Vol. 9, No. 18 (2026)

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Editorial

We are delighted to celebrate the release of the 18th issue of Encartes, featuring the special section “Breaking Paradigms: The Ex-Voto, a Heritage in Resistance and Transmutation,” coordinated by Caroline Perrée. Four articles explore the ex-voto through its materiality and its transition from the sanctuary to the internet. The “Realities” section features two articles on clandestine graves in Chihuahua and immigration bureaucracy; in “Multimedia,” two documentaries on batik and devotional tattoos; plus two interviews, a debate on migrants stranded at borders, and three book reviews.

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Temáticas

Breaking Paradigms: The Ex-Voto, a Heritage of Resistance and Transformation

Presentation

  • Caroline Perrée

The ex-voto emerges as a heuristic object that mobilizes circulation, material biography, and agency. The four articles in this special issue explore its subversive uses in Latin America, spanning tradition, innovation, and resistance to authority.

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Dossier

Votive Offerings as Objects and Active Memory: Contributions by Halbwachs and Latour

  • José Cláudio Alves Oliveira

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Votive Offering, Bastion, and Sanctuary: Between History, Autoethnography, and a Visit to the National Basilica of Luján (Argentina)

  • Patricia Alejandra Fogelman

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Asking for and Giving Thanks for Miracles Granted: The History, Practices, and Social Significance of Votive Offerings in the Chapel of Jesús Malverde

  • Diana María Perea Romo

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“Thanks to the Virgin”: Online Votive Offerings and Digital Religion in the Baroque Era

  • Carlos Nazario Mora Duro

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Realities

Testimony to Barbarism: Clandestine Mass Graves as Micro-Spaces of Exception in Northern Chihuahua, Mexico, 2008–2024

  • Salvador Salazar Gutierrez
  • Vladimir Hernández Hernández

The objective of this article is to analyze the phenomenon of clandestine graves in northern Chihuahua as an expression of atrocious violence and forced disappearance in Mexico, in order to understand how these spaces operate as necropolitical mechanisms that articulate practices of extermination, silencing, and territorial control. The study involved reviewing statistical data and local and national news reports, as well as conducting semistructured interviews with members of the Paso del Norte Human Rights Center (cdh Paso del Norte). It was found that the northern region of the state accounts for more than half of the mass graves recorded between 2008 and 2024, which points to a systematic pattern of violence, impunity, and institutional collapse. These clandestine graves contain not only bodies but also territorial markers that instill a culture of terror throughout the region.

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Bureaucracy as a Border: Higher Education, Deportation, and the Liminal Citizenship of the "Homies" in Mexico

  • Ricardo Alfonso Zepeda Orozco

Deportation does not end the U.S. “school-to-prison pipeline”; rather, it shifts it to the Mexican bureaucracy. This article argues that the administrative procedures for accessing higher education function as a punitive technology that fragments and delegitimizes educational trajectories built outside the national documentation framework. Drawing on critical ethnographic research with deported men in western Mexico, the article demonstrates how the school registration office functions as an internal border that perpetuates the logic of punishment by demanding unattainable documents and invalidating prior academic achievements. The article proposes understanding bureaucracy as a central mechanism of the transnational punitive regime in debates on migration, punishment, and citizenship.

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Encartes multimedia

Coloring Silence: Audiovisual and Textile Narratives by Gambian Women Through Batik

  • Martha Ileana Landeros Casillas

Life stories of women from Lamin, The Gambia, told through batik as a tool for memory and situated knowledge. The study proposes the collective construction of narratives through a creative and audiovisual space that promotes participation and horizontal dialogue, and recognizes textile and audiovisual practices as legitimate forms of knowledge.

Santa Muerte Tattoos

  • Gustavo Morello

An analysis of tattoos as a religious practice among devotees of Santa Muerte in Tepito and Tultitlán, Mexico. The devotees, who often find themselves in situations of socioeconomic vulnerability, seek in the sm safety and protection. Tattoos are a fundamental expression of this devotion: they fulfill promises and transform the body into a personal altar.

Entrevistas

From the Couch to the Confessional: An Interview with Fernando M. González

  • Fernando M. González

  • Renée de la Torre Castellanos

An interview by Renée de la Torre with psychoanalyst Fernando M. González about an unpublished article—rejected on ethical grounds—that compared the Catholic confession to psychoanalytic therapy. The conversation explores the tensions between religion and academia and cultural narratives of sin.

Vulnerability and the Senses in Ethnographic Narrative: An Interview with Paul Stoller

  • Paul Stoller

  • Yael Dansac

An interview with anthropologist Paul Stoller on sensory ethnography and vulnerability: his 17 years of learning from the Songhay healer Adamu Jenitongo in Niger, Jean Rouch’s «shared anthropology,» and how storytelling through the senses humanizes ethnographic writing.

Discrepancias

Lives on Hold: Different Perspectives on Migrants Stranded at the Borders

  • Florence Boyer, Lorenzo Ghione, and Harouna Mounkaila

  • moderates Olga Odgers-Ortiz

Four experts compare migration traps in the Sahel, North Africa, and along the U.S.-Mexico border, and discuss which political, legal, or administrative mechanisms create these “traps” and which populations are most affected.

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Reseñas críticas

Illness and War: A Brief Analysis of an Ethnographic “Pharmakon” Based on Its Side Effects

  • Juan Felipe Guevara Aristizábal

Maraña, by Lina Pinto García, is an ethnography on leishmaniasis in the Colombian jungle, a disease that affected soldiers, guerrillas, and civilians alike who were being treated with glucantime. The author rethinks Karen Barad’s concept of “entanglement” and proposes “untangling” as a path for political action in the face of violence.

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How should we teach—or how should we learn—history?

  • Adriana Mata Puente

Education, Heritage, and History (Ortiz Oropeza and Carpio Pérez, eds., 2025) presents strategies for teaching cultural and historical heritage through museums, school photographs, folk festivals, and decolonial approaches, inviting readers to reflect on how we have learned history and on the challenges of digital heritage.

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Listening as a Method: The Scope and Prospects of Oral History

  • Ignacio Salvador Durán Ricardez
  • Natalia Zepeda Cazarez

This collective work on oral history, the result of the Mora Institute’s Oral History Seminar, brings together essays on emotions, memories of indigenous struggles, diplomatic life, theater, and popular music. It stands out for its interdisciplinary nature and for its reflection on the challenges and risks that artificial intelligence poses to this methodological practice.

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Director

Ángela Renée de la Torre Castellanos

Edition

Emilia Diaz Corona Centeno

Correction

Isabel Orendáin

Amparo Ramirez Rivera

Design and layout

Veronica Segovia

Wordpress Desing

Arthur Temporal Ventura

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