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Reactivating Collective Grieving: Interview with LALS Affiliated Faculty Dr. Olga Salazar Pozos
Interview conducted by Yamitza Yuivar Villarreal
Dr. Olga Salazar Pozos is Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages at DePaul University She has a Master's and Ph.D. in Hispanic Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics from the University of Minnesota and a B.A. in Hispanic Literature and Linguistics from the Tecnológico de Monterrey. Her main interests are researching contemporary Mexican Literature and Film, Human Rights, Literary, Cultural, and Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies. Dr. Salazar Pozos recently joined the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies as an affiliated faculty member.
I'm originally from Monterrey, a city in the state of Nuevo León, in the northeast of Mexico. That's where I lived most of my life. I came to the US to study for my master's and PhD at the University of Minnesota. My research focuses on contemporary Mexican literature and documentary films. When I was finishing my PhD and was looking for a job, DePaul was looking for a Mexican expert in the Spanish program. I like the values of the university, the Vincentian vision, and of course, the job really aligned with my interests, so I'm thrilled to be at DePaul.
How has your background in different academic environments and cities influenced your research?
For most of my life, I lived in Mexico, in Monterrey, a city that has really felt the consequences of the war on drugs. When I came to the US to pursue my PhD, I didn't know what I wanted to do for my research. While I was at the University of Minnesota, the director of the Human Rights Program contacted me because they were creating a database about disappearance cases reported by Mexican newspapers. I was a reporter in Mexico and was very interested in the subject, though I didn’t know much about it. I entered the Observatory on Disappearances and Impunity in Mexico [a multinational academic collaborative], and reading hundreds of reports made me think that I was reading into a phenomenon of catastrophic dimensions but, still, disappearances were underreported, at least in newspaper outlets. And people, unless they had been directly affected, were not talking about this I kept thinking, what can we do to make the people of Mexico and other places aware of the magnitude of this phenomenon? That question, which came to be because of my background as a reporter in Monterrey and a graduate student at Minnesota, has shaped my research the most.
You work with really sensitive topics related to human rights violations, disappearances, and impunity. What elements do you consider important when addressing these conversations in the classroom?
One of the main things you want is to give students good background information on this, explain that reading about this will be difficult and that we will be exploring sensitive topics. You also need to give them trigger warnings, and things to expect from the readings. Something very important towards the end of each session is to not only focus on the negative aspects. For example, even though we have more than 100,000 cases of disappearances in Mexico, laws have been created specifically to address this issue, and we also have a lot of NGOs and a huge international network working towards resolving the crisis. And of course, citizens who are protesting more and more in Mexico. So, it's important to show students what human rights violations mean, give them background and trigger warnings, but at the end of the day, give them hope that something is being done.
In your dissertation, you explore the notion of “collective mourning” in the context of the human rights crisis in Mexico and the War on Drugs. What does this concept mean?
Different authors have engaged with the subject. Judith Butler writes about “collective grieving” and “grievability,” explaining how we have decided that there are lives that are worth grieving and lives that are not –or that we don’t have the right to grieve publicly. But “grievability” implies that everybody has the right to be mourned. Cristina Rivera Garza takes on this idea and applies it to the Mexican context recognizing the different connotations duelo (grieving/mourning) has in Spanish. “Dolernos” (to grieve) means to embrace the pain of the other and vice versa. Also, duelo has the connotation of fighting. Now, this idea doesn't mean that I'm going to be able to feel, for example, what a mother of a disappeared person feels, but I can understand that that loss isn't just personal, a disappearance, femicide, or extrajudicial execution also concerns me and has something to do with us as a society.
When the War on Drugs started, we had the boom of what we call narcoculture, which created this enormous perpetrator, the public enemy of Mexico, which is the narco. And we all think that we know what narco means, but we don’t. The whole narrative of narcoculture is centered on this one perpetrator who has surpassed the government, and even though sometimes it is portrayed as colluding with Mexican authorities, it takes away responsibility from the State. At the same time, since 2010, the year in which violence started to escalate, in the press and the government there has been a predominance of visual representations of violence inflicted on the bodies of the victims, and of explaining these violations by criminalizing the victims. There is also a predominant political discourse in which the government doesn't recognize its responsibility for the crisis.
My perspective, which many researchers share, is that these discourses produced, in the first years of the war, a lack of collective citizen response against the war and human rights violations. This lack of response translated into a lack of opposition, and therefore what we had was a cycle. And since these phenomena made people feel like they were separated from the victims and the violence because the victims were either criminals or erased from the narrative, we started talking about indifference. So, collective mourning is saying: no, they are not criminals, and even though some of them might have committed a crime, there is still no justification for the human rights violations they suffered. There are thousands of cases So, “collective mourning,” this recognition of everyone and everything we have lost, allows us as a society to reestablish connections, protest together, and pressure the government more and more. And that's why I think it's relevant to have it in the public sphere.
We have a grieving culture that is striving to create connections with the victims, to show and denounce human rights violations, to understand the multiplicity of perpetrators that are in Mexico.
How do cultural and artistic representations confront these dominant political perspectives in Mexico regarding violence and impunity?
Well, in opposition to narcoculture, what I've been tracing is that there's a new form of dominant culture in Mexico, which is what I call the “grieving culture.” It refers to artistic and literary creations, in which instead of having the perpetrator as the protagonist of the story, we have the victims, we have their families, we have the stories of their lives. Putting the victims in the forefront helps us create these connections that were lost because of the phenomena I mentioned. We have a grieving culture that is striving to create connections with the victims, to show and denounce human rights violations, to understand the multiplicity of perpetrators that are in Mexico. And I think that's powerful in the public sphere and when we talk about getting responses from the government because we are looking at the war and crisis in a more critical way, in which we can really understand what a disappearance or a femicide is, but from an empathetic point of view.
What is the role of language, in all its formats, in public discussions around these topics?
Back in April, the Center for Latino Research brought Cristina Rivera Garza to DePaul. The book discussed during that visit, Liliana's Invisible Summer, centers on the femicide of Liliana, the author’s sister, in Mexico in the 90s, at a moment in which the word femicide didn't exist and wasn't recognized in the constitution. It was considered “ a crime of passion” when a man killed a woman, and that has very different implications judicially. But now, when we talk about feminicidio or femicide, we understand all the forms of violence that are implicated in this crime. I think language is at the center of all of this If we don't have language to discuss what's going on, we don't have a way to measure the implications or to identify the dangers. Most of my research is in documentary films which have their own language, and of course, now there are concepts to explain the situation and social documentaries are the perfect place to synthesize large amounts of data and legal concepts in a more accessible way for the public. Mexican documentary filmmakers know that it is not only necessary to give the information to the public, but also to establish a connection with the victims. Sometimes they use images or sounds to elicit affective responses. In this way, the legal language, the participants' verbal and corporal language, and cinematographic language work together to establish such connections.
You are trying to transform this dissertation into a book manuscript. Can you tell us more about the process or its challenges?
One of my main challenges is to know when to stop updating data. Every time I look at my dissertation, I have to update the facts I had. For example, when I finished my dissertation in 2023, there were 90,000 disappearances, and now we're talking about 115,000 disappearances. But right now, the main challenge is to finish describing the grieving culture in literature I have one more chapter to write to finish my manuscript and it has to do with a case of torture. Sometimes it's difficult to write about this because of the topic, the fact that it is my country, and the War on Drugs is still ongoing. Another challenge is the language. I think it is important to publish it in Spanish. It would be easier to publish it in English, and more people probably would read it in English. But my book project has to do with Mexico and a lot of people helped me write this, NGOs, journalists, filmmakers, writers, victims, and even my family. I want everyone related to this project to be able to read it. And since all the work with which I'm dealing is in Spanish, I feel more authentic to myself and the content when I'm writing in Spanish than in English.
What classes will you be teaching during the Winter quarter?
I'll teach Spanish 315: Mexican Literature. It's not just literature; the class explores films and culture. It's going to focus mainly on the culture of the 20th and 21st century in Mexico. I will also be teaching, and this is a brand-new course, LSP 112: Human Rights in Latin America, in Spanish. I'm very happy about that. It's going to be a human rights course that will focus on Mexico and will be covering the so-called Dirty war and the War on Drugs.
