Description
This article traces the collaborative creation of the Illustrated Dictionary of La Búsqueda, a tool developed through participatory workshops with three Mexican search collectives. Drawing on principles of activist research and radical tenderness, we examine how a metalanguage of disappearance emerges when searchers name their own experiences through writing, collage, and dialogue. The workshops, held in Morelos, Puebla, and Sinaloa, centered the epistemic authority of searchers, transforming private grief into shared vocabulary and vivid visual forms. We analyze how meanings crystallize relationally- through intergenerational exchange, bimodal translation between text and image, and the negotiation of diverse regional and personal truths. Each Dictionary entry functions simultaneously as a counter-archive and a political intervention, challenging state narratives that reduce disappearance to statistics while offering intimate practical and affective guidance to emerging collectives. By foregrounding vernacular knowledge and collaborative meaning-making, the Dictionary demonstrates how communities affected by systemic violence produce alternative epistemologies that refuse erasure, honor memory, and sustain collective struggle. The article reflects on art-based methods' possibilities and limitations in contexts of mass disappearance, emphasizing care infrastructures and solidarity as essential to transformative knowledge production.
