Sophie D’Anieri

A swelling industrial corridor in El Salto, Mexico, located just 30km outside of metro Guadalajara, emits profound quantities of chemical contaminants into the surrounding region. Citizen scientists and local activists have been at the forefront of advocating for environmental remediation and health care; recruiting scientific studies to link pollution to the regions’ increasing rates of cancer, kidney disease, and respiratory illness (González Torres et al. 2016) and pushing for a hearing in an international human rights court, which ultimately ruled in their favor. Despite decades of organizing, little has changed. This project considers the ways that ordinary life in El Salto has become marked by slow violence and how new norms may give rise to emerging political forms. Over 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I will track the slow shifts in norms stitched to ongoing harms, considering how the temporality of slow violence unfurls new practices at the level of the ordinary, practices that might not be named as “political” per se, but offer subtle openings that change their conditions of life.