Sowing Life in Place of Death: The Grief Activism of Relatives of Disappeared Migrants

Abstract

Drawing upon ethnographic research with Central American relatives of disappeared migrants, this article elaborates on the concept of ‘grief activism,’ contributing to a growing body of literature on the mobilization of personal grief in social justice movements. Through ethnographic detail and semi-structured interviewing, the article explores the formation of local, regional, and transnational movements of relatives of disappeared migrants, focusing on their efforts to prevent future disappearances and thereby protect other families from experiencing the same loss. The first-person testimonies of these families reveal how shared grief provides an avenue for building solidarity and advancing liberatory calls for justice, while activism serves a meaning making function for those grieving ambiguous loss. This article contributes to theoretical knowledge about the connections between injustice, grief, and activism, while highlighting the important role played by grieving families in advocating for social change.

On November 2, 2018, the opening of the World Social Forum on Migrations was held in the historic Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco in Mexico City. The location of the forum was auspicious; in October 1968, Tlatelolco was the site of a massacre of students, protesters, and bystanders by the Mexican military, marking the beginning of Mexico's “Dirty War.” The massacre set off a years-long campaign of state-sanctioned violence against activists and opponents of the government, including the use of forced disappearance and other tactics of state terror. Tlatelolco has since been transformed into a museum and memorial. On the 50th anniversary of the student massacre, Tlatelolco was again the site of a gathering of hundreds of activists taking part in the World Social Forum on Migrations and the parallel event, the World Summit of Mothers of Disappeared Migrants.

The participants of the Summit of Mothers entered the conference space waving the flags of their home countries—Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, Tunisia, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Mexico. Most in this gathering had a child, spouse, sibling or other relative disappear while seeking safety or security abroad. These missing persons were represented by the enlarged portraits carried by attendees. In the wake of these disappearances, families formed local committees to search for the disappeared and protest the structural violence that contributes to displacement and disappearance. As the delegations marched into the Summit, they shouted pro-migrant slogans in Spanish, French, and Arabic, signaling the incipient formation of a transnational movement. During a breakout session the next day, a woman from Senegal explained, “we don’t speak the same language, but we understand each other because we share the same pain” (fieldnotes, 2018). In a space designed to commemorate the victims of state violence in Mexico, a transnational movement against the global structures that imperil migrants’ lives was formed.

This article draws upon the results of ethnographic research undertaken with relatives of disappeared migrants to elaborate on the concept of “grief activism” (Stierl, 2016) and the significance of activism for persons grieving losses arising from injustice and violence. Through ethnographic detail and reflections from relatives of migrants who died or disappeared, the article explores the development of local and transnational activist movements rooted in grief, from the advocacy work of a family committee in Honduras, to the Caravan of Central American Mothers of Disappeared Migrants, and finally to the World Summit of Mothers of Disappeared Migrants. In these varied activist spaces, grief is politicized and mobilized toward a social justice agenda (Granek, 2014), namely, the prevention of future disappearances through calls for transformative structural change. Grief activism also holds personal significance for the families as a mechanism for meaning making through symbolic action (Armour, 2003). This article contributes to theoretical knowledge about the connections between injustice, grief, and activism, while highlighting the important role played by grieving families in advocating for social change.

Background

Every year, thousands of migrants die or disappear while crossing borders. The Missing Migrants Project reports that over 66,000 migrants have disappeared since 2014, though the organization notes that this is a vast undercount of the total number of disappearances worldwide (IOM, 2024). The United Nations found that migrants are especially susceptible to disappearance due to their exposure to situations of insecurity, violence, high rates of impunity, multiple forms of discrimination, and the militarization of borders (Human Rights Council, 2017, p. 11). The Central Mediterranean is considered the “deadliest known migration route in the world,” (IOM, 2023a) with tens of thousands of migrants dying or disappearing while attempting to make the sea crossing on crowded boats. In the Americas, thousands of migrants have died or disappeared while attempting the long journey from South and Central America through Mexico towards the United States. In 2023, the International Organization for Migration named this route the deadliest land border crossing in the world (IOM, 2023b). Migrants in the Americas encounter not only environmental hazards including scorching deserts and fast-running rivers, but are also targets of kidnapping, extortion, forced labour, and murder at the hands of organized crime who sometimes work in collusion with state agents (IACHR, 2019; Vogt, 2018). Immigration and border control policies have made crossing territory and accessing asylum more difficult, and in the process, have worsened migrants’ exposure to violence as they are pushed into more clandestine spaces and dangerous forms of travel.

Grief Activism

Traumatic loss is deeply destabilizing and potentially transformative for individuals and society at large. Loss can shatter the “assumptive world” (Janoff-Bulman, 1992) or the core assumptions that form the basis of one's worldview and contribute to a sense of predictability and personal safety. As Janoff-Bulman (1992) describes, the deeply held assumption that the world is benevolent and meaningful can been shattered by a significant loss. For losses arising from violence or injustice, additional core assumptions may be challenged including the notion that violent deaths will be socially recognized as a tragedy, justice will be sought if a loved one is killed, disappearances will be thoroughly investigated, and steps will be taken to prevent similar tragic losses from happening. When losses are disenfranchised (Doka, 2002) or fail to be socially recognized or deemed worthy of public commemoration, assumptions surrounding justice and redress may be challenged, thus further contributing to the grief felt by the bereaved. In the aftermath of loss, grievers begin a process of making sense of what happened (Gillies & Neimeyer, 2006). For those grieving losses deemed to be preventable or caused by violence and injustice, meaning making may be centrally focused on action (Armour, 2003), including participation in movements to raise awareness and seek justice.

Several terms have been used to describe the mobilization of private grief in movements for social justice. Sofka (2018, 2020) describes such movements as animated by “survivor advocates” who engage in awareness raising to overcome feelings of powerlessness and to prevent others from going through the same thing. The term “political mourning” has similarly been used to refer to the mobilization of public grief to pursue social change among communities facing systemic oppression (Al’Uqdah & Adomako, 2018). In this article, I utilize the term “grief activism” to discuss forms of protest involving public grieving and the sharing of personal testimonies of loss to challenge the politics of dehumanization that lead to the deaths and disappearances of migrants. Stierl (2016) introduced the term grief activism to describe mobilizations against the deaths and disappearances of migrants in the Mediterranean. Migrant solidarity groups organized commemorations to raise awareness of the deaths that were occurring on the shores of the Mediterranean and to protest European border policies that contribute to migrant deaths, noting that these losses are often “uncounted” and deemed “unnoteworthy” by European nations (Stierl, 2016, p. 177). By publicly grieving the deaths of migrants, allied movements sought to challenge the framing of migrants’ lives as disposable while condemning the policies that exacerbate migrant vulnerability.

The concept of grief activism has also been used to discuss the public memorialization practices of Muslim youth in Canada following an Islamophobic terror attack that took the lives of four members of a local Muslim family (Al-Sabawi et al., 2024). The youth organized vigils and marches to publicly mourn the family and raise awareness about Islamophobia in Canada and abroad. These diverse movements share several elements in common including the use of public grieving to make violence visible and challenge the injustices that differentially expose particular groups to death and suffering. Grief activist movements draw upon a variety of methods to achieve this goal including protests, marches, vigils, the sharing of first-person testimonies of loss, and public education campaigns. The act of public grieving provides a means to assert the personhood and humanity of those who have died or disappeared contrary to discourses that would “subdue these lives and reinforce the unequal distribution of harm” (Stierl, 2016, p. 184). Thus, grief activism is primarily focused on the issues of visibility, disenfranchised grief (Doka, 2002) and grievability (Butler, 2009). As Butler explains, all lives are not equally valued or publicly grieved; therefore, “mournful protest[…] makes the claim that this lost life ought not to have been lost, that it is grievable and should have been regarded as such long before any injury was done” (Butler, 2020, p. 74). For Butler, “ungrievable” lives are those that are perceived to lack value, that are not fully regarded as “real” through the operation of discursive frames of otherness informed, for example, by gendered, racial, and religious difference. These losses are not publicly mourned because within the public imagination, their lives were not deemed to count. Grief activist movements challenge processes of dehumanization that would deny or diminish the significance of a loss and the personhood of the victim. These movements are not focused solely on an individual victim of violence but become sites for building solidarity with the broader social goal of ending injustice and preventing similar losses from occurring in the future. In the process, these movements provide a mechanism for those impacted by traumatic loss to engage in meaning making through action (Armour, 2003).

This article explores the grief activism of relatives of deceased and disappeared migrants, focusing on their efforts to build a transnational movement, seek justice for their loved ones, and prevent future disappearances from occurring. This movement exemplifies several underrepresented themes in the literatures on migration, grief, and bereavement. While there is significant literature that examines the violence encountered by migrants as they traverse militarized borders (for example, De Leon, 2015; Iliadou, 2023; Vogt, 2018), there is less attention to the grief of those left behind, particularly among those grieving the loss of a disappeared family member. In the literature on grief and bereavement, there is growing attention to the social justice dimensions of grief and loss (Borgstrom & Visser, 2024; Harris & Bordere, 2016); however, as described above, there is limited attention to the connection between personal experiences of loss and social justice activism. The Caravan of Mothers of Disappeared Migrants draws these threads together by illuminating the processes through which relatives of disappeared migrants are politicized by their loss and transform their personal grief into a collective movement against precarity.

Methods

The findings presented here emerge from a multi-sited ethnography of the grief activism of Central American collectives of relatives of disappeared migrants. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at George Mason University [ref. number 1028806-1]. The year-long study conducted between 2017 and 2018 employed participant observation and semi-structured interviewing with relatives of disappeared migrants (n = 72) and affiliated activists (n = 6). The research focused on the annual Caravan of Central American Mothers of Disappeared Migrants, a protest action organized by a Mexican migrants’ rights organization, the Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano (Mesoamerican Migrant Movement, MMM), in collaboration with committees of relatives of disappeared migrants in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Each year, representatives of local committees travel to Mexico to journey along the route commonly taken by migrants to travel north to the United States. Along the way, the participants engage in public protest, vigils, commemorative actions, and press conferences to publicly grieve their missing relatives and raise awareness about violence against migrants in Mexico. The Caravan also presents an opportunity for families to directly participate in search efforts for missing migrants.

For this study, I participated in two Caravans in 2017 and 2018 as a volunteer. I identified myself to participants as a researcher interested in learning about their activism on behalf of their disappeared relatives. Verbal informed consent was received before participation and interviews were conducted in Spanish. Recorded interviews were later transcribed by research assistants. Pseudonyms are used for all participants. In the time between these two Caravans, I travelled to communities in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador to interview members of local committees and engage in participant observation of their advocacy work. In 2018, the Caravan of Mothers coincided with the World Summit of Mothers of Disappeared Migrants in Mexico City. As a volunteer and researcher, I had the unique opportunity to conduct participant observation and interviewing during this historic event.

Ethnography contributes to building “nontotalizing theory” that seeks to understand the relationship between theorized social processes and a particular local context, which can be achieved through an interpretive process of constant reflection, placing theory and ethnographic detail in dialogue (Cerwonka & Malkki, 2007, pp. 17, 19). The analysis phase of ethnography is implicit throughout the process of data gathering as ethnographers utilize their fieldwork journal to constantly reflect on meaning, identify salient themes, and connect ethnographic detail with prevailing theory (Cerwonka & Malkki, 2007). At the conclusion of fieldwork, all sources of data including interview transcripts and the detailed fieldwork journal were coded and analyzed using a recursive process of both deductive and inductive analysis (LeCompte & Schensul, 2012). This article is structured as a series of ethnographic anecdotes taken from fieldwork during the months preceding the World Summit of Mothers of Disappeared Migrants in November 2018. These anecdotes illustrate the strategies and personal significance of grief activism to relatives of disappeared migrants in different spaces including the local organizing of a committee in Honduras and the on-the-ground work of the Caravan of Mothers, concluding in a description of the transnational space of the Summit of Mothers. These anecdotes provide insight into the transformative potential of grief activism in both personal and political realms as a means to (i) make sense of ambiguous loss and injustice through action, (ii) develop solidarity across difference and distance, and (iii) challenge frames of ungrievability that facilitate violence through the sharing of personal testimonies of loss.

Grief Activism and Demands for a Liveable Life

A few months before the Summit of Mothers, I was in a woman's living room in a rural community in Honduras conducting fieldwork with collectives of relatives of disappeared migrants. A framed photo above the couch showed an image of the woman's brother who had been killed a few years earlier in a high-profile massacre of migrants in Mexico: the 2012 murder of 49 people in the municipality of Cadereyta Jiménez. The massacre was devastating for this small Honduran community, as nine people from the region had been kidnapped and killed by members of an organized criminal group while they were transiting through Mexico. Most of the victims remain unidentified; however, DNA testing led to the identification of 14 victims from Central America and four from Mexico (Díaz, 2022). This violence occurred in the context of territorial disputes between rival criminal organizations in Mexico who were fighting for control over lucrative border-crossing routes where migrants were routinely kidnapped, extorted, and held for ransom (Salazar Araya, 2020). Many families were left with uncertainty regarding their loved ones, a situation characteristic of ambiguous loss, or a loss that remains unclear, indeterminate, and frozen in time due to the ambiguity surrounding the circumstances of the loss (Boss, 1999). Amid the grief and uncertainty, affected families organized a committee to demand the investigation of the case, the dignified repatriation of the remains of the victims, and to achieve the longer-term goals of access to truth, justice, and reparations. Later, the committee expanded its focus to include relatives of other migrants who had died or disappeared in the region.

Back in the house in Honduras, a small group had gathered including a few members of the local committee. The conversation turned to a discussion of strategy: “We need to focus not only on the repatriation of remains, but also on the prevention of these massacres and disappearances,” argued one of the activists (fieldnotes, September 2018). Another added that it is not only the actions of criminals that cause these outbreaks of violence, but that the massacres are reflective of structural issues related to impunity, corruption, and the criminalization of migrants in transit, facilitating both the everyday violence faced by migrants as well as these sensational outbreaks of carnage. The United States and Mexico have responded to the mass displacement of migrants from Central America with policies that make the journey across borders more difficult and dangerous as a purported means to “deter” future migration from the region (Campos-Delgado, 2021; Cornelius, 2018). Those who die and disappear while in transit are not solely victims of criminal enterprises that target migrants, but they are victimized by policies that intentionally place migrants at risk of death and disappearance by eliminating safer means to cross territory and curtailing possibilities of seeking asylum.

The testimonies of the relatives of disappeared migrants support the notion that rather than electing to leave their homes in pursuit of opportunity, migrants are obligated to leave due to political persecution, economic insecurity, criminal violence, and climate change, only to encounter further violence on their journey. The committee in this small Honduran town formed as a result of the shared grief wrought by the Cadereyta massacre, yet it became quickly apparent that the pursuit of justice on behalf of their murdered family members would require not only demands for the repatriation of their loved ones’ bodies, but advocacy for structural change in Honduras and along the migrant route to prevent others from falling victim to the same fate. To do so, the committee encourages young people to not only know the dangers of migration, but to know their rights and to make demands for access to safety, dignity, and livability in their home communities and abroad:

What's beautiful is that the committee is reaching out to the population to raise the consciousness of young people so they make demands to the state. That they ask them, “Where are my opportunities so I don’t have to migrate? Migrating is a risk, but you force me to leave. Give me a chance to stay!” This is the approach we are taking as a committee, so that each young person says, “These are my rights. Respect them or you are forcing me to migrate” (Interview. Alberto, Honduras, 2018).

The committee's public education campaign seeks to make visible the myriad violence that migrants are subjected to, while rooting their calls for justice in the recognition of the need for broad structural change to address the displacement of migrants from their home communities.

The grief activism of the local committees is animated by the desire not only for justice for their own relatives, but to prevent others from experiencing similar losses. This move from personal to collective advocacy is reflective of the politicization of grief, or the mobilization of grief as an “activating force toward social justice goals” (Granek, 2014, p. 66). Granek (2014) explains that while grief can be politicized in ways that impede justice and peace, grief is also politicized in ways that bring people together in the pursuit of social justice. This form of politicizing grief is characterized by:

(a) the conscious and explicit use of grief as an activating and motivating force toward a social justice agenda; (b) the linking together of personal and collective grief with a national or community level desire for positive social change; and (c) the recognition in each case of the losses and the grief happening for, and to everyone in these unbearable situations (Granek, 2014, p. 67).

This last point speaks to the centrality of grievability in grief activist movements. These movements are not geared toward elevating the justice claims of one group over another but make claims for the recognition of the humanity and grievability of marginalized and criminalized groups like migrants, which has the effect of broadening life chances for all people. As Butler (2020) explains, these movements “contribute to the formulation of a political imaginary of the radical equality of grievability” (p. 74) in which all lives are valued, grieved, and thus, ought to have access to the necessary infrastructural and social conditions for the flourishing of life.

Since the late 1990s, similar grassroots organizations have emerged in communities across Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. These committees collaborate with various national and international organizations to provide advocacy and follow-up on cases of migrant disappearance, while pressuring governments to adequately investigate disappearances, identify deceased migrants, and repatriate their remains (see: McLean, 2020). Many of these groups provide psycho-social support and other services to families affected by disappearance. Through the collective organizing of the committees, families accompany one another in their grief, learn to cope with ambiguous loss, and begin to see themselves as a part of a transnational movement for migrant justice.

The political work of the committees is sustained through practices of care that the women and other family members provide for one another as they each grapple with personal and collective grief. In these supportive spaces, the emotional pain experienced by the mothers of disappeared migrants is converted into a force that drives their activism and lends meaning to their loss. In a conversation with Claudia, a Salvadoran woman who has been involved in activism for disappeared migrants and their families for over 10 years, she described how witnessing the pain of others motivated her to continue her work as an act of solidarity:

To be honest, sometimes I want to throw in the towel. But to see the reunifications [of families and their missing children] and to see the people experiencing the same [loss] that happened to us, this motivates me to continue forward, to keep helping[…] I have to continue forward because there are many families behind me, many families that are still grieving their loss (Interview. Claudia, El Salvador, 2017).

As alluded to in Claudia's comment, the committees also engage in direct search efforts for their missing relatives and occasionally are able to reunite missing persons with their families. The key mechanism of this work is the Caravan of Central American Mothers of Disappeared Migrants, an annual action that brings representatives from the varied committees across Central America to Mexico to raise awareness about the crisis of migrant disappearance and to search for their missing loved ones who might be living in precarious conditions in Mexico.

During the annual Caravan, relatives of disappeared migrants travel to communities in Mexico that lie along the route often taken by migrants to travel north toward the United States. They march through towns carrying flags and photos of their missing relatives, while shouting slogans intended to call attention to the plight of migrants. At each stop, the women display portraits of the missing in parks and town squares while sharing stories of their loved ones and the grief wrought by this loss. These first-person testimonies provide the audience with details that might generate clues about the whereabouts of the missing. The testimonies also serve as a key mechanism for building cross-border solidarity through the sharing of familial grief, thus humanizing the disappeared as beloved daughters, sons, husbands, and wives whose absence has left devastation in its wake. In-person efforts to locate the missing are amplified through digital media coverage by local journalists and activists affiliated with the movement. Using social media and other platforms, images of the disappeared and the testimonies of grieving relatives can reach a broader audience, including among communities of displaced migrants in Mexico. The impacts of digital grief activism were powerfully illustrated in 2018 when a previously missing relative of one of the participants appeared at a Caravan stop after having read an article online about the Caravan of Mothers. Through the on-the-ground search efforts of the mothers of disappeared migrants, as well as the use of digital grief activism—a potent example of Sofka's (2020) notion of “thanatechnology”—the Caravan has managed to locate over 300 previously missing migrants.

Between stops during the 2018 Caravan, I asked some of the women what it was like for them to participate in the Caravan and share their testimonies of loss with journalists and members of the public. Flor María and Consuelo, from El Salvador and Guatemala respectively, discussed being haunted by the absence of their daughter and brother, while acknowledging the significance of activism for their own personal coping:

I participate [in the Caravan of Mothers] with love, with faith that I know that by doing this, I am going to find out about my daughter[…] and I feel that I am going to find her alive[…] I thank God because he has given me this means so that I can search for my daughter and file a case [of disappearance] because I am even more lost if I just stay at home without doing anything[…] [Whenever I tell the story about my daughter], I always cry because the feeling is always there[…] I can go to a fair, to dances and everything, and I can laugh, but the feeling is always there. For example, when I go out and see a girl the same height as my daughter, I imagine that's what my daughter looks like. Day and night, I think, there she is (Interview. Flor María, El Salvador, 2018).

I want to see my mother happy and keep my promise to her. I’m not afraid because I’m a person of character. I’m not ashamed to say it because I know that one day, if I find him, I know he will thank me. Sometimes people say to me, “Doesn’t it bother you to remember? To tell your brother's story?” I say to them, I want to feel strong. To find him. Because it's been many years since we’ve been together as a family. To lose a family member, to see other families happy where everyone is together, and then see another where they are missing two or three, it's very painful[…] Don’t give up. Keep fighting. Be strong. Sometimes you feel weak with all the memories. When people are asking you questions, it's like this pain is standing right in front of you. You are looking at it. So you have to be really strong. You have to be brave[…] My advice is not to give up on searching. I know it's very painful, but you have to be brave and not give in (Interview. Consuelo, Guatemala, 2018).

In her analysis of meaning making following homicide, Armour (2003) found that the families of victims made meaning of their loss through actions that held symbolic significance. These meaning making practices manifested in actions related to declarations of truth, fighting for what's right, and living in a way that lends a sense of purpose (Armour, 2003, p. 526). These meaning making practices are evident in the statements of many of the Caravan participants, including both Flor María and Consuelo. The women's determination to share their story, despite the pain that this implies, resonates with Armour's notion of the importance of survivors’ self-determination in speaking their truth. Flor María understands her participation in the Caravan as an expression of living with purpose as a religious woman, noting that God has given her the means to search for her daughter. Consuelo, a young woman searching for her brother on behalf of her ailing parents, embodies the notion of fighting for what's right. In each of these cases, the pain associated with ambiguous loss is not overcome by participation in activism, instead, activism provides a means for this pain to exist alongside the development of collective strength and sense of purpose.

For many of the participants of the Caravan, local and transnational activism is a key mechanism for making meaning of the grief caused by disappearance by fighting for justice for their relatives and for other vulnerable members of their community. The goal of preventing the disappearance of migrants that was discussed among the Honduran activists resonates with many of the conversations I had members of the Caravan of Mothers. Prevention in this sense can be understood as both the concrete actions are taken to locate missing migrants living in precarious conditions in Mexico as well as the broader, transformative goals of structural change so that migrants are no longer obligated to leave their homes and their lives are not imperiled during their journey:

Although my relative has not been found alive or dead, I can join the struggle of the others. The collective struggle is hope, as well. First in the search and location of the disappeared, but also this hope is about raising your voice to demand the right to health, education, work. To struggle and shout for rights[…] The hope is that there is a struggle so that others don’t go through what we are experiencing as relatives of the disappeared[…]. The demand is for rights and justice, for the disappeared but also for our own rights, so we can truly live with dignity (Interview. Valeria, Guatemala, 2018).

If we had support, why would we want to migrate? [The government] must change the situation: change it from the medicine, health system, work. Change all of it[…] We have a right to a better life. We have the right to dream (Interview. Marcelina, Guatemala, 2018).

Our objective is that no Honduran live in precarious conditions in other countries. That the rights of no Honduran are violated. To be a migrant is not to be a delinquent, and we want the authorities of other countries to stop seeing us as such (Interview. Alberto, Honduras, 2018).

When the families of the disappeared struggle for the rights of migrants, they are not only demanding respect for migrants’ rights as codified in international treaties but are struggling for migrants to be fully intelligible as persons, as grievable lives deserving of a future.

The strategies used by the participants of the Caravan of Mothers to raise awareness and demand justice echo those of other maternalist movements against disappearance in the region, including the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, CO-MADRES in El Salvador, and various collectives against disappearance in Mexico. These movements draw upon the powerful symbolic image of the grieving mother to more safely advance a critique of state violence and complicity that might resonance with their audience (Taylor, 1997). What distinguishes the mothers of disappeared migrants from these activist antecedents is that the disappearance of migrants often cannot be attributed to an identifiable state agent but is rooted in structural violence and militarized border control policies that render diverse populations vulnerable to displacement and disappearance. As a result, the goal of the mothers of disappeared migrants is not limited to justice solely for their loved ones, but, as shared by the Honduran activists above, is oriented toward preventing future disappearances through the transformation of unjust systems. To prevent disappearances, the global community must respond to the structural conditions that produce displacement. To this end, protection from violence and persecution, as well as access to safety, education, healthcare, job opportunities, and just wages are among the core political demands of the movement. As migrant disappearance is a global issue, the movement of mothers of disappeared migrants has transcended borders through events such as the World Summit of Mothers of Disappeared Migrants.

The World Summit of Mothers of Disappeared Migrants

At the conclusion of the 2018 Caravan of Mothers, the women from Central America gathered with collectives from North and West Africa in Mexico City to “share experiences of search and healing, feed hope and recognize that the issue of the disappearance of persons in movement is global, diverse and extremely complex” (Summit press release, October 1, 2018). The participants of the Summit of Mothers came from various geographic contexts and social, cultural, and religious backgrounds, but shared the experience of the displacement and eventual disappearance of a loved one along two of the most-travelled—and dangerous—migration corridors in the world.

On the first day of the Summit, representatives of the various country and regional delegations gave opening remarks that spoke of the connections between forced displacement, colonialism, the criminalization of migrants, and the extraction of wealth and resources from their home communities. Each speaker described a facet of the global political dynamics that foster displacement, disappearance, and the deaths of migrants in transit. A representative from Senegal spoke to the historical linkages between slavery, colonization, and the contemporary era of neoliberalism that has intensified economic inequality, which, along with corruption, conflict, and injustice have displaced thousands from their home countries. She discussed how former colonial powers effectively deny responsibility for the emergence of humanitarian crises in Africa, instead establishing agencies such as Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, to prevent migrants from arriving on the continent. The deaths and disappearances of African migrants and refugees along EU borders are facilitated by the positioning of migrants as threatening, ungrievable populations who must be kept at bay by militarized borders (see also: Iliadou, 2023). The assembled delegations at the Summit sought to challenge this framing by demanding the recognition of the humanity and grievability of the victims of these violent borders:

We are human beings. We don’t want to live in this situation, and we are here today for that reason. It does not matter where we are from. We are all human. We see our people entering and dying in the sea, but we are here (member of the Tunisian delegation, November 2, 2018).

The delegations at the Summit drew upon their lived experience of grief and loss to critique the intersecting relations of power that expel thousands of migrants from their homes and that lead to their deaths and disappearances in transit. The intent of the Summit was not only to seek models for pursuing the investigation of individual cases of disappearance, but to demand broad structural change to address the sources of precarity experienced by migrants and their families and to create a space for healing and repair.

After two days of sharing testimony and strategy, the delegations crafted a collective manifesto. The document discussed the root causes of mass displacement while also highlighting the role of grief and loss in the development of this transnational activist movement. The manifesto noted that the delegations, in all their diversity, were brought together by their shared pain, grief, and desire for justice. Their collective struggle is representative not only of their grief, but of their hope that change is possible and that grieving families are key actors in bringing a new world into being:

The mothers, family members, and allies that search for their loved ones are united by our love, pain, and by this struggle[…] No family should ever know this pain. The actions that we take now are key to preventing further disappearances. To migrate is a right. As is to not migrate. Therefore, we hold the states of the world responsible for the pain that has brought us together in this Summit, and we demand the right for all to a dignified life in any country in which they find themselves[…]

We, the mothers of the world and our allies, are strong and unstoppable. We replaced our tears with mobilization and hope until we find our daughters and sons. Our struggle is sustained by an unwavering love that seeks to create another world, which is shared with love, sowing life in place of death. From our pain and love, we embrace you strongly.

Conclusion

The organizing of relatives of disappeared migrants represents the transformative potential of grief activism. Loss and grief can be politically transformative when private grief is politicized in a collective movement for positive social change (Granek, 2014). As described in the testimonies of relatives of disappeared migrants, these movements lend personal meaning to loss as participants derive a sense of purpose from their advocacy on behalf of all missing migrants and those who may yet suffer this fate in the future. This is a form of meaning making through symbolic action (Armour, 2003) that provides an avenue for grieving persons to reconstruct their shattered assumptive world and begin making sense of their loss. Grief activism is also socially transformative as the practice of publicly grieving those populations rendered marginal and oppressed serves as a means to assert the “radical equality of grievability” (Butler 2020, p. 74) and the equal value of all lives and their deservingness of care, protection, and dignity. Through actions such as the Caravan and Summit of Mothers, the relatives of the disappeared position the missing as loved, valued, and grieved through the sharing of personal testimonies of loss that also function to make the violence of disappearance visible to a broader public. Finally, through grief activist movements, visions of a more hopeful future begin to emerge as affected families present a desire to change everything to ensure that no other migrant is lost in the pursuit of safety and liveability, and no other family is forced to grieve such losses.

To date, the collective organizing of families of disappeared migrants has resulted in locating hundreds of missing migrants and reuniting them with their families as well as accompanying families in receiving the remains of migrants who died along their journey. In the realm of public policy, collectives have partnered with civil society organizations to lobby the Mexican government to implement a policy that allows families to initiate proceedings for the investigation of cases of disappearance from their home countries without having to first travel to Mexico, thus removing a key barrier to justice among Central American families. While these initiatives have made a substantial impact among the relatives of disappeared migrants, there is much to be done to achieve the broader goal of the movement, namely preventing future disappearances from ever occurring. Preventing disappearances involves fostering the conditions for a liveable life for people in their home countries, in transit, and in places of destination. The transformative vision of the relatives of disappeared migrants is indicative of the interconnections between grief, hope, and social change and the radical potentiality of grief activism. It is a goal, however, that requires solidarity beyond the families directly impacted by displacement and disappearance, implicating the broader global community in the movement for migrant justice.