Social representation in the traumatic status

^{Alexander underscores (2002}, ²⁰⁰⁴, ²⁰¹⁶) that cultural trauma is not something that exists naturally, but rather is a sociocultural process built by society. In the present work as well as in ^{Alexander's proposal (2004)}, a traumatic event is used as a frame for interpretation, that is to say, the main characters are whom describe themselves as traumatized. This takes place when the personal and/or collective environment suddenly and unpleasantly changes (^{Alexander, 2004: 2}). Nevertheless, the result of the event itself is not the construction of meaning of trauma —like the disappearance of the 43 students—, but rather the result of a more complex process: while experiencing pain and mourning is a personal fact, sharing trauma depends on the cultural interpretation which lies beneath collective processes.

As Alexander underscores, the same traumatic event such as mass genocide, may be interpreted in different ways according to social and historical contexts, and solely in certain occasions gives rise to the social process of cultural trauma (^{Alexander, 2004} and ²⁰¹⁶). For instance, years before the Holocaust of Jewish people, during the invasion of China in 1938, the Japanese army slaughtered more than 300 thousands civilians in Nanking. The trauma caused by this never spread out beyond Chinese territory which did not allow the social process of cultural trauma to develop in Japan regarding the victims of Nanking.

Conversely, the public exposition of the Holocaust, for instance, made it possible for the Germans to develop, after three generations, a cultural trauma based on a sense of guilt and responsibility, regardless of the fact that many German citizens had no connection with the Nazi regime. Therefore, the process of cultural trauma and the construction of the meaning of trauma are dynamic processes that vary according to culture as well as to social and historical context.

Additionally, the construction of meaning that surrounds cultural trauma is also linked to the emotional dimension of people, particularly to feelings such as threat, fear and insecurity. The way in which individuals interpret their emotions regarding the traumatic event is what ^{Alexander (2004: 10)} calls traumatic status. In the case of Ayotzinapa, the traumatic status that emerges from the students disappearance is determined by the feeling citizens have about being directly threatened, and not only them but their loved ones as well, as shown in these statements: ‘Lamentably, this time were them, but tomorrow who will be?’ (I.45). and ‘Tomorrow it might be my son’ (I.43).

Therefore, in the case of the enforced disappearances of Ayotzinapa, as ^{Alexander underlines (2004)} the event itself is not what characterizes the creation of the traumatic status, but rather the individuals’ interpretation because the traumatic status can be ascribed to a real or imaginary phenomenon. Different from ^{Caruth's psychoanalytic approach (1996)} , which emphasizes the unconscious dimension of emotions during trauma, I consider, it is the ability of people to create, control and transform their emotions (^{Hochschild, 1975} and ¹⁹⁷⁹) which determines the symbolic construction of the traumatic event.

In Ayotzinapa, the traumatic status is the result of the symbolic and cultural meaning that is ascribed to shock and fear produced by the disappearance of the students as this testimony proves: ‘what happened to the students can happen to anyone's children, though I understand that here, in Mexico City it is a bit more unlikely for that to happen’ (I27). Besides emotions such as fear and threatening which people directly link to the traumatic event —enforced disappearance—, there are other emotions which play a role in the construction of the collective trauma and link victims with others.

The trauma that emerges at a collective scale is also the result of empathy and solidarity shown by the unaffected towards the disappeared students and the parents of the victims, and also the result of the deep disconformity of society who feels its identity is in danger (^{Alexander, 2004}). Just as in the case of the Holocaust (^{Alexander, 2016}), trauma is the result of reconstructing a shared pain in the community (victims and unaffected), which becomes a threat to ‘the sense they make of themselves, from where they come and where they want to go’ (Alexander, 2004:10). To sum up, the traumatic event as enforced disappearance is interpreted in such a manner that it leaves indelible impressions on the affected community, redesigning its memories and changing its future identity in an irrevocable way (^{Alexander, 2004}).

Emotions which bind others with victims are essential in the process of cultural trauma construction. Absence of empathy, for instance, might lead to what ^{Alexander (2004)} calls the rejection of trauma existence, as currently observed in a fraction of Japanese society which still rejects or downplays the massacre of Nanking in China.

Humanization of victims and the circle of the we

People's interpretation of the emotions, which emerge from the traumatic event, transforms the image of victims as well. As analyzed in ^{Alexander's (2016)} research about the Jewish Holocaust, a component which establishes the traumatic status is the process of humanizing victims. Instead of seeing the Jewish victims of Nazis as a depersonalized and chaotic mass, Western culture began to personalize and differentiate them. Identify them plainly as human beings allowed the Western non—Jewish, for the first time, to experience an intense emotional identification with the 6 million Jewish victims of Nazism (^{Alexander, 2016: 5-6} ).

In the case of the disappeared students from Ayotzinapa, the new meaning ascribed to the victims as human beings allows others to experience an emotional identification with them, as shown in the following statements: ‘we are students, what would have happened if it had been us?’ (I.66), ‘I think about parents suffering’ (I.14) or ‘As a mother I feel the pain parents are having, and it is very hard’ (I.53).

In addition, in this case there clearly is an interruption in how victims stop being anonymous rates in order to become human beings, which transforms the disappearance of students in a social crisis, for instance, the pictures of one of the young men assassinated the night of September 26^th, 2014 with the skinned face. Seeing those pictures and link his death to his biography as a student, father to a baby girl, broke the anonymity characteristic of the numerous victims of disappearance in Mexico.

This process led people to reflect upon what happened and consequently to do something, as an interviewee declares: ‘It was not this world, it was another one, then when this happens, when I see the picture that starts to be spread on social media I thought they were talking about another Mexico. [...] It was this what hurt me most and made me cry’ (I.64). In order to fight the violence of dehumanization exerted over the students -which is reflected in the words of one interviewee: ‘They preyed on them like animals, followed the 43 students like animals’ (I. 58)-, emerges the need to humanize and personalize the victims. This makes possible for the disappeared students to become 43 faces and 43 names with personal stories. This process of humanization creates a sense of identification and leads citizens to ‘not forget them and demand justice’ (I.16).

The process of humanizing victims, besides contributing to the emergency of the traumatic status, allows widening what ^{Alexander (2004)} calls the circle of the we. To recognize a victim as a human being, to identify oneself with the disappeared students or with their parents is what expands, strengthens and sustains the sense of collective identity of a community.

The widening of the circle of the we allows a part of the Mexican civil society, as a first result, to overcome the differences between protesters, the majority of them of middle class living in the capital, and the teacher trainees and their families, coming from a rural and indigenous place, which is still being stigmatized in Mexican culture. This result coincides with other cases of study, such as the Woman in Black Movement in Israel and Palestine, which when humanizing the victims of others and sharing the same pain and mourning, achieved to overcome the national differences (^{Benski 2005} and ²⁰¹¹).

The circle of the we, which is widen thanks to the process of humanizing victims, is strengthen also with the perception of living in a community under threat or under attack, just as what happened with the Jewish community after the Holocaust (^{Alexander, 2002} and ²⁰¹⁶) or with the LGBT community in the United States during the AIDS crisis in the 90's (^{Gould, 2009}).

The fear and anxiety that ‘this is happening everywhere, they are our children and tomorrow it may happen to mine’ (I.43), make possible the remaking of the events in Ayotzinapa building a sense of "we"; that is to say, a collective identity based on threat, as the following interviewee highlights: ‘Now we live here with fear because if it is not the government is the police; unfortunately many times the police is corrupt. People live with fear. Here we say: "we are free, but until when?"’

The humanization of victims and the widening of the circle of the we causes the community to identify the moral cause of trauma. The community members who feel under threat define their relationships of solidarity in order to share the suffering of others and increase the possibility that the same trauma may not be repeated again. Thus, the event produced by the trauma suffers a process of political and symbolical deconstruction (^{Alexander, 2016: 8} ).

In this process, the event created by trauma is made widespread and it becomes the symbol of violence against the members of any stigmatized community, as it happened with the Holocaust (^{Alexander, 2016}). In Mexico the enforced disappearance of students, that is, ‘everything that the 43 students represent’ (I. 31) became a frame of political significance, comprised with different moral emotions which sprout in the interviews such as: dignity, resistance, hope, but at the same time: impunity, helplessness, injustice and insecurity. Such process is analyzed in the following section.

The process of politicization of the cultural trauma

The construction of cultural trauma around a traumatic event such as enforced disappearance triggers what ^{Alexander (2004: 11)} calls a cluster of meanings, which involves a collective change in consciousness, memories and identity. This change is manifested with the development of relations among previous events, apparently unrelated to the traumatic event, social structures, individual perceptions and collective actions (^{Alexander, 2004: 1}).

In the Mexican case, framing the enforced disappearance of students as a cultural trauma causes a relationship of meanings between the events in Ayotzinapa and other events, apparently disassociated, because they took place in another historical context of Mexican society, for instance, the demonstrations of 1968, as the testimony of a 30—year—old, who did not witness those events says: ‘It recalled me the 1968 events, a huge disgrace for all the people of Mexico’ (I.45). In practice, a symbolical continuity emerges between past events and the ones in Ayotzinapa strengthening the symbolical value of the traumatic event, here is what an interviewee said: ‘not only are 43, but thousands of people who disappear violently’ (I58).

Another relationship which emerges from this cluster of meanings, as ^{Alexander (2004)} suggests, is that between the traumatic event and the structural components, seemingly external to the event, for instance, the presence of the army on the streets or the economic crisis the country is undergoing, both are added to the displeasure caused by the mobilization: ‘we are here because of all the unemployment’ (I.5). In addition, there is the relationship between the traumatic event and individual perceptions, such as the perception of living in an insecure place: ‘Mexico has become a country of too much crime’ (I.45), or the notion of impunity: ‘because there is a lot of impunity in Mexico’ (I.1). Finally, the relationship between the traumatic event and collective action stands out such as the participation in demonstrations and the notion of ‘keep fighting for all the other cases’ (I.35).

As we have shown the cluster of meanings, which is developed from the cultural trauma, does not isolates the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa students, but rather presents this case as the result of a series of external circumstances to the trauma, circumstances perceived by people as unjust. This cluster of meanings feeds the process leading to social mobilization with the desire of not having the trauma of enforced disappearance repeated and also with the desire to obtain justice for the other cases and, generally, to put an end to the feeling of insecurity and threat.

The components mentioned above contribute to what we suggest should be called process of politicization of cultural trauma, which means that the symbolical dimension of cultural trauma and the emotions linked to it allow building a political discourse around trauma and frame in a political way the experience of the violence suffered, as what happened in the Holocaust (^{Alexander, 2016}), or in another case, with the victims of incest in the United States (^{Champagne, 1996}).

This is possible not only because the cluster of meanings allows the development of a series of unexpected relationships, but also because the process of trauma politicization is determined according to two typologies of emotions: the ones linked to trauma -emotions of trauma-, such as pain, fear, shame and helplessness; and the ones produced from the experience of resisting trauma —emotions of resistance—, such as pride, happiness, trust, security or righteous anger (^{Whittier, 2001}).

On the one hand, the latter are the ones which build a political discourse of trauma from the suffered violence, focusing on the importance of recovery and the individual and collective resistance (^{Champagne, 1996}). On the other hand, emotions of resistance allow bearing the former and make possible the generation of emotional energy (^{Collins, 2001} and ²⁰¹²; ^{Jasper, 2011}). That energy, which emerges during collective events and rituals, contributes to social change encouraging the subjects as a fuel for collective action since ‘each victory, though small, produces trust, attention and emotional energy, components that will benefit future actions’ (^{Jasper, 2011: 296}).

In this way, the demonstration of September 2015 also becomes an emotional device capable to feed, mainly, hope with regards to the fact that ‘we are taking a step forward. We are more in the people than in the government. If we stand together, we can make it!’ (I. 47); and also joy ‘because, even though, they do not hear us, we are many from different states and countries, and if we all stand together we can bring justice’ (I. 51); such emotions turn out to be essential in order to avoid the weakening of a movement (^{Poma and Gravante, 2016}).

The public manifestation of emotions of resistance is important for it shows that victims can recover, for instance, from violence or mourning and it encourages those who are fearful to mobilize and live the same experience -as it is the case of the following interviewees: ‘The fact that there are many disappeared people in Mexico creates an unbearable situation, so I am here to manifest that we do not want more disappeared people, we want education’ (I.31).

In the movements of victims analyzed by ^{Champagne (1996}) and ^{Whittier (2001)} , emotions of resistance emerged from a repertoire of emotions (^{Jasper, 1998}) belonging to the women's movement in the 60’s in the United States, that is to say, from political experiences that publicly reclaim the right to express what ^{Whittier (2001)} defines as oppositional emotions, such as pain, fear, anger and resistance.

In Mexico, during the march of Ayotzinapa, the process of politicization of trauma is built thanks to a repertoire of emotions of other protests —such as the movements of disappeared relatives during the dirty war in the 70's, students movements as the one of 1968, and of course, the experience of insurgent Zapatistas communities since 1994— all of which have publicly manifested certain oppositional emotions such as mistrust of the State, pain, mourning, and the "worthy anger."

The process of politicization of cultural trauma leads also to another aspect, which is the need to identify the performers of the traumatic event —or according to ^{Alexander (2016)} the perpetrators— and the social group who should be hold morally responsible for the events. In the Mexican case, regarding enforced disappearance the government is directly held responsible (in fact, the movement's main slogan is "It was the State"), and the Mexican army is considered to be the performer, as the following statement shows: "unfortunately, now as in 1968, the army took part but not protect the people only to assassinate them." (I.44).

The need to identify the responsible implies weakening the cementing emotions, which consolidate the relationship between political institutions and citizenry, needed to maintain and strengthen the "social contract" between a State and its fellow country citizens. Such emotions are gratitude, loyalty, esteem, admiration, fear of authority or shame to be against it.

The process of separating cementing emotions connects itself with a process in which other emotions emerge, according to ^{Flam (2005)} these are subversive counter—emotions: hatred towards government, disdain for politicians, anger due to impunity, all of which cause a rift between citizenry and the political system, as shown in the following statement: "however, rulers are the thieves, the murderers and the ones who always want to trample on the people. Enough with impunity! Enough with barbarism! (I. 45).

To conclude, the process of politicization of cultural trauma leads, among other things, to strengthen the circle of the we mentioned above. If the emotions of trauma such as pain and mourning, widen and strengthen the collective identity as it is demonstrated in other researches on movements of war victims (^{Bayard de Volo, 2006}; ^{Schirmer, 1993}), then emotions of resistance are essential in determining antagonism with other actors, the "circle of they", that is, the responsible ones for the traumatic event.