Contributor:
Cite as:
Torres, María. 2019. "On Absence/Presence in the “Field” Of Citizen-led Forensics in Mexico". In "Methodological Interruptions Across the Field and Archive: Doing STS in Mexico" created by Arturo Vallejo. In Innovating STS Digital Exhibit, curated by Aalok Khandekar and Kim Fortun. Society for Social Studies of Science. August.
My research is about the role of forensic genetic technologies in emerging processes of grass-roots organization in the search for and identification of missing persons in Mexico. For the past four years, I have been researching these processes of civil society organization, focusing particularly on the collection of citizen DNA samples and the civilian search for clandestine graves, practices carried out mostly by activist mothers throughout the country. During this time, I have faced difficulties in gaining "access" to the relatives of disappeared persons and "observing firsthand" their practices. This is because of two main reasons: one, there is risk involved in accompanying mothers in their efforts to search and locate clandestine graves in the midst of an ongoing violent conflict (a risk not sanctioned by University protocols). And two, the families themselves consistently question the role of the academy and the ways we intervene (or not) in this context of structural violence, inaction, state collusion, and abandonment of families and their disappeared relatives.
This impossibility of accessing the "field" has functioned as an interruption of my own practice, short-circuiting the notions of "science", "technology" and "activism", "observation", "field", "subject/object of study", of “accompaniment" and, very particularly, of "listening". Moreover, this interruption is responsible in my case for contaminating the limits established between the academic, the personal and the political, forcing me to make explicit the implications of "placing the body" or not when we do what we call "field work". This will imply the task of rethinking, perhaps in a fundamental way, the intricate and unequal relationships that are established from academic work with "the other", the role of my presence/absence in the field, as well as with other forms of affective and political work. In this sense, I ask myself: Is it possible, given this interruption, to deploy other more critical, creative and ethically responsible modes of STS "intervention" in the context of violence and forensic auto-organization in Mexico? What could feminist and decolonial STS contribute to this effort? I pose these questions in the hope that this interruption may open a site of articulation of a feminist praxis of listening, care and situated epistemic exchange with and throughout the body (Haraway, 1988).
Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: the Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”. Feminist Studies, vol. 14 no. 3, 1988, pp. 575-599.
Harding, Sandra. 2008. Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Harding, Sandra. 2017. “Latin American Decolonial Studies: Feminist Issues”. Feminist Studies, vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 624-636.
Harding, Sandra. 2016. “Latin American Decolonial Social Studies of Scientific Knowledge: Alliances and Tensions”. Science, Technology, & Human Values, vol. 41, no. 6, pp. 1063-1087.
Lugones, Maria. 2010. “The Coloniality of Gender”. Globalization and the Decolonial Option, edited by Walter Mignolo and Arturo Escobar, London: Routledge, pp. 369-390.
Lyons, Kristina, Juno Salazar Parreñas, Noah Tamarkin, Banu Subramaniam, Lesley Green, and Tania Pérez-Bustos. 2017. “Engagements with Decolonization and Decoloniality in and at the Interfaces of STS”. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 1-47.
Reardon, Jenny, Jacob Metcalf, Martha Kenney, and Karen Barad. 2015. “Science and Justice: The Trouble and the Promise”. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience,vol. 1 no. 1, pp. 1-48.
Smith, Lindsay A., and Vivette García-Deister. 2017. “Capturing Los Migrantes Desaparecidos : Crisis, Unknowability, and the Making of the Missing”. Perspectives on Science, vol. 25, no. 5, September, pp. 680-697.
Smith, Lindsay A., and Vivette García-Deister. 2016.“Ensamblajes de la ciencia forense en américa latina”. Aproximaciones a lo local y lo global: América Latina, edited by Edna Suárez Díaz and Gisela Mateos, Centro de estudios filosóficos, políticos y sociales Vicente Lombardo Toledano, pp. 270-300.
All Innovating STS exhibits are oriented by nine shared questions in order to generate comparative insight. These are:
ARTICULATION: What STS innovations (of theory, methodology, pedagogy...Read more
Furthering its theme, Innovations, Interruptions, Regenerations , the 2019 annual 4S meeting in New Orleans will include a special exhibit, Innovating STS , that showcases innovations ...Read more
On the morning of September 16th, 2017, I interviewed the activist Juan Carlos Trujillo at his home. He is brother of four youths who disappeared between 2008 and 2010 and a member of the Brigada Nacional de Búsqueda de Personas Desaparecidas (National Brigade in Search of the Disappeared), a network of family collectives dedicated to the citizen-led search for clandestine graves in more than 15 Mexican states. That holiday morning (it was Mexico’s Independence Day), Vivette, my thesis advisor, lent me her car to travel to the interview's location in Tepotzotlán, a town in the State of Mexico 43 kilometers northwest of downtown Mexico City. Daniel, a driver to whom Vivette introduced me, accompanied me that morning. Uncertain about the route, we got lost several times on nearby dirt roads until we found Juan Carlos’ home. It was in a low-income residential complex with one-story houses on the town's outskirts, near an industrial park. I remember feeling out of place there. I remember feeling that our presence attracted attention: We arrived in a VW dark grey car, a chauffer at the wheel dressed in a formal shirt and, next to him, a visibly foreign researcher (Spanish although resident in Mexico for years, middle class and "güera", as they usually call me at my neighborhood market in Mexico City). I remember feeling scared, and that made me feel shame. Fear and shame. I got out of the car with a huge professional audio recorder, a $150 Zoom just acquired via Amazon. I worried my presence might seem pretentious and invasive, especially with that recorder in my hand. I got out of the car anyway. I knocked on the door. It didn't have a lock, just a piece of cardboard covering the hole in the handle. I was invited in. Daniel, the driver, waited for me outside.
I talked to Juan Carlos for an hour or so. He yawned. I felt he had answered my questions hundreds of times before I asked him. And almost at the end of the interview, his questions arrived:
¿Y ustedes, desde la academia, qué hacen además de extraer información a las familias para sus trabajos? ¿cómo tú y gente como tú han decidido acompañarnos? ¿nos escuchan o nos han dejado solos?.
[And all of you, in Academia, what do you do other than extract information from the families for your work? How are you going to accompany us? Will you listen to us and just leave?
I managed to babble a few words in response, but I wasn't prepared for that question.
His question made me ask myself: In what ways do our academic practices, especially those derived from 'field' work of this nature, become extractivist? How can we account for the ways in which our practices unfold in classist, racist and colonialist frameworks?