Superfluous Human Material and “The Disappeared”

To whom can we ascribe responsibility for the evil Hannah Arendt and Sergio González Rodriguez recount? Arendt identified a range of culprits. She named the Nazis and especially their SS as authors of violence and engineers of industrial death. But she also explained how others played along. The victims, "ghastly marionettes with human faces" (455), participated in their destruction. Totalitarian states achieved unequivocal authority in the death camps. What totalitarian authority then does González Rodriguez find residing in contemporary Mexico? Mysterious authors of femicide operate with impunity most effectively in the absence of a strong state. Their "refuge for libertinism" requires government "institutions [that] are an amorphous entity, connected less and less to reality" (91 and 86).

Foucault's notion of BioPower requires as prerequisite a state to claim sovereignty over the lives of individual human bodies. Mbembe complicates Foucault with the assertion that in stateless settings, distributing death can be a means for non-state agents to approximate or even to reproduce the kind of totalitarian authority Arendt imagines in the Nazi camps. The mechanism by which such power was dispersed in González Rodriguez's stateless Mexican borderlands is neoliberalism. Chapter four of The Femicide Machine began with the author ascribing significant meaning to the date 1993, the final year before the United States and Mexico ratified the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA). By the chapter's end, González Rodriguez had not made any specific accusation against the purported woman killers by name. Never did journalist Marcela Turati provide any concrete specific examples. Instead, González Rodriguez named design agency Rodarte and economist and neoliberalism architect Friedrich Von Hayek. Their total aspirations to power originate not in bureaucratic politics but in marketplace exchange. Ciudad Juarez's femicides' bodies not only vanish but also transform "into simple data or signs that become part of commercial creativity's available stock" (93). Novelist Roberto Bolaño's Benno von Archimbaldi, former Nazi and possible Juarez woman killer, might also evoke the Austrian economist with such a similar name. Neoliberalism, with its utopian aspiration to a post-state world, is no solution to the threat of totalitarian institutions. Through Mbembe's reading of Arendt, we know that mass death can manifest when the state exists not to perpetrate but merely to look aside.

Critic Cuauhtémoc Medina's timely intervention in rereading artist Teresa Margolles puts this work in the context of narco-state Necropolitics. Margolles relies on statelessness to convey her message that he Mexican government is complicit in the violence of the 1990s. State laxness enables sicarios to kill as much as it left Margolles an opportunity to purchase body parts and to smuggle them across international borders. Repeating the words, "Only in Mexico...," Medina avows the singularity of a "historic situation" in contemporary Mexico where the artist participates in Necropoltics (323). Asserting neoliberalism's particularity in place is to buy into an essentialist notion of national "difference," Medina still succeeds in reading art as also part of a corrupting marketplace. To attempt separating Margolles and femicide is to risk eliding the discursive links that make both possible.

Urban Renewals/ Urban Disasters

Transportation: Tacubaya and Places of Transition

Tacubaya is not a place of destination. The expansion of highways in this region divided the area into pieces and thus, reminds us Jose Joaquin Blanco, “[Tacubaya] became a place to get through, then a mess to get away from.. those who resign themselves to remain [in Tacubaya] is because they have no choice (199)”. Correa explains how mobility networks deeply influenced new forms of housing typologies, “partnership between developers and public lending institutions paid little acknowledgment to transportation infrastructure, nor travel times between dormitory cities and major sources of employment (Correa, 209).”

How does the accommodation for private transportation, affect the livelihoods of those who have no choice but to stay in the dismantled places they once called their community? How and when does urban growth account for the commute of the working class, the informal sector and those who transcend through the zones outside of the bypasses, the freeways, the turnpikes that insulates the “indigent parts of the city”?

Housing: High-Rises and Linkages

“Housing as a typology is one of the richest representation of a city’s history and evolution of culture" and Mexico City is no exception (Correa, 2009). With growth both through expanding industry and migration, housing becomes a major part of any city plan and renewal efforts. Creating affordable housing is often the hardest as it is not only difficult to secure capital to build the structures, but it will generate little return on investment when compared to higher-end housing or commercial buildings. This results in the marginalizing of these projects to the city's outskirts where land is cheaper or less valuable, which become problematic in linking these development to the city center through transportation and other services. This is particularly evident in the case of Santa Fe. Initially intended as an industrial site, this former landfill has struggled to provide adequate housing for its residents despite of the investment and collected revenue from sales and property taxes. Luxury condos and high-rise apartment buildings dominate the skyline as well as the housing stock. In his book, Correa examines different housing typologies including high-rise condominium which has been the choice of affluent residences since the high performance of Torre Lomas during the 1985 earthquake and with the increasing security concerns.  While these high-rises present the image of affluence, these luxury units discharge waste into ravines or the groundwater system as they are not connected to the city's sewage system. How can affordable housing be physically and visually integrated into high-end development and into the city's plan? Ibarguengoitia argues that "neighborhoods with mixed populations are troublesome... It’s far more profitable to transform Mexico City into a lake of stricken ghettos over which the islands of affluence float lightly joined by high, efficient, fast bridges."

Sewage Water and Garbage: The Calcutta/Houston Complex

The Santa Fe Megaproject hits a reality check. As Maria Moreno-Carranco reminds us “The implementation of transnational urban projects is restricted by local circumstances (Moreno-Carranco, 7)”. Without appropriate expansion of services, with a lacking infrastructure capable of accommodating sewage water and garbage, how do you distinguished the ground water from the sewage water? And when the temperature reaches a certain point and the wind blows in the right direction, the corporate executive in the tallest luxury building of Santa Fe can still smell the fetid smell of garbage. In a city that capriciously wants to modernizarse, “inside the buildings you are in Houston but when you go out you are in Calcutta.” (Moreno-Carranco, 6)

Competing Globalization: Street Vending in Tepito

While street vending is an integral part of the city's commercial history, urban renewal projects have tested the resilience and value of this service. Most urban renewal efforts attempt to eradicate this informal commerce in favor of formal shopping centers, which are often enclosed and separated from the city street. However, the demand and opportunity in street vending make it resilient to political and larger economic ambitions. For example , in Santa Fe, informal vendors sell to the low-income employees during business hours despite efforts to squander these activities.  This importance of street vendors was particularly evident in Tepito's influence on the Alameda project. Tepito is a neighborhood located on prime development property near the city center that depends on the commerce generated by street vending. The Alameda project would displace its residents while threatening the vending culture of Tepito. Davis describes this conflict as competing globalization where " opposing sets of social forces draw their strength from entirely different networks of global actors and investors, yet who coexist uneasily in a delimited physical space." (Davis, 157) While the Alameda project in that incarnation did not did pass, the central location, increasing security concerns, and demand from residents kept Tepito vulnerable to redevelopment. It was clear that any development had to retain the economic character of Tepito. After years of political and resident resistance, the Alameda project was implemented as a combination of upscale formal development separate from addressing the security concerns in Tepito. However, one interesting tension remains in that street vendors have been kicked out of the Alameda because "public space makes us citizens and no one has the right to appropriate it, no one, for any reason." (Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, 2012).

Safety: Cleaning the Streets

One of the major ideas of urban renewal is the notion of making the city safer, which is often tied up in the idea of "cleaning the streets." When safety in Tepito needed to be addressed, the solution was to provide new housing, widen streets, and building "modern" markets to "restore some order to the streets" (Davis, 162). Davis goes on to question the relationship between the efforts of controlling urban violence and the urban projects addressing it--"high levels of violence helped create a “political space” for public authorities to re-instigate plans for downtown development, ultimately tipping the balance towards urban change" (Davis, 158). Urban renewal packages the new, the clean, the formal, and the safe into one project of urban development, creating a perception of safety.

Growth and Modernity: Imposed Urbanisms and its Bureaucrats

Does Mexico City sit  in a place with “no good reason for its continued presence of this spot  (Ibarguengoitia, 196)”? Is the location of the capital nothing but a bureaucratic intervention, one that can be traced to the Spanish conquest and its capriciousness of imposing itself on top of the Aztec empire? How do we understand the legacy of the paternalistic, centralized system that has categorized the urban projects that are carried out on the city? Moreno-Carranco reminds us about the legacy of this self-centeredness is evident in the Santa Fe Megaproject. She concludes that the  “Santa Fe must be viewed as part of a longer history of the deep involvement of bureaucrats in urban development and landmark projects in Mexico City (Moreno-Carranco, 6)” Can the bureaucratic corruption in the Santa Fe project be hidden away to justify the possibility of modernization and progress from these imposed urbanisms?When you have places like Tepito, where colliding globalization ideologies have different social and economic futures in mind, you are likely to hit a reality check--imposed urbanisms will be resisted because as Diane Davis reminds us “any built environmental transformation intended to turn it into a global city—will depend in large part on what happens with the low-income, unskilled service, informal sector living in this area (Davis, 157)”.

Necropolitics

Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

In light of Judith Butler’s 2004 reflection on the role of grieving in the establishment of the political body, the social body, and the boundaries of what any subject may be capable of conceiving as “human” (Butler p.24,29)  the work of Teresa Margolles, which expose the body of Mexico City’s uncounted dead through trace evidence of their decaying bodies (Martinez, p.117), takes on additional weight.   If the act of grieving, or of the acknowledgement of death through the public obituary constitutes a primary method for the delineation of the bounds of the national community, or the human community  (Butler p. 36-38), Margolles work functions to undo the most primal act of the collective discursive negation of the “ungrievable” nameless dead by making visible, if not a name or obituary, at least a trace of the corpse, which attempts to access our primal sense of the relational “we” (Butler, p.20) through unsettling confrontation with the taboo of the human corpse (Martinez p.125), which is both undeniably real and undeniably dead.  

Sovereign Power and Bare Life

In “Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life” by Giorgio Agamben, Agamben questions the fundamental nature of sovereignty and redefines it as the power to create the state of exception. The state of exception is the ‘new “normal” bio-political relationship between citizens and the state’, where Homo Sacer loses the right to be protected under juridical, social or religious law meaning ‘the life… may be killed without the commission of homicide’ while there will be no sacrifice dedicating the life to the god. In other words, it is not merely the matter of liberal democracy, but it is the state’s power to remove ‘life’ from people. That being the case, the sacred life or bare life becomes indissociable from the notion of sovereignty and Agamben makes a provocative statement that a concentration camp is the ‘paradigm of the political space of modernity, whose metamorphoses and disguises we will have to learn to recognize’. Therefore, under the logic of the camp, life and death are entirely controlled by the politics and subjectivity of the sovereignty. Agamben claims that ‘politics is now literally the decision concerning the unpolitical (that is, concerning bare life)’ and it is the status of the modern biopolitical society today and the individual’s life within it.

Necropolitics

Achille Mbembe (2003) develops a theory of necropolitics by providing the reader with specific moments in time underlining the necropower in who has the right to kill and be killed. Nazi Germany is an example of a necropower in an early modernist state, which combined the “characteristics of the racist state, the murderous state, and the suicidal state” in exercising its right to kill culminating in the “final solution” (p.17). Mbembe, demonstrates that the perception and existence of the Other in the Nazi extermination has its roots in colonial imperialism. Mbembe argues that any historical account of the rise of modern terror must address slavery and the plantation system. In slavery there was an expulsion from humanity where slaves experienced a loss of a home, loss over the right to one's body, and loss of political personhood. Terror formation in apartheid regimes are concentrated around race, “the selection of races, the prohibition of mixed marriages, forced sterilization, even the extermination of vanquished peoples are to find their first testing ground in the colonial world” (p23).

Mbembe argues that the most accomplished necropower is contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine. Spatial control is key in mass expulsions, resettlement and establishment of new colonies. Roads, bridges, tunnels and walls  are built to separate Israelis from Palestinians. Surveillance, bulldozing, and infrastructural warfare are key ways the state disciplines Palestinians. In late-modern colonial occupation multiple powers: disciplinary, biopolitical, and necropolitical combine to give the state complete domination over the occupied peoples.

As I read this, I think about the biopolitical and necropolitical power of the state in my three countries: El Salvador, Guatemala, y los estados unidos. In El Salvador, as in Guatemala the Other has been the indigenous, el subversivo, y el pobre, whose collective bodies fill mass graves that we continue to uncover. I wonder if in blaming “the state”, “the state”, “the state”, we let those responsible maintain their anonymity. Who exactly do we hold accountable? Rios Monte has yet to account for his murder of tens of thousands of Mayan people. Today it is the poor, who disappear en masse on their long voyages to the U.S. This year so many Central American children escaping the violence caused by civil wars, (funded by the U.S. that have permanently destabilized our countries for generations), will survive and arrive in the U.S. only to be locked up and housed in our own states’ concentration camps. And I am wondering how on earth do we begin to hold necropowers responsible for these atrocities?

The 1985 Earthquake: Signs form the Disaster

“It started out like a normal day”: Documenting the Disaster

In “The Earthquake”, Elena Poniatowska recounts the experience of Elia Palacios Cano during the event of the 1985 earthquake on September 19^th. The day began similar to any other day, except within seconds, her routine changed. She watched as the building outside crumbled, realizing the immensity of the earthquake. The sudden shaking of the ground shocked many with its landscape altering effects. Before the damage could register in anyone’s minds, their city was in ruins. With many people dead, and many trapped, rescue took days and a second earthquake created more difficulty.

Natural disasters such as earthquakes are typically unpredictable and therefore difficult to document during the period of tectonic movement; for instance, the accounts of both Elia and her nephew César, though similar, vary slightly in regarding specific language. Each person experiences the same tragic event subjectively. Even cameras have the ability to frame specific moments in certain ways. According to Susan Sontag, “…photographs…both objective record and personal testimony, both a faithful copy or transcription of an actual moment of reality and an interpretation of that reality…” (26).

Accidental documentation during the event records a whole set of complex emotions that occurs during the devastation. Spontaneity transforms these human reactions into everlasting imprints of the pain and fear that people suffer. For example, the live broadcast of Hoy Mismo shows a raw, unedited version of reactions to the earthquake, with each news anchor (Lourdes Guerrero, María Victoria Llamas and Juan Dosal) reacting in their own way. In opposition, Pedro Meyer’s photographs may be edited but they are also raw in the sense that the subject is raw; destruction is photographed in its natural state using framing techniques by the author. The photographs document but also tell a story Meyer chooses to tell. In this sense, neither text, nor video, nor photograph is more accurate.

“No more, get me out”: The Rational and Irrational Traces of the Disaster 

In “Disaster, Crisis, Revolution”, Eric Cazdyn suggests that: “Disaster is everywhere and touches everything” (647). Certainly, disaster is that precise instant when “the relation between one thing and another break down” (Cazdyn 647). Even a natural disaster, such as Katrina or the Earthquake of 1985 in Mexico City, becomes an event that not only defies our logical way to comprehend the magnitude of contingent situations, but also a moment in which all possible relations within society fail (the individual disconnected from the community, the collapse of communication. the devastation of infrastructure, the uncertainty of the future). When natural disasters strike, the basic structure of human society, and the values and principles that support the foundation of our society are reduced to rubble. Nature strips us from the confortable limits of our rational world.

In On the Natural History of Disaster, W. G. Sebald analyses the silence and the consequences that preceded the Allie’s air raids at the end of the Second World War. As the German writer suggests it is impossible to comprehend the magnitude of a million tons of bombs falling in German territory, changing at once the life of people and the landscape of the cities: “Today it is hard to form an even partly adequate idea of the extent of the devastation suffered by cities of Germany in the last years of the Second World War” (Sebald 3). As Sebald implies, as a consequence of this devastating action, there is a certain feeling of “national humiliation” that affected German language and memory. The disaster remained as a taboo that created “an individual and collective amnesia” (Sebald 24). It is clear that Sebald’s account portrays the humiliating result of two forces colliding in the battlefield, but can we apply the same paradigms to a natural disaster, such as the Earthquake of Mexico City in 1985?

Such as the immense Allie’s bombing, the Earthquake of 1985 not only devastated the urban landscape in one day, it also become an event that affected the collective consciousness. The Earthquake left profound scars in the mentality of the inhabitants of the city. Since that day, a culture of disaster transformed the everyday life practices of people, as well as the laws that regulated the construction of buildings. Planning and waiting for the next disaster became a priority of the social policies. New strategies to survive influenced our language and our cultural manifestations. Songs, such “Cuando pase el temblor” from the Argentinian rock band Soda Stereo, became an expression of resistance, and the subtle semantic difference between “sismo” and “temblor” symbolized the conceptual bridge between a 5 to 7 degree movement and a violent 8.1 degree earthquake with the potential to desolated once again the city.

Did 1985 become a date of national humiliation? Were Mexicans defeated by the unpredictable and unstoppable power of Nature? Or does it symbolize something else? Certainly, the Earthquake transformed our way of thinking the world. Our memory was affected and our minds conditioned to wait the next one. But, could this event be a memory of collective resistance and survival?