In Mexico, enforced disappearance is a hard reality. Due to the failed politics strategies against drug trading with results add up to between 30 and 50 thousand forced disappeared persons. The civil society has organised itself against the indifference of the authorities to locate the disappeared, Its been majorly women groups (mothers, sisters, wives…) that have decided to cover areas and have found plenty of clandestine pits. This action against oblivion is a social vindication itself, as after forensic arduous work the treasures, as the women call them, can be identifies by their names and returned to their families.

The project I working on in collaboration with las Rastreadoras del Fuerte is a book of recipes. My work consists in creating a joint author recipe project of the favorite recipes of the disappeared loved ones.

The act of cooking is a ritual, in intimate, it ́s a social act. Traditionally family life organise around d meals. They are moments of sharing and encounter. Our identity is also composed by our taste memories. The act of feeding someone else, until very recently associated only to women’s role, is directly related to the relation of mother and son. So we have multiple favorite mother meals: the Sunday meal, the celebration one, the family occasion, and the kind meal. Those flavors and smells stay in our memories, so our mothers “pozole” will never be the same to any others cook, because that “pozole” carries within all the relation with her.

I have started to work with Las Rastreadoras del Fuerte on different ways to visualize the search of disappeared. The question is how we can tell stories? We are convinced of the need of reflection and collective proposal on our social reality.