lack of clarity around the identities of perpetrators of disappearance in Mexico. In these circumstances, justice would appear to be a dream.
In Bootstrap Justice: The Search for Mexico’s Disappeared, Janice K. Gallagher shows that ‘justice’ is more than a dream for advocates and activists who pursue it. Instead, ‘justice’ is a horizon defined through a process of what Gallagher describes as ‘sustained mobilization’, as well as through transformations in activists’ relationships to state power that sustained mobilization implies. Gallagher organizes Bootstrap Justice into seven chapters, including an introduction and a conclusion. The most engaging chapters follow the ‘life courses’ of families that have suffered the trauma of disappearance. By tracing these families’ experiences, from early social formation through the trauma of disappearance and subsequent reorientations towards territorial authorities, which are prompted by the pursuit of justice for their loved ones, Gallagher shows how these families redefine justice and converge with allies to sustain a collective process of subjectification. Some chapters withdraw from the intimate family narratives to engagingly provide a historical-geographical context against which to understand their pursuit of justice, but these treatments of context only intensify the force of the narratives and their demonstration of the potential for disappearance to propel strategic and sustained action for justice.
One of Gallagher’s conclusions, that direct experience of the trauma of disappearance might inspire sustained mobilization, may seem unconvincing for readers of scholarship that suggests the pervasiveness of violence with impunity paralyzes community organizing and mobilization (Navarro Trujillo, Citation2019; Paley, Citation2016). Gallagher, however, explains why a tendency for generalized violence to be functional to territorial control is more evident in some contexts than others. This treatment of geographical variation warrants further consideration. Indeed, the book is helpfully organized to reveal geographical variation across the Mexican territory and is suggestive of a need to study conditions for mobilization that inhere only in some contexts. For example, readers come to appreciate the importance of distinctions between Mexican states, including states in which officials more clearly collude with perpetrators, or are perpetrators themselves, of disappearance. At the same time, some anthropological and geographical scholarship suggests that there may be opportunities for work on how particular places, within particular states, are more or less permissive of effective citizen-led mobilization (Pérez Negrete, Citation2013; Tapia Martínez, Hernández Lara, & Crane, Citation2023). When Bootstrap Justice describes geographical variation across the national territory but focuses on variation between states, it nonetheless licenses further study of the socially and geographically uneven production of generalized violence, and of the everyday spatiality of citizen-led mobilization. Through family narratives, Bootstrap Justice also sometimes reveals place-based conditions for citizen-led mobilization and its frustration, complementing more high-resolution studies of geographical variation around these themes.
Gallagher’s ethnographic approach is crucial to the book’s success. For example, when, as I note, Gallagher sometimes demonstrates the power of attention to place-based conditions for citizen-led mobilization, it is through details of how protagonists in one or another instance of mobilization strategically engaged with allies, including state officials and human rights organizations, to harness perceived local political opportunities. That the ethnographic work was also pursued with a clear sense of social obligation contributes to the book’s success. Gallagher’s commitment to accompany the people with whom she worked enables the book to highlight the ways that concepts (notably ‘justice’) are constitutively related to the places in which they matter for understanding the world and acting on it. Through conceptual revisions, Gallagher intervenes in the poetics of accounting for complicities and collusions that define the contemporary context of generalized violence.
Bootstrap Justice is deserving of a wide audience. It draws from across disciplines and fields of study, including anthropology, political science, sociology, and social movement studies, which are put into conversation in a way that generates novel insight into one of the most pressing themes in the study of contemporary politics and society of Mexico. I find myself recommending Bootstrap Justice even to colleagues who are completely unconnected to Mexican studies, because the book exemplifies the best of a ‘community-engaged’ practice to which many scholars aspire. Bootstrap Justice contributes to the advancement of thinking across disciplines, for a network of scholars who are interested in dynamics of contentious politics in contexts of pervasive violence. At the same time, Bootstrap Justice is engagingly written and rooted in lived experiences. For that reason, the book is also meaningful for people who persist in pursuing ‘justice’ for the disappeared in Mexico, despite the risks and disappointments that this work implies. |
