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María Bacilio | Anarchic Justice: Responding to the "Enforced Disappearance Apparatus" in Mexico
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Tue, Mar 3, 2026
12 PM – 1:15 PM EST (GMT-5)
Aaron Burr Hall, Room 216 (open to students, faculty, visiting scholars and staff)
Princeton, NJ 08544, United States
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Since at least the 1950s, Mexico has endured the systematic practice of enforced disappearance. During the second half of the twentieth century, communist guerrillas groups constituted the first generation of victims. From the 1990s to the present, however, women (such as workers in Ciudad Juárez), Mexican citizens, and migrants have formed a second generation of victims. The persistence and devastating consequences of this practice—today reflected in more than 130,000 forcibly disappeared persons—compel us to ask how Mexico arrived at this situation and why enforced disappearance has become the predominant form of violence in the country. In this lecture, we will argue, drawing on a field-philosophy approach to testimonial accounts, that only by understanding enforced disappearance as a power apparatus can we fully apprehend the legal-political structure underlying Mexico’s dramatic situation. This perspective also enables us to show why the political and ethical organization of the mothers of the first and second generations of victims—known respectively as the Doñas (“the ladies”) and the Buscadoras (“the searchers”)—could only give rise to what we term anarchic justice.
ABOUT OUR GUEST SPEAKER
María Bacilio (Ph.D. École Normale Supérieure de Paris) is a philosopher and writer whose research focuses on violence, biopolitics, power, civil war, ontological anarchy, insurrection, justice and memory with a special focus on Mexico and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Her book project provisionally titled From Bare Life to The Demand for Anarchic Justice: Enforced Disappearance in Mexico proposes a philosophical approach to enforced disappearance in Mexico (since the counterinsurgency until nowadays) and suggests that the maternal resistance that has appeared to face this power apparatus could be understood as a new paradigm of justice, namely, anarchic justice. Her research has received support from the Académie Française, the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD), the Centro de Estudios Mexicanos y Centroamericanos, the Graduate Program Translitterae, among others. She has been visiting lecturer in the Philosophy Department at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris and at the Cycle Pluridisciplinaire d’Études Supérieures de Paris. In 2017, she was awarded the Gustavo Baz Prada Medal from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México after her internship in a women’s psychiatric prison in Mexico City.
DISCUSSANT
Susana Draper, Professor of Comparative Literature, Princeton University
This event is open to students, faculty, visiting scholars and staff.
Sponsorship of an event does not constitute institutional endorsement of external speakers or views presented.
Where
Aaron Burr Hall, Room 216 (open to students, faculty, visiting scholars and staff)
Princeton, NJ 08544, United States
Speakers
Hanna Garth
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Princeton University
Hanna Garth is a sociocultural and medical anthropologist focused on the anthropology of food. Garth’s scholarship is broadly focused on the ways in which marginalized communities struggle to overcome structural inequalities and prejudice as they attempt to access basic needs. Garth studies these questions in Latin America and the Caribbean, and among Black and Latinx communities in the United States. She has focused on the ways in which the global industrial food system affects food access inequalities. Her first book "" (Stanford University Press, 2020), is based on ethnographic research in Santiago de Cuba, the island's second largest city. Her research reveals the ways that even food distribution systems, which ostensibly supply sufficient nutritional needs, can also have detrimental effects on individual and community wellbeing. Her next book project will draw on ethnographic research she has conducted on the Los Angeles Food Justice Movement from 2008-2021. This project analyzes the work of organizations that are trying to improve access to healthy food in South Los Angeles. Based on this work she co-edited the volume (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). She is also conducting new research in South Los Angeles on emergency food programming during and after COVID-19, and developing future work on fish and seafood in the Caribbean.
Prior to arriving at Princeton she was an assistant professor in Anthropology at UC San Diego from 2016-2021. She received her PhD in Anthropology from UCLA, an MPH from Boston University, and was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Irvine in Anthropology.
Hosted By
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies