The iconic headscarf of Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, spraypainted onto Buenos Aires Street. Nora Strejilevich has worked to preserve the memory of Los Desaparecidos in many different ways (including helping arrange a U.S. tour for members of Las Madres). Click here to see part of the movie Nora (16MB), and here to visit a website that she helped build about Los Desaparecidos.

A Single Numberless Death is a verbal collage that draws on a many texts including speeches and quotes from political leaders, other testimonios, newspaper clippings, and government documents.  By blending these works with her own, Strejilevich places her memories and reflections into a much more communal context and her story becomes an allegory for national history.

In a section titled "Men quick to Unzip" Strejilevich mixes her personal memories of rape and sexual torture with passages from other women's writing and testimonies. One of the most powerful passages come from a fellow Desaparecido, Ana Maria Careaga, whose story was told in the official final report of the National Commission on Disappeared Persons, Nunca Mas:

WHEN THEY KIDNAPPED that girl, they asked her which torture she preferred- the cattle prod or rape.
At first she chose the prod, but then she asked to be raped.
The next day on of the guards inquired.
“What did they do to you last night?”
“They raped me, sir.”
“Bitch, [slaps] no one did anything to you here, understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What happened to you last night?”
“Nothing, sir.”- Ana Maria Careaga, Nunca Más (Strejilevich A Single Numberless Death 15).

The inclusion of this story, inserted into the author's own montage of memories about her torture, establishes a solidarity between the two women. The reader is reminded that Strejilevich's story is not an isolated anomaly, but reflective of an entire, collective suffering.

Strejilevich uses personal experiences as a vehicle to illuminate communal history, showing both the extreme personal trauma and the magnitude of suffering during the Dirty War. Intertextuality ultimately relocates the emphasis of the testimonio from an isolated individual and places it upon the communal whole with losing the individual trauma.