Procession and protest: The resignification of families’ pain in the Ayotzinapa Case

Abstract

The Ayotzinapa Case concerns the death and forced disappearance of a group of student teachers from Guerrero (Mexico) on September 26 and 27, 2014. For more than nine years, the topic has been recurrent in the media nationally and internationally. However, the news usually frames the mass actions that take place in Mexico City (capital of the country) commonly with a disqualifying and criminalizing discourse of both the protests and the victims of forced disappearance. From 2019 to 2021, I had the opportunity to carry out ethnographic work with some families of the disappeared students and with their classmates from the Rural Normal School “Raúl Isidro Burgos” of Ayotzinapa. This photoseries exposes the manifestation of the collective process of conversion of pain and suffering into organization and social mobilization of the Mondragón Fontes family and the current students of Ayotzinapa from the case of Julio César Mondragón Fontes (JCMF), who was executed and tortured to the point of skinning his face, which is why his family and colleagues continue to demand justice and punishment for those who are responsible.