This dissertation examines the use of visual media as a means of resistance to oppressive political narratives in five Mexican works from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Included are two novels: Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho: Relatos de la lucha en el Norte de México (1931), on the Mexican Revolution, and Elena Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco (1971), about the 1968 Mexican student movement and the October 2 massacre. I also analyze three projects, both visual and discursive, related to the 2014 forced disappearance of 43 students of the Ayotzinapa Teacher’s College in Guerrero, Mexico. The three historical moments the five texts explore are marked by particular trends in visual representation as well as by official narratives that manipulate or misrepresent history for political purposes. I analyze Cartucho and La noche de Tlatelolco with regard to their distinctive structures using theories on photography and cinematography, which help to describe the narrative dimensions of the works. The photography theory is primarily drawn from the work of Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, and Roland Barthes, while the cinematographic theory is drawn from Sergei Eisenstein’s work on intellectual montage. I argue that Cartucho functions as a textual “album,” in which each brief text (relato) presents a snapshot of a participant or moment during the Mexican Revolution related to the Villista forces. Campobello’s work responds to the commercial and political uses of photographic images of the time (1916-1920) and was written with the goal of refuting the “black legend,” which characterized the Villistas as criminals. Concerning La noche de Tlatelolco, I analyze the way in which early editions of the book incorporated images of 1968, and argue that the text is best understood as an intellectual montage, which communicates through interactions between the fragmentary and contradictory texts that comprise the book. I analyze the three Ayotzinapa projects, a museum exhibit, an online platform, and the Antimonumento +43, by considering how an audience must interact with each; my goal is to understand the discourse these works generate regarding the Ayotzinapa case, and I explore the problems of historicization and memorialization in relation to ongoing Ayotzinapa activism.

In September 2014, forty-three students were attacked and forcibly disappeared by police in the town of Iguala, Mexico. The Ayotzinapa Case, as it is known, caused international outcry and a domestic political crisis. In the following weeks, the surrounding countryside was discovered to be saturated with clandestine individual and mass graves, and a crisis emerged around bodily remains and their improper burial. As the willingness of the Mexican State to investigate became less and less credible, families of the disappeared —not just families of the students, but families of hundreds of other disappeared people across the country— took on the role of searching for their loved ones and caring for the name-less and unidentified dead they began to find. No longer waiting for authorities to act, kin of the disappeared began to symbolically and materially enact attributes of the State. What started as groups of people getting together on Sundays in the town of Iguala, to go to the hills in search of bodies in clandestine burials, grew in the following years into a nation-wide social movement. What does it mean to find a murdered body in Mexico today? What does it mean for it to become evidence? What work is done through the discovery by searching families of such bodies? The result of 32 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico, between 2015 and 2021, this dissertation builds on anthropological scholarship on bureaucracy and forensic evidentiary practices to examine the encounters of relatives of the disappeared and State authorities. It analyses current regimes of justice and forensic expertise, interrogating how bodies in the ground are translated into terms legible to the law. This project investigates social processes of public truth production, forms of violence exerted by the State —through physical violence, forced disappearance, and bureaucratic violence— by bringing into conversation forensics alongside recent critical perspectives on bureaucracy, bearing in mind longstanding approaches to the anthropology of death and the anthropology of the State, to address how dead bodies become evidence and how truth claims circulate around and through them.