Reconstructing Historical Geographies of the Dirty War in Mexico: The Challenges of Working with the Archives of the Dirección Federal de Seguridad

Abstract

As part of the process of democratic transition, the Mexican government opened the archives of the Dirección Federal de Seguridad in 2002. Created after World War II, the mandate of this agency was to protect the country from internal and external subversion. When decommissioned, the archives joined the Archivo General de la Nación, which is housed in the former Lecumberri prison in Mexico City. The archives help to outline the development of new technologies of state power that underpinned Mexico’s Dirty War. Working with such documents therefore poses significant methodological and ethical challenges. This article addresses several of these challenges. It first addresses the complex transitions represented through the prison-turned-archive and highlights the ways in which access to the archives has been politicized and tenuous. The article draws on the concepts of “state fixations” and “fugitive landscapes” developed by Craib (2004) to explore the spatialities of power and resistance represented through the archives. Drawing on archival material that documents a significant university movement that emerged in the 1970s in Oaxaca, this article presents a range of strategies for building an explicit geography of student mobilization and state repression in Mexico.