Putting Words to Pain: Ester Hernández Palacios’s México 2010. Diario de una madre mutilada

Abstract

This article studies the book México 2010. Diario de una madre mutilada, a testimony written by Ester Hernández Palacios in response to the murder of her daughter Irene Méndez and son-in-law Fuoad Hakim Santiesteban in 2010 in the context of the Mexican government’s war on drugs. It analyzes the literary strategies used by the author to manifest her pain and write as an act of survival, through concepts such as corporeality —the body as a social text and locus of personal and collective suffering—, performativity, presence, and spectrality, all in relation to language as an active force focused on healing. Religious and secular rites, the threshold between life and death, and the capacity for solidarity are some of the elements that turn the testimonial writing of the self, under conditions of violence, into a protest, an offering to the dead, and a strategy of resilience.