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In response to requests from media photographers, in 2013 Lidia Diego Mateo posed in front of her own image taken the year before in 2012, when she travelled with the Caravana de Madres Centroamericanas (Caravan of Central American Mothers) through more than a dozen Mexican states to publicize the disappearance of her teenage undocumented-migrant daughter and search for evidence of what might have befallen her. Since the search proved unsuccessful, Diego Mateo was trying again the following year when photographers once again caught up with her. In 2012, Diego Mateo holds her daughter's photograph with both hands; in 2013, she wears a different top from the previous year, grasps the photograph with a single hand and holds a visor cap in the other. Yet her hair is parted in the same place, her bag strap hangs over her shoulder in the same way, her grim smile is almost identical, and the image of her daughter Nora hanging around her neck is identical: the girl smiles broadly, bangs falling over one eye, facing forward as if for a school photograph. Nora left their home in the Guatemalan municipality of Ixcán in 2007, at the age of sixteen, to work as a maid in a Mexican town bordering Guatemala, Benemérito de las Américas. After months of weekly phone calls, one day she simply stopped calling home. Diego Mateo said she feared that her daughter may have been forced into sex work.2 As Diego Mateo poses for the photographers covering the caravana, she creates a doubled image: the new photograph incorporates the earlier photograph, like a visual echo.3 Yet more importantly, the image provides evidence of the repetitiveness of her so far fruitless search, of her tenacity, her persistence and her motherly devotion to her absent daughter. The caravana provides a transnational stage-in-motion for women like Diego Mateo to perform devotional motherhood as they protest violence – both in space as they move around the country from stop to stop on the caravana's lengthy itinerary of some five thousand kilometres over a period of two to three weeks, and across time, as some of the women participate year after year (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1
Lidia Diego Mateo poses for journalists in front of her...