The Art of Ayotzinapa

One year ago, on the night of September 26th, 2014, students from the Rural Teachers College in Ayotzinapa traveled to the nearby town of Iguala as part of a plan to commandeer buses for a school trip to Mexico City. They hoped to visit the capital to recognize the anniversary of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre in which the military and the police fired on student and civilian protesters, killing dozens. The Ayotzinapa students come from some of the poorest areas of Mexico and aim to become teachers in those same areas. Woefully underfunded, the school has made a common practice of commandeering buses, which involves coming to terms with the bus drivers. That night, near a political event in Iguala's Civic Plaza, police ambushed three of the buses and opened fire. After several hours, six people were killed and forty-three disappeared. According to John Gibler, who has provided the most detailed account of the massacre, and from whom I have gathered the above narrative, "One victim's body was found in a field the next morning. His killers had cut off his face."1

One year later, the students remain missing. The search for the students has led to the discovery of more than sixty clandestine graves.2 Last month, Miguel Ángel Jiménez Blanco, an activist who had helped lead the search for the students, was found riddled with bullets in his taxicab.3 Still the Mexican people demand, "Los Queremos Vivos": We Want Them Alive.

I spent time in Mexico earlier this year and found Ayotzinapa everywhere: on the street, on the tongues of the people, on Twitter feeds. The hashtag #Ayotzinapa was sprayed in red on the walls of municipal buildings in Mexico City. Around the corner from my room in Oaxaca, an artists' studio named after the populist revolutionary Emiliano Zapata had pasted posters with the faces of the forty-three disappeared. On Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, many Mexicans marked their foreheads in ash with the number forty-three rather than the traditional cross. The substitution was evocative. Lent is the period of waiting for Jesus Christ to rise from the dead. Mexicans were told by state officialsbut refused, with good reason, to believethat the forty-three were cremated in a dumpster and deposited in the San Juan River. The people spent Lent waiting for the truth. They demanded the rise of the supposedly dead. Another graffito outside Oaxaca's Santo Domingo Church offered a clue to the ubiquity of Ayotzinapa, echoing graffiti across the country: AYOTZI SOMOS TODOS. We are all Ayotzinapa.

Architecture students and plaza-lovers travel to Oaxaca to admire its Zócalo, or central square. When I was there, the Zócalo was occupied by teachers from across the state of Oaxaca who had established a tent community. Banners demanded the release of political prisoners. And, from lines strung to support tarps, posters hung with the faces of the forty-three.

Curious to know more, I spoke with Freddy, an elementary school teacher and union activist. He told me how the teachers had been battling federal education reforms for more than a decade. Most famously, the police fired on non-violent protesters in 2006, leading to months of massive protests. Freddy spoke passionately in defense of public education, rural access, and respect for local customs and indigenous languages, against a push for the privatization of education by the federal government and wealthy elites.

At some point he sidled from the specifics of education reform to offer me a lesson in capitalism-from-below. The government complains, he said, about the enormity of the informal economyat this he gestured toward the shoeshiners and candy peddlers and wrinkled beggars and passed-out drunks around usbut that federal and global policies have displaced and indebted the people and sent them in droves to the street. Meanwhile, Mexico's largest informal economy belongs to narcotraffickers who govern hand-in-hand with the state. Freddy showed me his smartphone. At each step of production, he argued, with each component, corporate tycoons garnish profits off the backs of the underpaid laborers who ultimately buy the device and foot the bill. That same smartphone then becomes part of the entertainment industry that distracts the people from mobilizing to action. Freddy especially lamented the pacifying power of telenovelas. They run all evening, delaying the news until 10:30, by which time blue collar workers have fallen asleep so they can wake up at 5:00 and go back to work. What we need, he concluded, is a strong public education system, the kind that can teach students what is happening in Mexico.

Of course, that is exactly what is happening at the Rural Teachers College in Ayotzinapa and the other rural normal colleges across Mexico. In the 1920s, after the Mexican Revolution, these colleges became key sites for popular education. Long after the spirit of the revolution decayed into the Institutional Revolutionary Party (the name says it all) or PRI, the teachers colleges have maintained the tradition of educating rural people about the inequalities and injustices of their society. Students read Marx and study indigenous languages inside buildings painted with murals of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.4

If, according to Freddy, telenovelas are opiates for the people, others are making art in response to Ayotzinapa and to cry ¡Mexico despierta! - Mexico: wake up! Hear the old corridos and songs of San Jarocho made new in the crowded bars. See the posters, the foreheads marked by ash, the street art. See on the wall of Oaxaca's intersindical office the painting of a tank driving over a hill of bloody skeletons under the hashtag #FueElEstado, It was the state. This has become one of the refrains around Ayotzinapa. The massacre happened less than two miles from the 27th Battalion army base, yet the army never intervened. Laying out the evidence so far collected, Francisco Goldman, writing for The New Yorker, wonders why state officials still won't "allow an investigation into the Army's possible role."5

FueElEstado

Photo by Cory Cochrane

At a bookstore near my place I found a remarkable handmade book, written communally "entre las escuelas normales rurales"among the rural normal schoolson October 22nd, 2014. 6 A note in purple marker on the back cover relates that my copy was made by hand in the state of Chiapas in 2015. The book's title page says, "FUE EL ESTADO (OTRA VEZ)." That parenthetical "otra vez"againlaunches the book's project of showing that Ayotzinapa was not an isolated massacre, but rather only the latest and most publicized of a series of murders and disappearances committed in complicity with the state. According to John Gibler, over the last eight years, "some 100,000 Mexicans have been killed and at least 20,000 have been disappeared." These numbers should astonish us. The cold quantities belie the violent chaos of a dissolute nation-state. Most striking to me about the book is how it responds to its moment in the form of a physical object. Its DIY aesthetic suggests an urgency willing, nevertheless, to forgo the speed of digital media in favor of the analog and the clandestine. Its cover is a beautiful print of Mexico composed of skulls and flowers, with the skull that marks Guerrero drenched in blood. Its middle pages reproduce hand-written letters from students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico's most prestigious public university, to the missing forty-three. And it closes with a poem:

The disappeared

remember, poetry knows it

life knows it, the people

know it. Their names

the names of the disappeared,

of those impoverished by force

like all those in rural Guerrero

are marked by power:

apt to be sacrificed

for the status quo.7

A poem, too, titled "Ayotzinapa," has been installed in the heart of Oaxaca.8 The text covers a wall forty feet high and is written in white against a black background. In fact, all four massive walls are painted black, giving the visitor the sense of entering a tomb. The poem was written by well-known Mexican poet and columnist David Huerta and is displayed in Oaxaca's Museum of Contemporary Art. It begins, "Mordemos la sombra": "We bite the shadow," a fierce, angry, yet ineffectual action (the teeth clamp down on nothing) that nevertheless serves, in the poem, to conjure the dead, who appear "Like lights and fruit / Like cups of blood / Like rocks of the abyss." This calling forth summons contemporary Mexico as a hellscape, a country of "howling" of "children in flames," and of "martyred mothers," of "devastating conflagrations," of "burning bread" and "burning faces." This is the hell of mourning, where, between tears and screams, the line between the living and the dead becomes confused.

AyotzinapaPoem

Photo by Cory Cochrane

The poem is an act of desperationthose reading it should know, it tells us, that "it was thrust into the sea of smoke" "as a sign of a broken spirit"and it is, at the same time, an act of hope. After guiding us through hell, the poem ends with a collective call: first to make an offering to the dead of "The splendor of all sadness / The milk of our damnation," then to come together in silence, the better to collect the shattered hearts of the living and the dead.

It is an elegy, then, for Ayotzinapa. But perhaps also for the Mexican nation: this "country that yesterday barely existed / And now is all but lost." All but lost: this is the tremor one feels in Mexico now. How long can a nation last whose state disappears its citizens with impunity? How long can a country last whose state governs hand-in-hand with drug cartels? How long can a state last whose citizens no longer believe a word it says, when it becomes impossible to distinguish between truth and lies?

The museum's curation gives these questions added poignancy and situates them in the sweep of history. I first read Huerta's poem from the museum's second floor, through the bars of a window. At my back were the imagined recreations of a pre-Columbian indigenous codex. Vast libraries of these ancient books were destroyed by the Spanish in Mexico in the sixteenth century. The few that survive are stunning objects and incredible testaments to an older writing and way of being. There, in the museum, a film unfolds the imagined codex (based off Codex Borgia) with invented commentary from the book itself. It tells how, over centuries of conquest and degradation, its "shapes went mute": paradoxically it relates its descent into unintelligibility. The project as a whole is called "The Where I Am is Vanishing."9 Indigenous texts, like indigenous people, survive the loss of the world in which their lives once cohered. These codices give us a glimpse of a radically different world, destroyed by the same forces that, down through the centuries, committed the massacre at Ayotzinapa. We cannot make sense of the codices in our terms. "It was a language made of wind and dry leaves," the exhibit says, ephemeral, passing, elusive.

We all too easily forget our fragility. States collapse, civilizations fall. Art presides across the breaks. We have art to howl, to eulogize, to gather the fragments, and maybe even, out of chaos, to begin to imagine the world anew.

 

Dan Sinykin is an assistant professor of English at Grinnell College. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in PANK, Guernica, and American Literary History.

  1. John Gibler, "The Disappeared." California Sunday Magazine, December 18, 2014, https://stories.californiasunday.com/2015-01-04/mexico-the-disappeared-en[]
  2. Maria Verza, "Correction: Mexico-Violence Story." Associated Press: The Big Story, July 27, 2015, http://bigstory.ap.org/urn:publicid:ap.org:c9aa6f12035848a6af4e71d89991b027[]
  3. Deborah Bonello, "Another Death in Mexico," Los Angeles Times, August 9, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-search-mexico-missing-shot-to-death-20150809-story.html []
  4. John Gibler talks about the teachers colleges in "The Disappeared." I have also drawn from Ayotzinapa: Desaparición Política (Méhico: Pensaré Cartoneras, 2014), a hand-made book that I discuss in more detail later in the essay.[]
  5. Francisco Goldman, "Crisis in Mexico: Who Is Really Responsible for the Missing Forty-three?" The New Yorker, February 7, 2014. http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/crisis-mexico-really-responsible-missing-forty-three[]
  6. Ayotzinapa: Desaparición Política (Méhico: Pensaré Cartoneras, 2014[]
  7. The translation is my own.[]
  8. David Huerta, "Ayotzinapa." Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, February 15, 2015. You can read the poem and an English translation by Mark Weiss at Plume: http://plumepoetry.com/2014/12/ayotzinapa/[]
  9. Mariana Castillo Deball, "The Where I Am Is Vanishing." Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, February 15, 2015.[]