Memory Protest and Contested Time: The <em>Antimonumentos</em> Route in Mexico City

Alexandra Délano Alonso; Benjamin Nienass

doi:10.6092/issn.1971-8853/16942

Authors

Alexandra Délano Alonso Global Studies, The New School https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5066-0902

Alexandra Délano Alonso is Associate Professor of Global Studies at The New School (USA) and holder of the Eugene M. Lang Professorship for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring. Her research on Mexico-US migration and diaspora policies includes the books Mexico and its Diaspora in the United States: Policies of Emigration since 1848 (2011, Cambridge University Press), From Here and There: Diaspora Policies, Integration and Social Rights beyond Borders (2018, Oxford University Press). In co-authorship with Benjamin Nienass they have published various articles on the politics of memory as well as the special issue Borders and the Politics of Mourning (2016, Social Research. An International Quarterly). Délano Alonso is also the author of the poetry collection Brotes (2021, Interstitial Press) and co-director of the short film Fragmentos (2021). Her forthcoming publications include the co-edited volume Las luchas por la memoria contra las violencias en México (El Collegio de México), and New Narratives on the Peopling of America: Immigration, Race and Dispossession.
Benjamin Nienass Department of Political Science and Law, Montclair State University https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6708-3320

Benjamin Nienass is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University (USA). His research on the politics of memory in Germany, the United States, and Mexico has appeared in The Review of Politics, Politics and Society, the German Studies Review, the Latin American Research Review, Current History, Globalizations, and many other journals. He is also the co-editor of Silence, Screen, and Spectacle: Rethinking Social Memory in the Age of Information (2014, Berghahn), Las luchas por la memoria contra las violencias en México (forthcoming, El Colegio de México), and of several special journal issues, most recently “Myths of Innocence in German Public Memory” (2021) in German Politics and Society.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/16942

Keywords:

Memory, Countermonuments, Protest, Memory activism, Mexico

Abstract

This article examines the corridor of Antimonumentos (antimonuments) in Mexico City. In a context of more than 110,000 enforced disappearances and hundreds of thousands of deaths since the start of the “war on drug cartels” in 2006, the Antimonumentos are one of the ways in which memory activists seek to mark significant events of violence and state neglect, and expressly confront both the government and society by voicing public demands for justice, accountability, and non-repetition. They occupy public spaces anonymously, without permission, and establish a link between past and present instances of state violence, thereby drawing attention to intersecting forms of violence. We examine how these countermonuments exemplify a protest against a specific regime of temporality, and how they also allow us to reflect on the temporality of protests.

References

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Memory Protest and Contested Time: The Antimonumentos Route in Mexico City

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