The collective Tesoros Perdidos Hasta Encontrarlos is made up of seventy-four women, sixty of them from Sinaloa, eight from Sonora and six from Durango, and it gathers on the twentieth of every month at Matadero, in the municipality of Rosario, on the Pacific coast, in a place that until the nineties was called La Boca because of the estuary; the name Matadero comes to it from a slaughterhouse for reses that was still working in the sixties, and which the mothers now curse because the name contains the wrong word and because in a place called Slaughterhouse they dig to find the bones of their children, the desaparecidos. Esmeralda Quintero, forty-eight years old, from El Rosario, is looking for her daughter Soledad, who disappeared on the fourteenth of May of two thousand nineteen outside the pedagogical university of Mazatlán. She arrives at five in the morning in her brother's truck. She climbs down with the shovel and the mask, and the disposable camera that a United Nations worker gave her last November.

The others have been digging for an hour already. The sun is not yet full. It spreads out above the palms of the coast, and the tabachines carry the orange flowers of June. Esmeralda sets herself down beside Lupita, who is looking for her son Manuel, desaparecido in two thousand twenty. They start from the two graves that the dog of the fiscal's canine unit marked the day before: one shallow grave, one deeper. Esmeralda works on the deep one. The earth is clayey, of that red which in Sinaloa they call colorada. She digs with her hands, then with the spoon when she reaches thirty centimetres. At noon she finds a tooth. She does not take it. She waits for the woman from the laboratory to come and measure it. Then she goes on. At two she finds a cervical vertebra. She cleans it with a small brush, and lays it in the jute sack of the evidence. At four, between two metatarsals, a buckle of dull metal. She stops. For a moment she calls no one. Soledad had an identical buckle. Esmeralda rolls the buckle between her thumb and her forefinger. There is almost no weight to it. She had given Soledad that buckle for her eighteenth birthday, bought at the market in Los Mochis, and she had remembered to advise her to take it in one hole tighter because the jeans kept slipping down. She lifts the buckle. She cleans it with the pad of her finger. The others, around her, have stopped digging.

In front of her the buckle, on the white cloth, and around her the other rastreadoras who have stopped digging. The buckle is of dull metal, of the kind sold in the tens at the market in Los Mochis, brand Anclas, made in Tepic, two crossed eagles, smooth on the back; Soledad had an identical buckle, but many other girls in Sinaloa had one, and it is not the buckle that makes the daughter, Doña Yolanda has always told them when they get to the shovel. Doña Yolanda is not here today: she has gone to Mazatlán to take her brother's DNA for the fiscal's database. Only she is left, Esmeralda, with the buckle in her hand. The others look at her. One of them asks her: 'Is it hers?' Esmeralda could say yes — she knows it, and they would all know, and the search would be closed, and tomorrow she would stay at home looking at Soledad's empty chair. She could say no — and tomorrow she would come back here with the shovel, and with the others, and with the pretext. She says: 'No lo sé.' She puts the buckle into the jute sack of the evidence. She kneels down again in front of the grave, and digs on.

In the evening the car runs along the México-15 towards Rosario. Into the window she says quietly to Soledad, so that no one can hear: mañana vengo otra vez. The window does not answer. The car slows. Ahead, the line of the other cars of the rastreadoras, all of them with the Resistencia stickers. Esmeralda does not look at the stickers. She thinks of the buckle in the jute sack. The jute sack is stamped Lab. Forense Estatal Sinaloa — Custodia — 06/2026. Tomorrow someone will open it, in a laboratory in Culiacán, and will slip the buckle into a smaller envelope, and slip the envelope into a folder, and the folder into a cabinet, and the cabinet into a room, and the room into a building that she will never see. The car reaches Rosario. Esmeralda gets out, pays the taxi driver a hundred pesos, goes up to the house. On Soledad's chair no one. In the kitchen the heat. She turns on the tap. The water comes out, cloudy first then clear. She drinks standing up.