El extravío de los signos: 19

Part of the essay collection, *The Loss of Signs*, unfolds in the Sonoran Desert, south of one of the world's most unequal borders, where the violence that has marked the region--and the rest of Mexico--has not been explained beyond the notions of drug trafficking and organized crime, categories insufficient to account for the wide range of issues at stake: from the management of undocumented migration to the extraction of forest resources or the economic and military rise of a social class that used to be disadvantaged. The violence experienced in Mexico, therefore, transcends the notion of criminality, but it doesn't quite fit the definition of war, since it has no clearly defined adversaries or explicit political objectives. This violence possesses, rather, a ghostly quality: its presence manifests itself in diverse and terrible ways, but it is never fully revealed. This demands a very particular relationship with the interpretation of signs: it forces us to decipher clues, to play detective, to imagine the hidden pieces of the puzzle. If this is true for the general population, for the families of the disappeared, the demand to guess, investigate, and search ceaselessly has become a true yoke. Through a solid theoretical, literary, popular, and testimonial framework, ranging from the seer Tiresias of Greek mythology to the work of the Searching Mothers or the weight of the repentant figure in the apprehension of mafia structures, Natalia Mendoza explores the multiple facets of a widespread violence for which even forensic investigation, with its scientific analysis--which attempts to unravel the mechanics of criminal acts--has failed to overcome the atrophy of discourse, as it has not produced a narrative that integrates the facts into a comprehensive vision, a broader political narrative that allows the events to be framed within a historical process. Only public mourning and the ritualistic processing of deaths, the author argues in this magnificent essay, can generate the possibility of collectively imagining a future beyond the routine repetition of violence.