Desenterrar la verdad: espacios afectivos y denunciantes en Volverte a ver

Authors

  • Olga Salazar Pozos University of Minnesota

Keywords:

Landscapes of disappearance, Disappearances in Mexico, Affective turn, Spacial turn

Abstract

In December 2006, Mexico started a War on Drugs which led to a human rights crisis. Regarding the problem of disappearances in the country, this directly translates to a public record of 95,350 missing persons (2021), and to the fact that, mostly, the victims’ family members are the ones left to organize and search for their missing relatives. Through the lens of documentary films, these search processes and the development of the unfortunate phenomenon have been thoroughly represented and have gotten deep into a scenario that has been scarcely documented and exposed: the search for “los desaparecidos” or “the disappeared” in clandestine mass graves. Volverte a ver (To see you again, 2020), directed by Carolina Corral, presents the possibility of responding to the question: What happens when cinema-as well as its protagonists-becomes capable of walking through a landscape where the earth is excavated, leading to uncovering truths which were buried until that moment? Following the protagonists from Regresando a casa - Morelos (Coming back home - Morelos) the exhumation of a staggering 84 missing persons in a government owned mass grave in Morelos is documented. This article states that in this walk-through, the documentary is capable of creating a portrait of the disappearances problem that goes deep into the ground from the perspective of the search for a loved one who went missing, and that it also has a twofold ability; to expose or report the violations in one of over 4000 mass graves in Mexico, and to explain from an affective perspective the impact that a disappearance has on the victim’s family members.

Published

2023-10-21

How to Cite

Salazar Pozos, O. (2023). Desenterrar la verdad: espacios afectivos y denunciantes en Volverte a ver. A Contracorriente: Una Revista De Estudios Latinoamericanos, 21(1), 105–131. Retrieved from https://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/acontracorriente/article/view/2197

Issue

Section

Articles / Artículos