The University of Arizona Press
Digging for Hope
A Feminist Ethnography in the Land of Mass Graves
Through physical and spiritual practices such as exhumation, mourning, and poetic remembrance, these women reclaim dignity for the dead and challenge a society that has normalized disappearance. At the heart of this book is a profound exploration of what Hernández Castillo calls a “pedagogy of love”—a political and ethical framework rooted in care, solidarity, and the refusal to forget. These women are not only searching for bodies; they are building emotional communities, crafting new languages of justice, and offering a reimagining of what it means to resist violence. Their practices, often overlooked by traditional scholarship, restore humanity and dignify the disappeared.
Digging for Hope is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the gendered dimensions of violence and the grassroots movements that rise in response. With clarity and compassion, Hernández Castillo brings readers into the intimate spaces of grief and resistance, offering a model for feminist ethnography that is both rigorous and deeply humane.
“Digging for Hope is a powerful ethnography revealing how women searching for their disappeared in Mexico craft a pedagogy of love to confront violence. Through brave and caring strategies such as exhuming bodies from mass graves, women searchers teach broader society to dignify the dead and resist normalizing violence. More than a book, Digging for Hope is a starting point for much-needed societal transformation.”—Ana Villarreal, author of The Two Faces of Fear: Violence and Inequality in the Mexican Metropolis
“Digging for Hope brings readers into the heart of Mexico’s crisis of the disappeared, taking them on an intimate tour inside the organizations of women and family members who are searching for loved ones not to achieve legal justice but to dignify them in life and death and return them home. Appropriating the tools of forensic anthropology and other documentary techniques, we see how groups of searchers are not only supporting each other but creating a culture and pedagogy of hope and peace as they seek to find the disappeared, educate the public, and push back on government and religious institutions in their organizing. Digging for Hope creates a picture of a powerful movement driven by love that seeks to remake the pedagogy of cruelty that has overtaken much of Mexico and many parts of the world.”—Lynn Stephen, co-editor of Indigenous Women and Violence: Feminist Activist Research in Heightened States of Injustice
