In Jankia Oza’s Fish Stories, a mother prepares a midnight feast, believing that her deceased son has finally returned home. Upon realizing the true absence of her child, she continues to serve the table, takes a seat, and reasserts her belief that “he will be back any day now,” ending on a note that is as heartbreaking for the reader as it is hopeful for the protagonist. This same notion of persevering through loss with hope, despite the evidence to justify it, is one that also colors the entirety of Jorge Santana’s Cóncavo y Convexo.
Winner of the 2025 Publishing Program in Tamaulipas, Cóncavo y Convexo is a poetry collection that details the accounts of Mexico’s madres buscadoras. The collection’s focus on the first-hand accounts of the controversial movement spurred on a very important realization: the government that published his book is the same one that denies the reality of the experiences discussed in his poems.
Since the 1970s, the madres buscadoras have organized to scour Mexico with the sole purpose of trying to find the remains of their missing and deceased children. As of the 2010s, with the escalation of the drug war and its associated risks, the organization has expanded into national movements and displays for their cause.
A central conversation recurring throughout Santana’s collection revolves around the idea of faith. On one hand, there is the understandable grapple with religion and a trusting in “God’s plan,” but on the other there is an interest in the faith these women have in the search. A common critique, or dismissal, of these mothers’ dedication was to write it off as an obsessive act, an addiction. I argue that the search had become a procession of faith itself.
As these women set dinner tables for the children they’ve long since awaited to finally return home, I see altars being made — a petition; digging through dirt with bare hands, seeking to be gentle with the remains of their children, holding them as if they were something holy; breathing in the dirt where their children laid, treating it as an act of communion; searching for the bodies of other mothers’ children, didn’t God love us all as his own?
People ask how these women can keep believing in something that never ends, a child they never find, chasing something intangible. Cóncavo y Convexo proves that it’s about the same way that people keep believing in God: blind faith.
