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The Caravana of Central American Mothers in Mexico: Performances of Devotional and Saintly Motherhood on a Transnational Stage-in-Motion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 November 2021
Abstract
Like earlier mother activism in Latin America, the annual Caravana de Madres Centroamericanas (Caravan of Central American Mothers) through Mexico strategically activates the traditional archetype of mothers as passive, pious, suffering victims whose self-abnegation forces them, almost against their will, out of their supposedly natural domestic sphere. Three elements, however, distinguish the caravana from earlier protests staged by mothers. First, this protest crosses national borders, functioning as a transnational pilgrimage to the memory of the disappeared relative. This stage-in-motion temporarily spotlights and claims the spaces traversed by undocumented Central American migrants in Mexico, attempting to recast those migrants as victims of violence rather than as criminals. Second, through performances of both devotional motherhood and saintly motherhood, the caravana's mother-based activism de-normalizes violence related to drugs and migration. Third, performances of family reunification staged by the caravana organizers take place in the few cases in which they manage to locate family members who have not fallen prey to violence but have simply resettled in Mexico and abandoned or lost touch with families left behind in Central America. These performances of family reunification serve important functions: they shift the performance of motherhood from devotion to saintly tolerance, patience and forgiveness – even toward prodigal offspring who were ‘lost’ for years; they provide a chance for other mothers to vicariously feel joy and hope that their children are still alive; they exemplify world citizens challenging incompetent or indifferent nation state authorities; and they enact a symbolic unification of Central America and Mexico in defiance of contemporary nation state borders.
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- Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2021
Footnotes
I would like to thank Katey Borland, Víctor M. Espinosa, José Jacques y Medina, Encarni Pindado, Marta Sánchez Soler and the many relatives of the missing who granted interviews for their assistance with this article. I would also like to thank Katherine Zien and Brenda Werth for organizing the 2019 working session at the American Society for Theatre Research, Gender, Sexuality, and Performance in Latin America and the Caribbean: From Marxist Masculinity to #MeToo and #NiUnaMenos, where the article draft benefitted from many useful suggestions for development.
References
Notes
2 Lidia Diego Mateo, interview with the author, 3 December 2013, Palenque, Mexico.
3 Diego Mateo's 2012 image was fastened to a freight train, along with images of other mothers and undocumented migrants, as part of an exhibit organized during the 2013 caravana by Mexico City photographer Jesús Villaseca and Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano organizer Encarni Pindado, who is also a freelance photojournalist. Villaseca gathered 280 reproductions of photographs of the undocumented migrant journey by about a dozen different Mexican photographers, many of them taken around or on the freight trains collectively dubbed La Bestia (the Beast). With the help of volunteers, many train cars (as well as the caravana bus) were covered with the images so that when the train left the station and moved north it would serve as both a photographic exhibit and a moving billboard, helping publicize the disappearance of the migrants and perhaps solicit leads as to their whereabouts. See Ana Elena Puga with Víctor M. Espinosa, ‘A Moving Exhibit’, 4 December 2013, at caravanamadres.wordpress.com (accessed 22 October 2019).
4 Rosa Nelly Santos, interview with the author and Víctor Manuel Espinosa, 27 June 2016, El Progreso, Honduras.
5 Marta Sánchez Soler, interview with the author, 19 January 2020, Mexico City.
6 For more on mother-based activism in Latin America see Cynthia L. Bejarano, ‘Las Super Madres de Latino America: Transforming Motherhood by Challenging Violence in Mexico, Argentina, and Salvador’, El, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 23, 1 (2002), pp. 126–50Google Scholar; Taylor, Diana, ‘Trapped in Bad Scripts’, in Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's Dirty War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 183–222Google Scholar; Wright, Melissa W., ‘Urban Geography Plenary Lecture: Femicide, Mother-Activism, and the Geography of Protest in Northern Mexico’, Urban Geography, 28, 5 (2007), pp. 401–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kron, Stefanie, ‘Nacimos de la Nada: Border Struggles and Maternal Politics in Mexico’, Citizenship Studies, 20, 5 (2016), pp. 579–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Rivera Hernández, Raúl Diego, ‘Making Absence Visible: The Caravan of Central American Mothers in Search of Disappeared Migrants’, Latin American Perspectives, 44, 5 (2017), pp. 108–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Amarela Varela Huerta, ‘El Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano: Una aproximación desde la sociología de la acción colectiva a un ejemplo de luchas migrantes’, Amnis, 1 September 2016, at https://journals.openedition.org/amnis/2854 (accessed 22 October 2019).
8 Tom Phillips, ‘More than 60,000 People Are Missing Amid Mexico's Drug War, Officials Say’, The Guardian, 6 January 2020, at www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/06/mexico-drug-war-missing-estimate (accessed 22 July 2018).
9 Daniel A. Molina, La caravana del hambre (Mexico City: Ediciones El Caballito, 1978).
10 Martínez, Ana, ‘Distrito Federal: “Global City, Ha, Ha, Ha!”’, in Hopkins, D. J. and Solga, Kim, eds., Performance and the Global City (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 183–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 190.
11 Segura, Ricardo, ‘Javier Sicilia como celebridad trágica y los performances del Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad’, Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, 64, 237 (2019), pp. 95–118Google Scholar.
12 Amalia Frank-Vitale, ‘From Caravan to Exodus, from Migration to Movement’, NACLA, 20 November 2018, at https://nacla.org/news/2018/11/26/caravan-exodus-migration-movement (accessed 22 July 2020).
13 Luis Alfredo Arriola Vega, ‘López Obrador's Initial Policies toward Central American Migrants: Implications for the U.S.’, Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy (August 2019), pp. 7–8.
14 Kate Linthicum, ‘Pueblo Sin Fronteras Uses Caravans to Shine Light on Plight of Migrants – But Has That Backfired?’, Los Angeles Times, 6 December 2018, at www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-mexico-caravan-leaders-20181206-story.html (accessed 15 August 2020).
15 Renny Golden and Michael McConnell, ‘Sanctuary’, International Review of Mission, 73, 292 (1984), pp. 486–90.
16 For more on the AMIREDIS caravan see Ana Elena Puga and Víctor M. Espinosa, ‘Wounded Warriors: Corrective Castings in Male Activism’, in Puga and Espinosa, Performances of Suffering in Latin American Migration: Heroes, Martyrs and Saints (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 185–229.
17 ‘Caravan’, in Paul Lagasse and Columbia University, The Columbia Encyclopedia, 8th edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), at http://proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/columency/caravan/0?institutionId=4358 (accessed 11 August 2020).
18 Elaine A. Peña, Performing Piety: Making Space Sacred with the Virgin of Guadalupe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), p. 10.
19 Rivera Hernández, ‘Making Absence Visible’, p. 109.
20 EFE Newswire, ‘Caravana centroamericana encuentra a hondureño en una cárcel mexicana’, 14 November 2011, at www.efe.com (accessed 11 August 2020).
21 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 139.
22 Emiliano Ruiz Parra, ‘¿Dónde está mi hijo? La caravana de madres centroamericanas’, Gatopardo, 20 December 2012, at https://gatopardo.com/revista/edicion-137-diciembre-2012-enero-2013/caravana-de-madres-centroamericanas-migrantes-desaparecidos (accessed 22 July 2020).
23 Ana Enamorado's son Óscar Antonio López Enamorado went missing in 2010 in San Sebastián del Oeste, Jalisco, even after she paid what she suspected was a ransom to some men who called her in Tegucigalpa to say that because her son had crashed their pickup truck she must therefore wire them the money he ‘owed’ them. Ana Enamorado, interview with the author, 11 December 2013. On 6 April 2015, fifteen state police officers were killed in an ambush by the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación. In December of that same year Enamorado was given some ashes by the Jalisco Institute of Forensic Science and told that they were the cremated remains of Óscar Antonio, who had allegedly been found hanging from a bridge. No DNA testing was done on the body before it was cremated. See ‘Hondureña en México pide ver cuerpo de su hijo, pero le entregan las cenizas’, La Prensa, 7 December 2015, at www.laprensa.hn/mundo/908777-410/hondureña-en-méxico-pide-ver-cuerpo-de-su-hijo-pero-le-entregan (accessed 22 October 2019). Without forensic proof, Enamorado has refused to accept the ashes as those of her son. See also ‘Ana Enamorado’, interview, Ecologies of Migrant Care, Hemispheric Institute, 9 August 2017 at https://ecologiesofmigrantcare.org/ana-enamorado (accessed 15 August 2020).
24 Sanjuana Martínez, ‘El Estado ha dejado en el olvido la masacre de 49 migrantes en Cadereyta, denuncia ONG’, La Jornada, 24 January 2016, p. 7. In Spanish: ‘¿Cómo es posible que hayan hecho eso? Todos somos hijos de Dios. Tanto daño le están haciendo a México, un país desprestigiado; mire esos 43 normalistas (de Ayotzinapa) desaparecidos; a mí me duelen también esos estudiantes. Hacen cosas horribles, pero nosotros seguimos pidiendo justicia. Queremos que se identifique a todos, pero van tan lento; no es justo.’
25 See Amarela Varela Huerta, ‘Las masacres de migrantes en San Fernando y Cadereyta: dos ejemplos de gubernamentalidad necropolítica’, Íconos, Revista de Ciencias Sociales, 58 (2017), pp. 131–49.
26 On the number of migrants located by MMM as of the end of 2019, ‘Madres Centroamericanas Llegan a México a Buscar a sus Hijos Migrantes’, EFE, 20 November 2019, at www.efe.com/efe/america/sociedad/madres-centroamericanas-llegan-a-mexico-buscar-sus-hijos-migrantes/20000013-4114941 (accessed 11 August 2020). Their willingness to be publicly reunited with their families was stressed by MMM president Marta Sánchez Soler, interview with the author, 19 January 2020, Mexico City.
27 For more on the madrecita archetype see Jorge Ayala Blanco, La aventura del cine mexicano (Mexico, DF: Grijalbo, 1993), pp. 42–53.
28 ‘Tras 21 años, abraza a su hija’, El Siglo de Torreón, 7 November 2010, www.elsiglodetorreon.com.mx/noticia/573512.tras-21-anos-abraza-a-su-hija.html (accessed 11 August 2020). The last two lines of the un-bylined article read, ‘A doña Emeteria no le importan los motivos que tuvo su hija para guarder silencio durante dos décadas. Lo único importante para ella es que nuevamente están juntas.’
29 Israel Hernández, ‘Sin Importar los Obstáculos, Pilar se Pudo Reunir con su Hija Olga’, Movimiento Migrante Messoamericano, 17 December 2017, at https://movimientomigrantemesoamericano.org/2017/12/17/sin-importar-los-obstaculos-pilar-se-puedo-reunir-con-su-hija-olga (accessed 11 August 2020).
30 Marta Sánchez Soler, interview with the author: ‘El encuentro es una parte importante del éxito que pueden tener las caravanas. Es un evento importantisimo porque les da esperanza a las madres y porque, pues, es un momento mágico de la caravana. Esa es la parte buena de los encuentros. La parte que a mí no me gusta de los encuentros, no me gusta nada, es que es muy difícil mantenerlo y que no se vea como un montaje televisivo. O sea, le tienes que dar presencia, lo tienes que publicitar…al mismo tiempo publicitarlo en una forma que no parezca Don Francisco en la tele… No tiene salida. Le hemos buscado mucho. A veces hemos dicho, bueno, primero que se junten y luego que salgan a rueda de prensa. Pero no es lo mismo, no es lo mismo. La gente quiere ver que se vean y corren y se abrazan.’
31 Gould, Deborah, ‘On Affect and Protest’, in Steiger, Janet, Cvetkovitch, Ann and Reynolds, Ann, eds., Political Emotions: New Agendas in Communication (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 18–44Google Scholar.
32 Ruben Figueroa, dir. Barbara Beltramello (2015), at www.barbarabeltramello.com/playvideo/ruben-figueroa-1 (accessed 15 July 2020).