Jorge Santana is well recognized for the innate brilliance he lends to the culture, art, and history of both Laredos. What you may not know about him is the power of the words he commits to paper in the canon of his literary writings.
Cóncavo y Convexo, his latest work, was published by Fondo Editorial Tamaulipas and underwritten by Instituto Tamaulipeco Para la Cultura y las Artes (ITCA). Of 120 literary submissions to ITCA in 2025, his was selected for publication for its relevance.
Santana will read from his work on Thursday, June 11 at 7 p.m. at Casa Ortiz and share a discussion with TAMIU English instructor Patricia Gonzalez. The public is cordially invited.
In Cóncavo y Convexo, Santana directs his readers toa deep peer into the ravaged hearts of the madres buscadoras who relentlessly search for lost sons and kidnapped daughters, mothers who when alerted of the fosa of a mass grave gather there to dig first with a shovel to break the soil and then with their hands to find bones that can be tested for DNA in Monterrey
Santana said the words of Cóncavo y Contexto are a departure from other of his writings.
“I am a gay man who will never know the experience of losing a child. How could I possibly be the voice of a mother who has? In the many decades that I have been a writer, I have refined the exercise of my poetic language, but here I wrote in the simple language of the brokenhearted voices of the mothers who have often for decades searched for their children. I had to find the words that would leave the pages of my book to speak for them,” he said.
“They organize to get to the site where they will search. They sing and pray before they dig to find bones, mandibles, and teeth that can be tested for DNA. They sing and pray as they work with regret, respect, and tears. They help each other, many of them knowing it is not the remains of their own child they will find, but just the same they hope that the found remains of another woman’s son or daughter bring her a measure of comfort and closure,” he continued.
“While our daily lives go on with the concerns we consider important, they break their nails in earth searching for their child as they go through the dehumanizing horrors of shallow graves, burned bodies, bullet-shattered bones, and worse yet, bodies still decomposing in black plastic bags. The effort is intense, complicated, and horrific,” Santana said, recalling the substance of the interviews for this important body of work.
“In their effort to find their children, they remember them with longing and immense love. Even as they are certain after a time they will not find the remains of their own child, they look, they help other women,” he said, adding, “It matters that they try, and it matters, too, that their dignified voice has become loud and very clear.”
The poetry of this volume is an unvarnished account of the raw and devastating emotional journey of mothers who have lost what they most have loved, and who yet persist in searches that are an odyssey freighted with dear memories as resolute as their grief, which is anchored in an inexplicable loss.
There are several Nuevo Laredo groups of madres who seek solace and justice in their searches for the remains of their disappeared children, among them Por Nuestros Hijos Siempre Buscando, Juntas a Encontrarlos, and Madres Buscadoras de Tamaulipas.
According to Santana, the desaparecidos include young men 18 to 20 years old who have left the interior of Mexico for the better wages of the frontera. It is speculated that as they disembark the bus on which they have traveled to Nuevo Laredo many are marked for sequestration and service to the cartels.
Santana said that from 2004 forward, it is estimated that there are half a million desaparecidos in all of Mexico; 5,000 a year in Nuevo Laredo.
The following are paraphrased excerpts from Cóncavo y Convexo, which are far more impactful in Spanish.
From Poem VIII: I rush to be home by eight. I turn on all the lights, charge the cellular, turn off everything that makes noise. There is always a hot meal for two on the table and a pitcher of iced lemonade that will quench a tremendous thirst. He always gets out of work at seven and gets home punctually at eight, hungry and eager to break my solitude with what happened at work. He will tell me everything.
I sit in my rocker until night swallows the afternoon. It doesn’t matter that it has been five years. The table, always set for two.
From Poem XXXII: You dig at first with force, and then closer to the bones, you dig more softly, like kissing the dirt with the shovel, less impact, slower, trying not to tear, not to alter the imperative of this apocalypse.
From Poem LV this summary of a gathering to discuss a new site: Someone brings a cazuela of food. Others go for sodas, tortillas and papitas. Sra. Luz, the eldest of all, brings un postre she made with her hands that no longer look like hands. It’s like a fiesta, but no one laughs. There is no music, and no one dances. No one arrives happy or leaves that way. “How are you?” is a forbidden question. Everyone looks at the door while they talk, with the wish that all the missing might enter all at once.
“Cóncavo y Convexo is not an easy book. It has not been easy to read, and it must not have been easy to write. Every word is a sting in our conscience, a blow to the heart, a deep wound in our soul. A text in the edges of love and pain. When Jorge Santana tells the stories of those that search, when he unearths with words besides them, when he unravels what hurts, he hugs the wounds and provides company in this time without time,” wrote Libertad García Cabriales, historian and faculty member of the school of Ciencias, Educación, y Humanidades at Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas.
I have read through Cóncavo y Convexo several times, finally setting it down to write this. I feel immense admiration for Jorge’s evocative work, and I want to tell him that his words did indeed leave the page to tell this story in a voice not his own.
You need not be a mother, a sister, an aunt, or a grandparent to understand the magnitude of the devastating upending calamity of which Jorge has written. In the many emotional ruminations and afterthoughts that follow reading these intense and overpowering verses, I am able just for a moment to fathom the hideous accompanying unmooring of my life as I know it, should I lose those who most I have loved.
