Mexico City's exceptional deathscapes: the disappeared, (digital) bodies, molecular speculations

In 2015 the idea of Mexico City as an exceptional space, free from narco-violence came to an end. By paying attention to the materiality of corpses encountered in Mexico City’s mortuary, this chapter analyses deathscapes that emerge through the frictions, and fragmented mobilizations of expertise that aim to name those that have disappeared or been killed. The first deathscape explores how the corpses encountered in the mortuary contradicted the idea of Mexico City as a safe haven. The second deathscape analyses the hundreds of organized mothers who gather in Mexico City to render visible their disappeared sons and daughters along with the forensic digital infrastructures such as international forensic assistance, protocols and databases designed to face Mexico’s ‘forensic crisis’. I argue that what brings together these deathscapes are grassroots forensic practices performed by relatives of the disappeared, tied to the logic of biorecuperation: an individualized form of forensic care for the dead, materialized through DNA technologies. The chapter concludes with a speculative provocation: the sonification of forensic DNA as an alternative embodied deathscape that explores new avenues to link the living with the disappeared. Analysing these deathscapes provides a fertile space to critically engage with forensic tools and the politics of (dead) bodies.