Spectres of Mexico’s ‘Dirty Wars’: Gendered Haunting and the Legacy of Women’s Armed Resistance in Mexican Documentary Film

Abstract

In the past few years, Mexican documentary film has focused on the historical memory of women’s participation in various armed insurgencies of the 1970s. Centring on Luisa Riley’s Flor en Otomí (2012) and Colectivo Patitos’s Mujer Guerrilla (2007), this chapter examines the critical role visual culture plays in representing the Mexican Dirty War’s histories of trauma and state violence and the cultural memory of gendered state repression. This chapter centres on the challenges – and possibilities – of audio-visually representing the marginalized histories of women guerrillas and the tensions that emerge when representing the gendered ghosts of Mexico’s Dirty War. While the documentary films bring awareness to the elided histories of women guerrilleras, the films allude to the difficulty of representing violence and trauma, and the gendered haunting that is created when ghosts are denied, as Jacques Derrida has claimed, ‘a hospitable memory’. This chapter explores how the history of state violence and gender trauma represented in documentary film continues to haunt contemporary neoliberal Mexico, and furthermore, reveals how the spectres of the armed insurgencies hold Mexico accountable for its violent past.