What Gets Inside: Violent Entanglements and Toxic Boundaries in Mexico City

Abstract

Entanglement is a key concept in contemporary anthropology and science and technology studies. By tracing the contingent and uncertain relations that endow objects with seemingly stable boundaries, entanglement allows us to see how such boundaries restrict our ability to know the world better. This article examines the concept of entanglement in the context of contemporary life in a working-class Mexico City neighborhood, Colonia Periférico, and a longitudinal environmental health project that studies the neighborhood’s residents. While entanglement has its uses, the entanglement of working-class bodies with globalizing processes like NAFTA and the ongoing War on Drugs shows that the concept has its limits. For working-class residents, life is already deeply entangled with chronic economic and political instability shaped through the violent ravages of transnational capital. Instead, I trace how residents in Colonia Periférico secure stability through toxic boundaries that protectively keep out the disruptive effects of police and public health surveillance. Colonia Periférico’s boundaries, which include a sewage-filled dam, cement dust, and freeway exhaust, are clearly entangled with residents’ bodies. They get inside. These entanglements are the price paid for a remarkable stability, in which children can play on the streets and attentive care for drug-addicted and disabled residents is part of everyday life. With the goal of knowing the world better, then, we might complicate celebratory calls for the uncertainty of entanglement by taking into account both the practices that make boundaries and what boundaries have to offer.

Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017

“…Exemplary here is Elizabeth Roberts's () troubling of entanglement as a celebratory analytic . Considering a neighborhood in Mexico City that is permeated with sewage and drug use such that neither police nor public health workers dare enter, Roberts aims to take seriously the kinds of welcome boundaries that toxicity can enact (here boundaries of protection from police and other forms of undesired surveillance and intrusion) while also, she explains, “ not celebrating the endless entanglements of those who can live within the shit” (595).…”

“…How we theorize from place, and what that means for how we conceptualize the human, takes on different valences when the relations we seek to understand depart from the kinds of physical places discussed above to consider views from other planets, as theorized by David Valentine () and Lisa Messeri (), and relations with animals, plants, and chemicals, as emphasized by a growing number of anthropologists. For example, in a Cultural Anthropology Openings and Retrospectives section on “Chemo‐Ethnography,” Nicholas Shapiro and Eben Kirksey (), Michelle Murphy (), and Elizabeth Povinelli () urge us to think with the forms of sociality and care that emerge out of chemical exposures; in the same issue, Elizabeth Roberts's () essay, discussed above, engages similar questions and concerns. Elsewhere Stefanie Graeter () takes up a related task: her chemo‐ethnography, to extend the term used by Shapiro and Kirksey (), considers how a project that tests lead contamination that is run by the Catholic Church in Peru calls a form of biological citizenship into being by acting as though rights that are not (yet) there will be in the future, provided they can produce the expertise and evidence that might materialize them.…”

Whose Global, Which Health? Unsettling Collaboration with Careful Equivocation

“…I share his desire to do away with translations that act as if they rest on a natural referent, but I have suggested that careful equivocation might be a better way to approach the relational and temporal space of awkward collaborations in which “sides” refuse to stay put. Drawing on well over a decade of grounded engagement with an ever‐changing field of fields, I have worked to articulate the lively sociality of our disciplines alongside our terms and practices, showing how the differences between actors are emergent and slippery—however unevenly so (Law and Lien ; Roberts ).…”

What is Communicable? Unaccounted Injuries and “Catching” Diabetes in an Illegible Epidemic

“…For instance, key theorists of "syndemic" models-describing how multiple epidemics interact-recently expressed concern that the term can take on a miasma-like cloudy quality if it is taken up imprecisely, or without follow-up steps to trace specific pathways and signatures of responsibility (Mendenhall and Singer 2019). Anthropologists like Elizabeth Hoover (2017) and Elizabeth F. S. Roberts (2017) engage the work of collectives seeking ways to build a counterscience, through sustained collaborations and a grassroots-guided "science of the in-between." 3 I initially thought it would be fairly easy to apply for a grant to support the kind of local projects that people in Belize suggested.…”