Abstract

This photographic essay is based on images taken during night walks in Zamora, Michoacán, between 2020 and 2023, years in which Zamora was recognized among the cities with the highest homicide and disappearance rates in the world. It seeks an interpretation of the uses of home altars and cenotaphs in relation to a relative silence in public language. By following the examples of Zamorano (2022), Reyero (2007) and others, many of the images were returned, opening opportunities for conversation about violent events, mourning, fear and stigmatization of families with loss. The substantial portion of the text, distributed among the captions, comes from texts sent anonymously by people who responded to these images.

Keywords: disappearances, duel, visual methods, Michoacán, night

on the insomnia in zamora: what we don't speak of, but the night lets us show. methodological note

This photo essay features moments captured during night time walks in Zamora, Michoacán, between 2020 and 2023, years in which the city had among the highest murder and disappearance rates in the world. It explores the use of home altars and cenotaphs in the face of relative silence about violence in public language. Following the lead of Zamorano (2022), Reyero (2007), and others, printed images were delivered to the families of their subjects, or to the keepers of altars, which in turn created opportunities for people to discuss violence, grief, fear, and the stigma that hangs over families who have lost relatives. Responses sent anonymously via phone texts are shared in the captions and provide most of the substance of the interpretation.

Keywords: visual methods, night, Michoacán, disappearances, grief.

These photos were taken during night walks, between 2020 and 2023, in the city of Zamora, Michoacán. During these years, some organizations named this city the most dangerous city in Mexico (Consejo Ciudadano para la Seguridad Pública y la Justicia Penal, 2022; Observatorio Regional Zamora, A.C., 2022 and 2023). The following are observations on the daily (or nocturnal) life of Zamora during these years, based on the creation of a registry of thousands of images, and on the gradual definition of an investigation about grief based on conversations, with images in hand, with an abundant variety of people awake at night.

As a New Yorker in Michoacán, I was initially upset that many people told me that I should not walk at night. However, over time I made my own reading of the news, no doubt with a bias of my own: I concluded that most of the shootings happened in broad daylight and that the nighttime ones did not happen in the street. As of 2017, I returned to my old hobby of walking, with a camera in hand, a Sony a6000, a tripod and a remote control.

Behind the scenes: night, death and fear

During the covid-19 pandemic, I walked more regularly so as not to feel isolated. I began by taking pictures of cats and other animals in the dark, as the technical challenges are similar to portraits of children, and photographing them requires no permission. I watched with pleasure the arrival of the lights ledThe number of altars and cenotaphs (a sort of tombstone where there is no burial, but which usually marks the place of death), both in constant increase, not only in Día de la Muerte, but also in the decoration of houses and gardens, caught my attention. In addition, my attention was drawn to the many altars and cenotaphs (a kind of tombstone where there is no burial, but which usually marks the place of death), both of which are constantly increasing, not only on the Day of the Dead and other holidays, but throughout the year.

Over time, I began to prefer certain neighborhoods in the central-southeast area of Zamora: Infonavit Arboledas (i, ii and iii), Jacinto López, La Lima and Jardines de Catedral, which is the neighborhood where I live. Their advantages are multiple, despite the opinion that some people have about the conflict and disappearances. Being densely populated they were very convenient, since, until after midnight, there are many people on the streets. I assumed it would be quiet in a place where there are children playing, because moms are quick to find out about any fights. In Jardines de Catedral, originally, the apartments were houses that were subdivided by the growth of families or by the arrival of new families who come to work in the agro-industry and have to rent an apartment. Many homes house three to four generations. Often, grandparents raise their grandchildren because parents migrate to the United States. Narrow streets limit traffic, allowing free and safer use of the sidewalk and street for cooking, socializing, and for children to play. The Infonavit Arboledas subdivision was designed in a more optimistic era; the duplex homes were intended to be modifiable according to activities and were built among a series of car-free walkways. In Jacinto Lopez and La Lima, the detour of the Duero River provided land around its old course and set the pattern for curved, narrow streets that are inconsistent with the rest of the urban layout. In all these neighborhoods, the relative difficulty to travel by car reduces risks, mainly for pedestrians, but also for those who install altars and chapels on the sidewalks. Visually I liked all this better, and also because the houses are in constant modification and decoration, and resort to recycling materials in a novel way, unlike the uniformity of the more affluent neighborhoods.

During these years a lot of people died in Zamora, both from the pandemic and from violence. Therefore, I assumed that many people were dealing with grief. I was disturbed by the "nothing is happening" attitude. The relative absence of public reports of disappearances in Zamora (unlike the tabs that litter the posts in Guadalajara), led me to assume that it was prompted by fear of reprisals. It had not yet occurred to me to use my nightly photowalks as the beginning of any investigation, much less one into public or private mourning.

The portrait: their exchange and the fabric of trust

This changed through collaboration with a friend who has a hamburger stand in Colonia El Duero. A friend named her "La Metataxis" because she accumulates information from all the cab drivers. She takes down her stand until the wee hours of the morning. During the nights she is frequented by cab drivers, policemen, watchmen, rescue and emergency room personnel, and many people who can't sleep for various reasons. Its conversational skills are similar to those of a bartender or bartender, who provides a non-explicit service of empathetic listening, but in a familiar environment, without the need for alcohol consumption. He knows by heart the names, drink preferences, genealogies and even the criminal records of all his clientele.

What attracted me to your booth were your lights. led very bright. We soon realized that they were ideal for glamorous portraits. We were excited to learn the techniques, and eventually we realized that this type of portrait is attractive to many people in Zamora. She took it upon herself to offer them to her diners. Something that would have been unthinkable for me alone, as mistrust is high in Zamora, and I started from a critical stance towards my own look as a representative of the empire. I learned to offer portraits by imitating her, and then I learned to intertwine the small art of making them (focusing, showing, knowing the insecurities, changing the pose) with a less purpose-driven conversation. We became "partners" and in parallel with my other wanderings we made and shared about 500 portraits in three years. She manages her sharing through a Facebook album.

From the "project" of becoming glamour portraitists, themes emerged that defined the present photo-essay as an inquiry into mourning and the night. First, under this pretext, by being present at certain times, I was able to realize that the diners of nightlife used to unburden the bad news to my friend. They would share what they saw at the hospital; what they heard on the police radio. Faced with the silencing of journalism in the region, "gossip" becomes the central source of information for those seeking to understand the conflicts. Cab drivers, police, rescuers and others often have access to the raw data. The slower pace of work after midnight, added to the trust between frequent diners, generate good conditions for the development of a kind of "tertulia" or, better said, a workshop of discontinuous analysis of the war. Why do people not talk much about the obvious "killing"? How do the mothers of the victims experience it? Why do they often isolate themselves? Is the night more dangerous than the day? There are discursive spaces where narratives about the silenced are assembled. As proposed by Jacques Galinier and Aurore Becquelin (2016), "nocturnality" can be a key component in the constitution of alternative practices.

Second, the "tertulia de los desvelados" became my interpretive community, where I took my other street photos to give me context, interpretations and indications of their own aesthetic tastes.

Third, the portraits we took have taken on new meanings after the death of those we photographed. We were taken by surprise at how quickly this happened. Relatives thanked us for photos that turned out to be the only "decent" ones obtained for funerals and altars. With the portraits printed, we entered into new gift-exchanging relationships that reduced social distance and distrust. In the aftermath, I was invited into homes I would not have entered and was able to hear stories that intensified the sense of helplessness, while making me pay more attention to the details of the altars and cenotaphs I was photographing.

With all this, I decided to attempt a more investigative photographic project, with the expectation of being able to say something about how violence and silencing are experienced in Zamora. Following the recommendations of my colleague Gabriela Zamorano and the examples of Alejandra Reyero (2007) and others, I opted to deliver photo prints of altars and portraits with the intention that they would be affectively useful for the bereaved, as they have mainly been mothers, and then as triggers for narratives. The visits on the eve of the Day of the Dead proved to generate trust and empathy for the more suspicious family members, to whom it may seem right to hand over photos just for the altars. During the last two years (2022-2023), when handing out the photos I discovered that many mothers isolate themselves from their neighbors because of the stigma assigned to them for "not having raised their children well", and I wonder what good it does the stigmatizing neighbors get out of saying so. I also find homes where mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law raise the children of multiple partners, families that have been rebuilt and reunited in response to so many losses.

I maintain irregular contact with about twelve households, some by Facebook or WhatsApp, with others only when I pass by their street and, by chance, meet them. Of those I know, none of them are interested in contacting the search organizations with a presence in Zamora.

About the photo essay

The first selection of less than a hundred images was difficult, but was dictated by two criteria (although I realized this months later). First, I eliminated all photos that did not have a clear central subject, privileging content that framed itself "on its own". For example, an altar seen from the front implies its own inside and outside: it is something pre-framed by the one who puts it there. The portraits -since the sitters and I share notions that come from pictures of historical figures and fashion magazines- do the same. Most of the images here are very much of note, clearly deal with widely recognized devotional practices or forms of nocturnal sociability, and are very conventional in their composition, despite my personal taste for the "obtuse" in photography (see Kernaghan and Zamorano, 2022, in dialogue with Barthes, 1986). I suppose I internalize conventions of social denunciation that require this type of delimitation of possible readings. In a second filter, I privileged images that had attracted comments from people in Zamora who knew my purpose.

The captions, for the most part, are texts sent to me by six people with an inclination towards social criticism -none of them is a relative of a disappeared person, as far as I know-, in response to the preliminary selection of photographs. Two of the anonymous interlocutors chose on which photo to place their text. An exception to the anonymous texts is the excerpt from an article by Rihan Yeh (2022), who problematizes the transfer of fears from a guilty but unnamable object (violent people in Zamora) to a nameable one (in this case, trees). The commitment to keep them anonymous was made in the hope of facilitating the circulation of opinions based on deeper knowledge than mine, reducing the risk of consequences for expressing them. It is therefore not a perfectly collaborative work; finally, the narrative arc is by a foreign author-photographer, although very much impacted by the texts and the situation.

I do not claim that the photographs themselves constitute an argument about the social logic of silencing or about mourning in these times. This essay, which combines few texts and a very subjective selection of photographs, helps me to pose less simplistic questions for further research. The interpretation implicit in this selection, the arrangement of short donated texts and my own photos, tells us that the night gives power to the candle and, at the same time, to the illuminated altar, as a public gesture. Night allows lights to be more visible -in fact, they organize the darkness of a place- and acquire perlocutionary force (Austin, 2018), a performativity they do not possess during the day.

In an article that has accompanied me, Isaac Vargas (2020) writes of the public display of homemade photographs of the disappeared in Guadalajara:

...keep on the surface suspended gazes that are there trying to make eye contact with those who pass through the streets of the city. To concretize a process of identification of the city's disappeared... To see them. To see each other. To reflect them as equals: people with stories and dreams. Their presence somehow tells us: "you could be next". But as we have seen, the conformation of audiences in front of whom to denounce and that, in turn, they become denouncers, is not an easy task. There is indifference, sometimes astonishment and fear in the context of the disappearances that have occurred in the war against crime, as well as a tough struggle on the part of the tokens to attract the attention of passersby among the objects and events that take place in the urban environment.

The searching mothers, in Vargas' research, take informal portraits from the privacy of their homes, portraits that have "something" in their expression that individualizes them and separates them from the serialized images published by the Jalisco government. They bring them out into public view as much as possible and thus interrupt the effect of "just another statistic" in the urban landscape. It is a very conscious project that incorporates ideas of civil society and public opinion in an extension of spiritual care. In Zamora, the campaigns that paste search tokens participate with the same language of denunciations and appeal to human rights as sister campaigns in other cities of the republic. As "Anonymous" writes in a photo caption (Image 1), they tear them off fast. But the impression I get is that among most families with disappeared here, the appeal to civil values doesn't resonate much with them either. I suspect that many make their inquiries in spaces and through networks that I barely notice.

Picture 2

The altarcitos and cenotaphs of Zamora, on the other hand, can also be read as a "bringing to light" an intimate loss, to be seen by acquaintances and strangers. The usual reading of the altars is that they guide the soul of the deceased (as happens in the Day of the Dead), and that they destine a place and a moment to remember relatives together. Unlike search tokens, a projected relationship with strangers is not verbally problematized. Depending on the passerby, if they successfully attract attention they have the potential to unsettle, perhaps even claim tacit acknowledgement of what "no one" wants to say. I can read them as a kind of claim to recognition, but until today I have not heard anyone in Zamora put it in these terms. Because of the places where they are found, the passers-by who will see them will rarely be strangers. Most of those who will see them will be neighbors, other mothers who want to believe that it can't happen to them, and young friends of the fallen who may know something. Without wanting to give a single interpretation to these practices - for part of the attraction of the visual is that they welcome multiple representations - I emphasize the recomposition of the neighborhood landscape by the constellations of candles. One walks from lantern to lantern.

As the interlocutor writes in Image 2, there is an impulse not to allow it to become normal to leave the site of a murder without a visible gesture: "My mom told me she felt ugly that the [unknown] boy had no cross and she made him one with some pieces of wood she found in the yard."

Picture 2

Bibliography

Austin, John Langshaw (2018 [1962]). Cómo hacer cosas con las palabras. Buenos Aires: Paidós.

Barthes, Roland (1986). Lo obvio y lo obtuso: imágenes, gestos, voces (C. Fernández Medrano, trad.). Barcelona: Paidós Ibérica.

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Galinier, Jacques y Aurore Monod Becquelin (coords.) (2016). Las cosas de la noche. Una mirada diferente. México: cemca, Centro de Estudios Mexicanos y Centroamericanos

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Yeh, Rihan (2022). “The Border as War in Three Ecological Images”, en Editors’ Forum: Ecologies of War, número temático en Cultural Anthropology. Enero. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/ecologies -of-war

Zamorano Villareal, Gabriela (2022). “Remendar la imagen: subjetividades y anhelos en los archivos fotográficos de Michoacán, México”, Encartes, vol. 5, núm. 9, pp. 116-143. https://doi.org/10.29340/en. v5n9.260

TO Laura Roush likes to walk at night and during the pandemic began documenting aspects of the night in Zamora, Michoacán, where she lives. She holds a PhD in anthropology from the New School for Social Research and teaches at El Colegio de Michoacán.