Pronouncing Death: Language and Affliction in an Industrialized Mexico

Explain your research project

Against the backdrop of spectacularized drug violence, this project considers how slower forms of violence—environmental toxicity, poverty, and insufficient health care—also reshape what it is to live and die in Mexico. The rapid clip of ongoing industrialization alongside weakly enforced environmental protections exposes residents of Mexico’s ever-growing industrial corridors to acute levels of environmental toxicity and related afflictions. In the center of one of these growing industrial corridors—El Salto, Jalisco, a small industrial city on the periphery of metropolitan Guadalajara—I consider how the ubiquity of death and affliction introduce new conceptions of living and dying into everyday life and imagination.

How did you come to this work?

I came to this project through a desire to understand how U.S. industry has come to mark Mexican life in two specific ways. The first is related to U.S. environmental regulation. How have the heavily contaminating industries that fled the United States in the wake of mid-century environmental laws (i.e. the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts) changed the conditions of life and death in their new locations? The second relates to politics of migration and habitability—I wanted to think more broadly about the conditions that made life in Mexico uninhabitable such that people left their homes for the United States. These lines of inquiry brought me to Jalisco, which despite an abundance of employment, mainly in the manufacturing industries, has one of the highest rates of U.S. migration. I choose to locate this project in the small city of El Salto due to its centuries-long entanglement in foreign manufacturing alongside its distinctly radical history of labor activism and, more recently, environmental and health activism.

 What resonated with you as you conducted your research? What were you most excited or surprised to find out?

This summer of pre-dissertation fieldwork allowed me to specify my research questions and methods in advance of a year-long fieldwork trip beginning in Fall 2025. I went into this project planning on taking up care work and reproductive labor as an entry point into conditions of life in El Salto. However, I came to understand that tracking the language of death and affliction in the everyday lives of El Salto residents would draw my attention to the finer ways in which people express notions of living well and fairly, the “naturalness” or injustice of death, and how blame and responsibility are articulated in relation to affliction. For instance, I became interested in following one activist’s experience with their friends’ years-long chronic illness and ultimate death came to be distilled into a demand for meaningful participation in metropolitan development plans. Elsewhere, other illness experiences remained concealed in private spaces. In this sense, I was drawn to uses of language where death and affliction are not simply expressed as experiences but do the actual work of breathing life into political claims, demands, or expressions of responsibility.

Do you plan on continuing this work, or is this part of a larger project?

Future research will continue along these lines of inquiry, tracking how experiences of affliction and death come to be the terms through which El Salto residents express new conceptions of living and dying into everyday life and imagination.