A Lot of Us Are Gone

The territory of the Totonacs, indigenous people native to northern Veracruz and Puebla, houses more than 3,000 oil wells as well as many fracking fields. Excessive exploitation has had a major impact on both the health of the inhabitants (miscarriages, cancer, congenital diseases) and the environment of the land. Depending on who you ask, in Totonac Atzin means rain or drop of water. In 2019 my high school friend, Atzin Molina, was kidnapped and disappeared by a drug cartel in a Mexico City nightclub; during the last 20 years, the Totonac deity of thunder and rain, also called Atzin, has been described as being missing or dead due to the ecological devastation and pollution of the land of the Totonacs. The stories of the two Atzins –both narratives of violence and disappearance–merge to form a portrait of how violence transits between the natural environment, territories, individual bodies, my group of friends and the cultural unconscious of Mexico.