Tracing Aleida: The Story of a Search (2007), a documentary film by Christiane Burkhard, 88 mins., distributed by Icarus films
Testimonial documentaries are a relatively new and powerful way of fighting the oblivion to which those who were killed or disappeared in the last phase of Latin America’s Cold War have been consigned. Recent examples include Paula Rodríguez’s Pinochet’s Children: Volver a Vernos (2002); Albertina Carri’s Los rubios (2002); Peter Sanders’s The Disappeared (2007); Eduardo Walger’s Madres (2007); Cecilia Serna’s Vivos los llevaron, vivos los queremos (They Took Them Alive, We Want Them Back Alive, 2007); and Juan Mandelbaum’s Our Disappeared (2008).
Tracing Aleida is an excellent addition to this emerging genre. It tells the story of Mexico’s “dirty war” on armed insurgents and their sympathizers in the 1970s through the journey of Aleida Gallangos. In 2001, Aleida, at the age of 28, discovered her true identity as the daughter of radicals disappeared by the Mexican state in 1975. She then embarks on a three-year search for a long-lost brother she never knew she had, Lucio Antonio. Her voice begins the film. “When does this story really begin? It’s a story that has many beginnings,” she says. Later she adds: “It’s a story that is just getting told. Previously it was only told in whispers.”
Mexico’s Judicial Police kidnapped her parents, Roberto Antonio Gallangos and Carmen Vargas, and, like so many others, they were never to be seen again. The young couple was part of the Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre, an armed guerrilla group named after the date when a handful of young rebels unsuccessfully attacked the military garrison in Ciudad Madera, Chihuahua, in 1965. Encouraged by the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, inspired by the writings of Che Guevara, and enraged by the disproportionate violence directed by the Mexican government at the country’s organized opposition, Gallangos and Vargas were among the hundreds of rural Mexican schoolteachers who supported an armed insurgency during the presidency of Luis Echeverría Álvarez (1970–76).
Shortly after Aleida’s parents were kidnapped from a safehouse, Liga 23 de Septiembre member Carlos Gorostiola took Aleida to his brother’s house, asking him and his wife to adopt the child, which they did, considering her a part of the family from the start but not pursuing a legal adoption. Twenty-nine years later, in 2001, Quirina Cruz, Aleida’s paternal grandmother, published an advertisement in the newspaper El Universal. As in Argentina, Mexican grandmothers are frequently the survivors who search for their grandchildren, whose parents were killed or disappeared. The ad included a picture of Aleida as a baby, together with her younger brother, Lucio Antonio, shared the page with the headline “¿Dónde están?” (Where are they?). It also included a brief narrative that described the disappearance of the parents, gave the children’s age, and denounced the government’s likely responsibility in the parents’ fate.
The Gorostiolas lived in the northern city of Ciudad Juárez when Cruz’s announcement caught their attention. They spoke to Aleida and suggested she contact Doña Quirina. When Aleida visits her grandmother in Oaxaca, the old woman is overcome with the bitter joy of finding her disappeared son’s child. Aleida looks like her father, she tells her. She loudly addresses the absent authorities, demanding the right to see her lost son and daughter-in-law, and believing against all evidence that they are still alive. Later she and Aleida will have long conversations, trying to rebuild the years of separation they have endured.
Director Christiane Burkhard deftly uses film clips from the student demonstrations in 1968, a collection of photographs and documents gathered from family and official records—housed in the once infamous prison of Lecumberri, now turned into Mexico’s National Archives—and a mixture of wide-angle scenes in Washington, Atoyac, Guerrero (home of Carmen Vargas and her surviving relatives), and Jamiltepec, Oaxaca, home of the Gallangos family. Occasionally grandmother and granddaughter are also seen walking on a beautiful beach, most likely on the Pacific Ocean.
Aleida visits the abandoned house where her mother grew up, in the mountains of Guerrero, where she meets her mother’s relatives, including a sister. “Here is where all of us were born,” says her aunt. “It is our maternal house.” But it is empty, and Aleida’s tears flow freely as the house reveals her mother’s absence more powerfully than any other space. At her father’s village in Oaxaca, the elders tell her about Roberto Lucio, or Toñito, as they called him. An old teacher of his says Toñito was expected to do “great things.”
Aleida becomes determined to find Lucio Antonio, now named Juan Carlos Hernández, as she later discovers. In medium and close-up shots, Burkhard takes full advantage of Aleida’s expressive face and the deep emotions she feels as she tries to locate her brother and give him the news of his origin and identity. Viewers follow her steps, supported by a subtle music score and creative editing. It is no wonder that the documentary has received one international and two Mexican awards.
The film opens with Aleida arriving in Washington, where she has traced her brother after searching through adoption records. All she has is a name, Juan Carlos Hernández. When she calls the first person with that name in the phone directory, she finds a Puerto Rican man who asks her to come to his house. He will become a real brother to Aleida, offering help and hospitality, while she continues with her quest through Latino radio and television stations. One is amazed at her trust in a perfect stranger, and at the stranger’s genuine generosity and solidarity. His friends become Aleida’s friends while she is away.
Just before Christmas 2004, Aleida contacts Lucio Antonio on her cell phone. But he resists giving in to the discovery of his true identity, even after his adoptive mother confesses that she is not his real mother and says Aleida was telling the truth. Everything he believes about himself, now an immigrant working in construction, suddenly crumbles. The news his sister brings to him is a gift, but it is also a demolition ball. Did he need to know?
Aleida’s face-to-face encounter with Juan Carlos is the climax of the film. She wants her brother to understand that love took her to Washington in search of him. But he needs to process the loss before he can discover the gain. Viewers know at this point that he was wounded when the Judicial Police fired a gun in the process of arresting his parents, and that he was taken to a hospital and afterward to a casa hogar, or public orphanage. A priest who visited the orphanage told his parents about him, and they took him in as a four-year-old son without going through a formal adoption. His new parents explained his memories of the orphanage as a time when he had been sick and in a children’s hospital.
Juan Carlos appears as a wise young man, sharing the family strength we see in Aleida and her grandmother. He refers to the soldiers that took him to the hospital as if they were saviors. “They let me live, and here I am. The people that took care of me are part of that life, the life they let me live.” As Bishop Juan Gerardi put it in the Guatemalan human rights report released in 1998, shortly before he was murdered: “Knowing the truth is painful, but it is a highly liberating action.” For Juan Carlos, though, liberation still lies ahead.
In a moment of self-assertion, Juan Carlos tells Aleida: “I am not Toni. My name is Juan Carlos.” We hear this with a sense of relief, because assuming their newly discovered origin should not obliterate the lives both have lived so far, with loving parents and siblings. The film is effective in bringing several characters close to us, and letting us share both their joys and their confusion. We see how a certain pride arises in Aleida when she tells her brother that they were born out of love, that their young parents were surely in love. They do not seem to value their parents’ political militancy as a heroic, or at least brave stance in life. Perhaps they are aware of the naïveté of so many young people who embraced armed insurgency in the 1960s and 1970s without the slightest possibility of victory, ignoring the effect of their own violence on others, including soldiers.
Tracing Aleida documents a story that ends well—not with Hollywood simplicity, but with the difficult joys of real life. For Quirina Cruz, the offspring of her son is alive, so death does not have the last word. For Aleida and Juan Carlos, a painful past offers them a challenge to understand who they are, and what kind of country they were born in.
Burkhard, who lost her own German parents in an accident when she was very young, may in some way be searching for her own severed connections through the eyes of Juan Carlos and Aleida. The passion she injects in documenting their experience indicates a profound sensitivity to the enormity of their loss. At one level, the film is about the way we belong to our families, biological or not. At another level, it should raise questions about the way old and new violence forces the people of Mexico to rearticulate a deeper understanding of their country, its past, and its future.
For a long time, many believed that the bloody revolution that began the Mexican 20th century was a powerful immunization against future violence. But the long lens of history tells us that this is probably not the case. The violence of a long and cruel war—in which one in 10 Mexicans perished—is still part of the nation’s imaginary. Today, the country faces the biggest crisis in its post-revolutionary life. The neoliberal development project imposed from above makes half of all Mexicans expendable. The army has been deployed in recent years not only in areas where drug-trafficking cartels operate, but also in Chiapas, Oaxaca, and the state of Mexico, aiming to control and intimidate organized social movements. Undocumented immigrants face the violence of a life in the shadows, always under fear of detection and deportation.
Cultural critic Rossana Reguillo-Cruz points to “the intellectual and political impossibility of separating the analysis of contemporary violence from its political use and its connection with power.” As the recovery of a historical memory exorcizes the violence of the 1970s, citizens must be active in defusing new potentially incendiary policies and practices. Tracing Aleida holds up a mirror on recent Mexican history in which we see a Dirty War that took the lives of young, idealistic, and seemingly noble human beings, inviting us to say “Nunca más!” “Never Again!” It is a welcome and powerful reminder.
Aurora Camacho de Schmidt teaches Spanish and Latin American literature at Swarthmore College. She has been involved in the defense of immigrants’ and farm workers’ rights, and in exploring the connections between literature and social transformations.
