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- Season 1, Episode 1: Street Harassment, Then and Now
- Season 1, Episode 2: Recording the Family: In Search of the Sonic Archive
- Season 1, Episode 3: Evidence of Absence: Lilli Segal, the KGB, and the AIDS Crisis
- Season 1, Episode 4: Archive Magic: Assembling History, One Clue at a Time
- Season 1, Episode 5: Capacity Matters: Immigrant Prisons in the United States
- Season 1, Episode 6: Policing Gold: Law Enforcement in the Shadow of the LA Olympics
- Season 1, Episode 7: Archie Bunker for President!
- Season 2, Episode 1: Revival and Reckoning: A Colonial Museum in Postcolonial Italy
- Season 2, Episode 2: The Unnatural Vice: King Henri III, Sodomy, and Modern Masculinity
- Season 2, Episode 3: Envisioning Eternity: Women and Purgatory in the Seventeenth-Century Spanish World
- Season 2, Episode 4: Mother Caravan: Disappearance and Resistance along the Migrant Trail
- Season 2, Episode 5: A Prison by Any Other Name: Imagining Childhood Criminality in 1920s Chicago
- Season 2, Episode 6: Surviving Patriarchal Violence at Home: Incest Victims in the Progressive Era
- Season 3, Episode 1: Music Time in Africa
- Season 3, Episode 2: Navigating Pregnancy: A Century of Prenatal Care
- Season 3, Episode 3: The Real Housewives of Medieval London
- Season 3, Episode 4: The Two Monsieurs
Since the 1970s, mothers in Central and South America have mobilized against a very particular form of political violence: enforced disappearance. At certain moments in time, they were the only ones who could.
When disappearances along the migrant routes through Mexico skyrocketed in the 1990s and early 2000s, largely due to the domino effect set off after changes in regional border policy, mothers of the disappeared came together once again. What began as an expedition to locate their children, marching from embassies to migrant shelters to public markets with photographs of the missing, has now become a worldwide call to action, demanding that governments put an end to the international border regimes that disappear migrants and erase the evidence. Arielle Gordon explores a mass movement of mothers who—even in the face of police intimidation, faked corpses, corrupt authorities, and government lies—thrust the unseeable into sight.
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Historian Biographies
Arielle Gordon is a PhD student in the Departments of History and Women’s and Gender studies at the University of Michigan. She studies resistance movements, border politics, and visual culture in Latin America and the Middle East. Her article “From Guerrilla Girls to Zeinabs: Reassessing the Figure of the Militant Woman in the Iranian Revolution” situates the icon of the “veiled woman with a gun” in a global landscape of liberation struggle and Third Worldism during the 1960s and 1970s.
Production Credits
Episode Producer: Arielle Gordon
Episode Contributors: Dr. Wendy Vogt, Dr. Diana Taylor
Voice Actors: Stefania Gonzalez
Host and Season Producer: Hayley Bowman
Executive Producer: Gregory Parker
Editorial Board: Hayley Bowman, Christopher DeCou, Arielle Gordon, Gregory Parker, Taylor Sims, Melanie Tanielian
Special thanks to Ecologies of Migrant Care, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at NYU.
Additional thanks to the Caravana de Madres and the Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano for their fortitude and their incredible story.
© 2021 Regents of the University of Michigan
Image: Miguel Discart, CC BY-SA 2.0.