Gabriel Gatti: “Disappeared is today a pop icon”

The Uruguayan sociologist Gabriel Gatti resisted that the word that names his father and sister, disappeared, be used for situations so different from theirs. Gerardo and Adriana were engulfed by the repressive apparatus that sucked in dissidence in the 1970s in Argentina; for him, those drowned in the Mediterranean or those kidnapped in Mexico embody something else. Terrible, but different. In the end he resigned himself because the use of the word had been extended too much and he investigated that explosion. “Why the hell was such an ugly word, so uncomfortable, being used massively?” He tells EL PAÍS from Spain, where he lives.

Gatti set out to map these new disappeared. The confinement due to the covid-19 pandemic found him and his 10-year-old daughter in California, during a sociologist’s stay at Stanford University, and together they began to put together the collage. This is how it took shape Missing. Cartographies of abandonment, an essay edited by Turner, which will be presented in Latin America soon. An unfinished map of “zombies, bugs, border beings, people without maps,” writes Gatti (Montevideo, 55 years old). Children of migrants without nationality in the Dominican Republic; inhabitants of the Montevideo margins; invisible bodies in the streets of São Paulo; Corpses piled up in mass graves in Spain.

Those days at Stanford, Gatti was reading sound desert. The Mexican Valeria Luiselli narrates there the diaspora of children who get lost on their journey north, to the United States. The sociologist took from the novelist a concept, a piece, and structured her book also in pieces. missing It is an essay and a chronicle and a personal diary, and it cites fragments of Luiselli’s text, like this one: “They were caught and put on a plane to be expelled, to disappear from the map, which is like a metaphor, but not really. Because it is true that they disappeared and that they could not live on the map.

Ask. The book is a cartography of disappearance. What did you see when the map was complete?

Response. It is not complete. What I found is a lot of people who want to make maps, a brutal desire to map an area that cannot be mapped. But there is one last question, which is the question of how to represent, how to think adequately, all those who fell off the map or who our maps expel. It is probably a question that cannot be answered. In fact, the particularity of these abandoned, the disappeared today, is that they are resistant to the possibility of being mapped.

P. It is a paradox that points out in the book, the impossibility of making a map of the absent.

R. You go a little crazy with that, but that’s how it is. I think it is important to recognize that it is a paradox and not try to unravel it.

P. What is the use of making a map?

R. The question of making maps is a basic question of scientific knowledge. I think it is essential to bear in mind that the way of making maps today can never be the same as the way we used when the world was tidier, tidier, more wonderful, cleaner. It’s not like that anymore, now it’s full of ruins inhabited by characters that require new categories. Disappeared is one.

P. The old tools for defining dropout – “poor”, for example, or “marginal” – have been overwhelmed, he says. Why does disappearance or disappearance serve you?

R. We have been desperately searching for concepts to understand that: the precarious, the vulnerable, the marginal. and the word [desparecidos] it has a bit of everything. It’s a shitty word, a word to talk about shitty lives. It was born in the Argentina of the 70s to qualify what had no name. But it is no longer state repression, necessarily. It is no longer necessarily death. It is no longer past. There is something in the term that is uncomfortable, that accounts for the invisible, for what is neither alive nor dead… There is room for a lot of things. It traveled very quickly and can be used by different people, by different groups, in different places. That plus chance, plus coincidence, plus pop culture, which makes things circulate, has made it work well.

P. Who are the new disappeared?

R. I wish there was a who. It is a huge, massive who, so massive that in some cases it can be said that they are the majority. Unlike what happened with the original disappeared, who were someone, a citizen with a surname, with an identity, [ahora], in most cases, do not even reach the status of people. There is an important gender mark, but it is not the only one. There is a breed mark. Obviously it has to do with specific places in the world, but there are also missing people, these disappeared, in the very center of the most powerful cities of Europe and America.

P. He didn’t like that the term used to name his father or his sister was used to talk about such different things. At what point did she resign herself?

R. At first, he was only aware of the case of Spain, where those from the Civil War and the first Franco regime were classified as missing. I compared the Spanish experience with mine and it had nothing to do with it. It seemed to me a misuse of a term that had already achieved certain guarantees. At the same time, it also seemed to me that realities like the Spanish one deserved their own terms. But over time I saw that what was happening in Spain began to happen in Mexico. The disappearance of the 43 of Ayotzinapa supposes the explosion of the massive use of the term.

P. Still think specific terms are needed anyway?

R. It seems to me that it is important to find extremely local words for extremely local phenomena. At the same time, I come across a fact that we in social sciences have to attend to, which is the brutal globalization of categories. Things today circulate with a speed to which you have to give ball. There are concepts like these that are like Coca-Cola bottles, that are recognizable anywhere, that are an icon: disappeared, at this moment, it is a pop icon. Just as I recognize Mick Jagger’s profile, I recognize a guy with the little sign and the photo of his relative.

P. In the chapter on Uruguay, he takes the testimony of a mother who says that political disappearances are searched for with more “respect” than her son, who was found torn to pieces by neighbors. Do you also notice that difference?

R. That hierarchy exists. In Mexico, in particular, it is very noticeable. The fight to recognize more and more abandoned people as disappeared is very fresh. People allow themselves to speak of the disappeared not only thinking of the militants of the 70s, but also of those affected by the war against drugs and everything that is around. However, it is not easy to listen to local Mexican people talking about the migrants who cross Mexico and disappear as disappeared. He is not on the sensitive spectrum of people who are, however, very sensitive to the subject.

P. He says that Mexico is a “territory of disappearance.” What does it mean?

R. The architecture of the old disappearance established two planes of reality: one beautiful and beautiful, in which life continued to function; another in the underground, which was the world of the exception. I think that now that has been reversed, at least in the Mexican case. Ordinary life are spaces where many people can disappear. There the bodies are at the disposal of many powers, there disappearing is not a minimal possibility. And the other way around: the exception to those places of normality are small shelters where one type, a migrant, for example, can eat, drink, shit and be human again for a while. It is more than a metaphor. It happens in many places.

P. He also travels to the Dominican Republic and there he writes that the disappearances of the seventies are more “explicable”. Do you think there are still no narratives that explain the current ones?

R. I approached the subject thinking that I, a relative of a disappeared person, would understand in my body any brush with the category of disappeared person. It is not even remotely so. I was able to perceive that my disappeared have something that those who do not now have, which is words-words-words, politics-politics-politics, meaning, discourse, citizenship and, above all, tremendous recognition. It was achieved over time, but it was achieved.

P. When he studies the theft of babies in Spain, he says that these cases do not fit easily into the idea of ​​disappearance.

R. It was fantastic that the missing name was available to give a name to something that was never named, numbered, or counted. Now: it has absolutely nothing to do with the Argentine case. And anyone who says that it is the same, that it is a phenomenon of systematic appropriation of the children of the defeated, is very lax. It’s not that, I don’t know if it’s worse, but it’s something else. I like the term that it has an enormous travel capacity, it can be appropriated in different ways. You can use the Dominican, which is legally a disaster but is very graphic; to the Mexican, who doesn’t know what the hell it is, but it’s everything; to Argentina, which is very precise.

P. Towards the end of the book, he wonders if it would not be better to bet on terms that are more uncomfortable and more adjusted to lives that are also uncomfortable. Give the example of illegal. Do you think political correctness hinders understanding?

R. It disables thinking in many cases. Sometimes stomach pain prevails more than the need to analyze. That statement, which I understand morally, “no human being is illegal”… Well, hopefully, but there are human beings whose consistency is defined by their illegality and it would be interesting to think of them in that place. To understand the texture of the new disappearances, it seems to me that it is essential to put things in their uncomfortable place. It is an uncomfortable world, it requires uncomfortable categories. Sometimes one finds oneself, especially when dialoguing with people from the new left, with many moral obstacles. We have become moral castrators in many cases and with difficulty thinking about it.

‘Missing. Cartographies of abandonment’, by Gabriel Gatti

Editorial Turner.
236 pages.

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