Memory Protest and Contested Time: The Antimonumentos Route in Mexico City

Abstract

This article examines the corridor of Antimonumentos (antimonuments) in Mexico City. In a context of more than 110,000 enforced disappearances and hundreds of thousands of deaths since the start of the “war on drug cartels” in 2006, the Antimonumentos are one of the ways in which memory activists seek to mark significant events of violence and state neglect, and expressly confront both the government and society by voicing public demands for justice, accountability, and non-repetition. They occupy public spaces anonymously, without permission, and establish a link between past and present instances of state violence, thereby drawing attention to intersecting forms of violence. We examine how these countermonuments exemplify a protest against a specific regime of temporality, and how they also allow us to reflect on the temporality of protests.

Keywords

• memory
• countermonuments
• protest
• memory activism
• mexico