Notes on Disappearing: A Life in Fragments

Veronica Gonzalez Peña explores fragmented memories of a childhood, in light of the 2014 murder of 43 Mexican students, in a story from the LARB Quarterly issue no. 42, “Gossip.”

By Veronica Gonzalez PeñaAugust 30, 2024

• LARB Lit

• Memoir & Essay

• Nonfiction

This story is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 42: Gossip. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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An Organizing Memory

I WAS FOUR or five or six, and the sun was bright above us. The air was different here from Mexico City’s, crisp and sharp and already carrying something of the ocean light. It was hot, the sky a deep clear blue. The children’s pool had a small resting ledge at the deeper end and I was pulling onto it, my arms working me out of the water as I dripped into the crowded cement seat. One knee already lodged, I was awkwardly adjusting myself up into a sitting position, my hand reaching out to grab the pool’s edge, when I noticed a boy who sat extremely close to where my body was twisting to reach, his face above where my hand was about to land, and his proximity unsettled me; I was so timid.

He looked at me with an intense urgency and then, his face dipping even closer to mine, he exclaimed, Cuida— as, confused, I met his eyes; did he like me? My stomach clinched as it always did when I thought a boy might like me, even at that young age, shy but excited too, and then I felt the burning sting as my hand landed, before he finished —do! I hadn’t seen it; how could I have, so focused on that boy’s eyes, their charge as they caught mine. The burning sting.

I feel it sharp and raw in my hand, is it my left hand? What hand is this? The boy had been trying to warn me. Did I cry out, or did he?

Whose voice was that now screaming?

Plunging my arm back into myself, the sharp dark pain, I twisted my body around it. I rarely cried. But I did then. How did she find me? Had someone run to her, one of the other children? I’d been in the water for what seemed like hours: in the water, submerged amorphous, surrounded by liquid, my face, my eyes, slick in wet … squirming from my sisters, lunging toward the ledge, the resting place, splashing and faltering and laughing, as one of them grabbed at my leg, yanked me back into the depths before I was able to kick free and reach forward, pulling myself, gasping, up to sit, rapidly blinking to see while drip dripping in that awkward cement seat.

It was my grandfather’s pool, the pool at his hotel. There was a bigger pool across the way, the adult pool, with gardens all around, the hot damp air, and their bodies hot and damp too, surrounding its edges; why didn’t they just jump in, like we did? On that side of the hotel, there were dense tropical walkways that vanished into leafy green jungle before opening onto small clearings with all around the lush density of palms and flowering bromeliads and brightly colored vines. But this little pool was ours, the children’s pool. In Iguala. My grandfather, a good businessman, owned the gas station and hotel on the perimeter of this small town that sits half way between Mexico City and Acapulco. It was 1969 or ’70, and in those days we would pile into our car, like every other Mexican family from DF, and drive to Acapulco where we stayed on the beach in hotels that had even more magical gardens than our grandfather’s, with crisscrossing paths that lay winding under the thickness of climbing creeping vines, and giant fan palms that sat between dangling papaya, passion fruit and mango and lime, all of it amid treelike aloe that flowered orange and red, the thick succulent leaves of which your aunt would break in half to rub the sinewy liquid sap onto your sunburned arms; there were talking parrots and toucans that stood staring at you from inside their big cages in the small sand clearings and you could flirt nuts or fruit into those cages but pulled your fingers back with wild screeches when their beaks got dangerously close to your inching hands. There were signs, you were scolded, that warned against this feeding, but you ignored your aunts and their scolding for the thrill of the birds’ proximity. Beyond all this, we knew, lay the vastness of the beach we all loved, though the waves could be wild, so you stayed at the edges, feet lodged in the sand, unless an aunt or an uncle went in with you and helped you to bob on the surface of those undulating caps. But before you could get there, to that beach, you’d have to stop to refuel in Iguala. Everyone would. And we, because of our grandfather, and his hotel with our pool, would sometimes stay the night.

Who ran and got her? Were they screaming out Hurry, hurry! as they grabbed and pulled at her arm? She was bikini-clad and like this she ran over and swept me up. Had she heard me crying? Who was she, this woman who picked me up and carried me now, as I wept, quietly, in her arms. My mother, who was so rarely a mother, ran to him with me limply drifting in and out in her arms, to my father where he sat drinking with friends.

Urgent, she approached them as she yelled out that they had to take me to the hospital, now, a scorpion had stung me. Now!

No. My father refused. Manolo said no.

He sat in the clearing, low chairs, framed in garden lushness, the fruit from the papayas hanging bulbous all around, with his friends, laughing and cajoling in unison, a big manly mass. They were singing and playing guitar, drinking beer and having a good time, didn’t she see that? He looked straight at her, that wry smile of his, No, he repeated more sternly, as he cinched his blue eyes at her. And then, without lifting his hand to grasp it, he took a hit of his cigarette, which sat dangling limply in his mouth. He turned from her and toward the men, and she turned too, away, no time for this.

Were they shocked, these men he drank with? Were they men I knew, and would see again, maybe at a card game at my grandmother’s house? Coming in boisterously to eat her food and have a drink and tease the young girls and middle-aged women? Or were they a group he’d picked up at the hotel? He was always surrounded. And we mostly knew to hide from them.

Panicking, desperate, she carried me to the road, still draped in her arms, my tears streaming silently now. Where was she headed?

She is hobbling—I am weighing in her arms; the gravel pierces her feet. And then she spots it there, blurry in the shivering sunlight, coming toward her, from in the distance.

She sees it approaching and rushes now, into the road to intercept it, and with her gesturing body she makes the bus stop. My beautiful mother, still dripping in her bikini, stands before the creaking bus.

The driver pulls to the side of the road and opens the door with his big lever. She yells out to him and he calls us up before she is done speaking. I can see them staring, the other people on that bus, not unkindly. She rushes in now. We are inside. The driver will divert and take us to the hospital door.

I don’t remember arriving at, or entering, the hospital. The next thing I recall is my favorite uncle, 17, at my side. He must have come with someone, my grandmother perhaps. Though he is the only one that I remember being there. Sitting at the side of the bed, he makes me laugh. And because I am laughing now, my eyes still heavy with sleep, I know I did not die.

Martin jokes as he reaches over to me where I lie on the hospital bed, It got you, huh? And then his eyes sparkle and he pecks at my arm with his fingers and I shriek and yank my arm back and he laughs. He plays rough, but I love him. Martin was 12 when I was born. He’s my funny teenage uncle, thick black hair and shining smiling eyes.

My grandfather did not own the hotel, my aunt tells me 40 years later. He managed and even expanded it, yes, and brought it back to life, but he did not own it. Yet, even after she tells me this, in my mind he owns it. He is powerful. The grandfather who appears at our home in Mexico City and disappears the same night. He doesn’t stay over, though he is our grandfather. He rarely sits to have a meal with us either. Sometimes he eats at the table alone and is served by an aunt or the woman who cooks for us. Who is he to my grandmother now? Does she still love him? Hola, Abuelito. Emotions restrained, we don’t see what there is between them. A sometimes visitor, in his formal suits and white hair and temperate smile. My beloved grandmother’s husband. He breeds dogs, beautiful German Shepherds. We have one, Diana, and she is nearly human, watching my sisters and me play in the garden, our unruly games, herding us when necessary, as our mad mother paces the insides of the house …

This mother who in a lucid moment scooped me up and rushed me to my father Manolo and, when he refused to do anything, ran me to the side of the road, her feet burning, so that the bus stopped there and all of the passengers looked forward as she, panicked, called out to the driver when he opened the door with his lever, and as he heard what she yelled he urged us on though she was already lunging up onto the bus barefoot, with me in her arms, silently crying, Scorpion, and all the other people, many in their formal white linen, looked forward at us as she climbed in, at the beautiful young woman ascending in a bikini with a little girl who may possibly die, weeping in her arms.

Is my mother crying too now? The bus stares and doesn’t say a word, until an old man in the front stands and quietly offers his seat. I am listless in her arms and the entire bus is silent.

I don’t remember my mother being there then, at the hospital with my uncle. Was she back to struggling with her insides? The urgency of the reality outside her head having subsided to be replaced by that other urgency she always carried inside.

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Iguala

Iguala is two and a half hours southwest of Mexico City, more south than west, and is the midway point to Acapulco. Its full official name is Iguala de la Independencia, because it is in this town that, on February 24, 1821, Mexican independence from Spain was proclaimed, through a document called El Plan de Iguala. It is where the Mexican flag was first raised and where General Vicente Guerrero swore allegiance to this Mexican flag, the first military leader to do so. The state Guerrero, named for this general, is also home to Taxco, a beautiful silver-mining town, the stone and whitewashed buildings there built deep into the sides of mountains, appearing as if they hang perilously off the cliffsides. I’ve been to Taxco only once, though it is not far from Iguala, because it’s hard to get to, as you must wind up and around increasingly narrower mountain roads that spiral you, finally, onto the ancient cobblestone streets that encircle the pretty structures that dangle, seemingly precariously, off a series of stacked precipices. It’s a striking place. Acapulco too, of course, is in Guerrero—the draw, our yearly destination.

As a girl, I did not know any of this geography, any of this history. I did not know that Iguala is, in essence and in fact, the site of Mexican independence. It is also where, in 2014, 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College were murdered. These are the students, mainly Indigenous, the sons of peasant farmers and menial laborers, whose deaths were finally investigated two years ago, with the final outcome pronounced by the Mexican president, López Obrador, who had made a campaign promise to get to the bottom of things four years earlier.

It’s impossible to write about Iguala now without mentioning these students.

Ayotzinapa was, in the early 1800s, a hacienda owned by Sebastián de Viguri—a man who was so moved by a treatise on the equal rights of mestizo peasants and the Indigenous poor that he handed a large portion of his lands to those who lived and labored upon them. In 1918, he took the even more radical step of apportioning the proceeds specifically for supporting the elderly, sick, and disabled. In 1931, two teachers established Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College on the property.

Ayotzinapa lies a few hours south east of Iguala, which is a stop on the way to Mexico City from the college.

Did we ever enter Iguala on our visits? In my mind, it is tiny, a pueblito, but maybe this is because we always stayed on its outskirts, arriving only to refuel and visit our grandfather at his pit-stop hotel, sometimes spending the night there, but I don’t recall ever going into Iguala proper, before continuing to our destination: the beaches of Acapulco where we bobbed on the waves in packs.

In fact, in my mind the whole town was just our grandfather’s hotel and gas station; that was all I knew Iguala to be. Though now I know that Iguala has a beautiful church, as all Mexican towns do, and a giant statue of Saint Francis, for whom the church is named, and a lovely central square with a bandstand and a promenade, and that, until recently, there was strong civic pride there, a flag museum, and countless public statues celebrating it as the site of Mexican independence. The pretty park with its bandstand is at the center of the murdered student’s destiny, it turns out, as the mayor’s wife was to give a speech there that day; near it, the statue of Saint Francis reaches forward to feed a flock of mourning doves from his outstretched hand.

Iguala has another history too, as it is also a strategic smuggling town in a state that has long cultivated opium poppies for heroin. Heroin seems to have played a role in the student murders. In some versions of what occurred that day the police were protecting a cartel transport when they intercepted those students. And in the end, it may have been even more complicated than that.

On September 26, 2014, a large group of Ayotzinapa’s trainee teachers, almost 120 altogether, went to Iguala to commandeer a fleet of buses to drive into Mexico City. The 43 murdered students were part of this rowdy, joyful group who were headed to Tlatelolco, in the center of the capital. Tlatelolco, which is made up of 102 tall towers, is the largest apartment complex in Mexico. Based on Le Corbusier’s concept of “towers in the park,” it was once a solidly middle-class enclave. At its center lies La Plaza de las Tres Culturas, where another group of students were murdered in 1968. The Ayotzinapa students were going to Tlatelolco to commemorate that mass murder at the hands of the Mexican government—a murder that had occurred 46 years prior, and which had for so many years been silenced by the Mexican government—when they, too, were murdered, under the order of the mayor of Iguala.

This voyage to Tlatelolco was a yearly ritual. The students always returned the buses.

But on this occasion, as Time magazine reported in 2014, after borrowing two buses, the students encountered a blockade of police officers, who opened fire on them immediately. There seemed to be other shooters among the officers as well. As one 19-year-old survivor recalled, “There were shots coming from all directions. We were shouting that we didn’t have any weapons, but they kept firing.”

When I went to Mexico City to visit my biological family the summer I turned 16, they lived in Tlatelolco. At first, I was sad not to be in the pretty modernist house with its travertine floors, lovely courtyard, and lulling private balcony that sat separate and secluded off my Aunt Betty’s bedroom. My family had lived in that house for several years. It is the house that Rafael Manzo had come to call at the summer before while I was visiting, when I was 15.

But my longing for this house soon subsided.

I loved living in Tlatelolco that summer, because those towers created a charged proximity: we were surrounded by countless other teenagers. Big groups of them—of us, because we became a part of them. Al’s strict and punishing wife was 2,000 miles away, and our mad mother was nowhere to be seen, and none of the other adults really tended to us, so my sisters and I could run wild in the streets, free and untethered, as much as we wanted. The whole world opened up for us when we stepped outside, an unfurling under that big Mexico City sky that at 8,000 feet sat so much closer to the heavens than the sky in Los Angeles did, and instantly my sisters and I were in the midst of it, at the center of the world, or so it seemed.

La Plaza de las Tres Culturas is called that because all of Mexican time, its history, is visible there: the colonial cobblestone streets leading to the 17th-century Spanish church, Templo de Santiago, under which lie the partially excavated Aztec pyramids of Tlatelolco, foundations from which that very church was built, all of it surrounded by the modernist towers. And these tall towers house the thousands of apartments where all of these teenagers live. The Aztec city of Tlatelolco was the site of the last battle in the conquest of Mexico, where Cuauhtémoc was finally defeated by Cortés. Around 40,000 Aztecs were killed defending Tlatelolco. There is now a plaque on the site that declares: “The battle was not a triumph, nor was it a defeat. It was the painful birth of the mestizo nation that is the Mexico of today.”

We now lived in this place, site of the birthplace of modern Mexico, and, curious, I paused for only a second to read that plaque before running off to join my wild younger sister Elena and her friends who are sitting in a café scheming about how they are going to get the boy that my sister likes to believe she is still a virgin, my long hair whipping behind me as I run to get there in time. You hold your legs real tight before he enters, her friend says as I sit down, my coffee in hand. And then, when he does, you yell out in mock pain and turn your head and make yourself cry.

Pinch yourself if you have to!

They all shriek with laughter and I know I can’t hide my expression, the shock written there, because my sister catches my eye, smirks at my blush, and whispers, Idiot, under her breath, before she turns away in disgust to ignore me again.

We had big packed parties in the communal spaces, various large halls and common rooms in Tlatelolco, that we filled with the density of our young bodies, dancing and laughing and shrieking, cruising, while we all eyed each other under the flashing disco lights before leaning in and whispering confidences about the other boys, the other girls who we were only occasionally brave enough to approach. Sometimes you were invited and sometimes you weren’t, although you went to those parties too because they were more exciting than the ones where you or your sisters already knew everyone, and even though I was still shy, my sister Elena wasn’t, and so at one of these parties to which we were not invited, I met a beautiful boy, one year older than me, tall with black hair and blue eyes, from the Sonoran Desert. He was standing with his friends near the back wall of the room, people dancing all around them while they stood oblivious in a loose circle and talked and joked and laughed. I eyed him there and could not stop looking, and Elena caught my eyes in their intense engagement, and after rudely asking what I was looking at, Que ves, Idiota? Elena told me to go and talk to him. I shook my head, and she called me stupid and pathetic; she had no patience for this, and so went right up to that boy, pointed at me from the distance, and then pulled him over to me by the arm. And though my heart was beating wildly in that moment, I was happy at her lack of restraint.

Aqui tienes, Mensa, she said, shoving him toward me before turning to huddle with her friends a few feet away.

Many magical things happened to us together, me and that boy, actual magic, and he was there alongside me when my mother tumbled into an especially dark place the following summer. I left him soon after her breakdown, for another boy I didn’t like nearly as much, a fact that has always tortured me, for though we were only teenagers, Emigdio felt real, clear and compassionate and unsentimental. He was interested, too, both in me and in the wider world around us, and he took me to plays and other performances put on by activists. I was only 17 then, and had never had a love like that. Of course I understand why I did it now, left him for that other meaningless boy, he having witnessed my mother pacing the halls murmuring her madness …

But now, I am 16; I am here for the summer and I have just met him, and his parents are visiting their own parents in Sonora the whole time I am here, this first summer together, and he is 17, a year older than me, and they’ve trusted him to stay alone in their beautiful modernist apartment, and so we are always at his parentless house, loads of us, just hanging around.

Tlatelolco was about running in packs, the rush of other young bodies when yours was just starting to expand, eyeing the other especially thrilling ones from across a plaza, wondering how you might approach them. Sometimes it just took a cruising past, on some casual fake errand—sodas from the corner shop for Auntie right when you knew they’d be hanging around; you’d do this once or twice before there’d be a calling out to you by one brave boy, and your sister’s quick and clever response—Elena could be hilariously biting—and suddenly, you knew them all.

The excitement of their own youth, the power of deeply felt principles and humanitarian ideals and political justice and historical commemoration. This is what drove those kids who were murdered on September 26, 2014. The vigorous joy that came with movement and activity: climbing onto buses, bodies jumping and pulling themselves on, calling out for liberty in this town that, 200 years earlier, had raised the cry for Mexican independence.

One of the drivers was killed when the police and the cartel attacked. The young men were murdered for running in packs; they were shot at, rounded up, and disappeared, on the orders of the town’s mayor, who was in cahoots with the cartel. His wife, Maria de los Ángeles Pineda Villa, was scheduled to give a talk in the central park later that day, in front of the pretty bandstand, not far from the statue of Saint Francis. Francis reaches out to feed a pack of mourning doves as she furiously exclaims that she will not be interrupted by those hoodlum students.

Stop them! the mayor orders his cronies.

That day, all decked out in her fine jewels, she was meant to give a speech that would help her secure the next mayoral race. This would be in the service of everyone who already worked for the cartel.

From Time: Guerreros Unidos. Mayor Abarca, elected in September 2012, is known to have been a central operative of the Warriors United, helping to launder their money through the many local businesses, including several jewelry stores that he and his wife owned. The mayor’s wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda was a known member of the Warriors as well. “The cartel is said to have inserted its gunmen into the police force,” the article reports. Many in the police force are known to have been directly working for the cartel.

These people were all connected.

From Time: After shooting at the commandeered buses, the officers started shoving students into police vehicles. A 19 year-old survivor ran for his life. “I was scared of being shot, but I was also terrified of being taken by these policemen,” the teenager says. “He escaped to a wooded area and hid in the trees, until dawn,” the article reports; the survivor says, “I feel lucky that I am alive. But I think all the time about my companions who were taken. I don’t know what they could have been through or how much pain they could have suffered. This makes me very sad and very angry.”

The captured 43 were disappeared. It is known that some of them were hacked up and then incinerated. These are the remains that have been found. The local coroner also worked for the cartel. It was he who incinerated the bodies.

Some 44 years earlier, a bus driver in Iguala had taken his bus off-route. Our driver was moved by compassion. That bus driver saved my life. The silent gravity of the mostly Indigenous passengers who would be detoured to drop off the little girl and her young mother at the hospital door is in cosmic opposition to the frantic horror of what happened on that day in September 2014.

But that’s not really it, my friend tells me. It goes much deeper than them, the mayor and his wife. And it wasn’t just the local police who were involved; the military at every level were in cahoots with the cartel too. Everybody was being paid off. Those two are easy pawns, simple scapegoats.

I swallow hard as I look at him, try to hold his eyes while I speak, I understand, I say, my voice faltering. But can’t we just pause here for a moment? They are so despicable, those two, a symbol of everything that is wrong. The way she lorded it over the town as if she were some queen, her cartel jewels and criminal clothing, parading herself, all made up and haughtily self-righteous, throughout Iguala, in front of the families of the boys she would later help to have murdered. Can’t we just pause here for a moment of clear indignation, of focused fury directed at these two before we plunge back into the not knowing, back into the question of vast collusion, back into the overwhelming doubt?

No, he says. 

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I had a mad mother. Her gaze was turned inward. It was stuck there, compelled by the sick fantasies that drove her, and as for me, aside from the day of the scorpion, it was indifferent. She did not want me. She gave me up. I was six, almost seven, when this severance occurred, and thus my confusion about my age, four or five or six when the scorpion stung, because the only thing I know for certain is that it occurred before I went to live in the States, with Al and the cruelty of his wife. Seven years earlier, my mother had tried to kill herself while I was deep inside her. I’ve written her madness in many different ways. It both evades me and will not let me be.

Yet on the day of the scorpion, she pulled outside of herself. I almost died, but it also gave me something to hang on to, something else to organize myself around, in regard to her, my mother. She saw me and in that moment knew what had to be done. It is there, in my mind’s eye now, in my personal ever-present. In the continuum that is me, my hand reaches up and out of the water, stretches to grasp at that ledge, every desire that lives inside me mirrored there in his eyes, in that boy’s gaze. I am small. I am five, I believe, because she has not yet sent me away. Am I five? He looks at me with urgency. We are in Iguala. The mayor is a cartel operative; his wife, who likes to parade around town covered in jewels from the shops through which she and her husband launder their money, is giving a speech that day. She doesn’t want the students to disturb it. The mayor orders the police to stop them; he barks out a command; there are 125 students; some of them escape the gunfire; they get away, running, running, fueled by terror, through the woods. For a whole night they hide there, silently panting, while 43 of their companions are mercilessly rounded up, shoved violently into police cars, from one moment to the next their joy transformed into a terrible electric panic. I am dripping, my left hand about to land on the little cement ledge. My eyes pause, suddenly caught on that boy’s gaze as he calls out, Cuida—

We are in Iguala.

My hand lands as we all scream out in unison.

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Featured image: John Frederick Kensett. Sunset, 1872. Gift of Thomas Kensett, 1874, The Met Museum (74.37). CC0, metmuseum.org. Accessed August 27, 2024. Image has been cropped.