A Ritual to Deal with an Unspeakable Trauma

On April 30th 1977 a small group of mothers gathered in Plaza de Mayo, in front of the Casa Rosada, in Buenos Aires, demonstrating against a regime that was causing their sons and daughters to disappear (the desaparecidos). They started to march around the square and their silent walking soon became an authentic ritual, with its own rules, symbols, time–space dimensions, and rhetorical strategies. A ritual whose main goal was to create a connective link between private and public expressions of grief, working through a literally unspeakable trauma because of the regime of denial perpetrated by the Argentine Junta. It was a ritual of memory that profoundly subverted the public space, with its values, its gender roles, and its silences. Through a semiotic analysis of the discourses and the narratives that this ritual has produced, we will focus on the Mothers as agents of memory and as distinctive witnesses, on the gender dimension of their ritual, and on the rhetorical features of their rite as a particular mimetic performance.