Domestic Laboring: Food, Violence, and the Household in Peri-Urban Guadalajara
Sophie D’Anieri
April 2024
A city in peri-urban Guadalajara, El Salto is home to narco-related conflict, poverty, state abandonment, and extreme environmental toxicity generated by the region’s highly concentrated manufacturing sector. While these overlapping forms of violence are woven into residents’ reproductive labor—their endeavors to provide sustenance and care—they also spill into and are remade within spaces of food, such as farms, gardens, and kitchens. In these spaces, violence is taken in, domesticated, and transformed through forms of temporal labor and memory work, shaping what it means to feed, provision, and sustain oneself and others within scenes of violence.
In what follows, I consider how temporality and memory shape the labor of two El Salto residents: Pablo, an agroecological farmer, and Lidia, a domestic worker.[1] I track how Pablo's transition from conventional agriculture to agroecological subsistence and Lidia's cooking labor reconfigure and re-temporalize violence, loss, and the domestic. Viewing Pablo and Lidia’s engagements alongside one another reveals how care and violence may be woven into labors of food provisioning both inside and outside the physical home. In this, violence is rendered not as an external spectacle, but rather as intimately entangled with everyday practices of cooking and cultivating.
—
Pablo is in his early sixties. He comes from generations of farmers in a rural municipality neighboring El Salto. He recently made the transition from conventional agriculture to agroecology, a form of sustainable farming concerned with the ecological and social impacts of agriculture, forgoing synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. He made this transition due to concerns of toxicity, in recognition of the threats posed by his decades-long use of agrochemicals in concert with the region's already-high levels of industrial pollution. “If I’m contaminating my land, then I’m also contaminating my daughters, and my grandchildren,” he told me.
Indeed, Pablo's transition to agroecology is framed in relation to both a present domestic and an anticipated future domestic. He told me that in recent years, he’s shifted from market-oriented production to subsistence farming. At a workshop 10 years ago, he learned that one can grow food for an entire family with a very small amount of land—gesturing, as he spoke, to the portion of his land that he had converted to fruit trees. “These days,” he said, “what’s most important to me is providing healthy food for my family.” Pablo worries that “in 20 years, we'll have more cancer and perhaps even the government will collapse due to an overwhelmed health system…” Agroecology, for him, offers a semblance of domestic insulation from an uncertain future. Later, he and his daughter toured me around the grain fields that Pablo was reviving, and the shed that held goats instead of, before the turn towards agroecology, cows and pigs.
Pablo spoke of this transition to subsistence farming not just as an orientation to the future, but also as a return to the “agricultura de los abuelos.” It was something new and old—a reanimation of past agricultural traditions. This transition required negotiation with what Kristina Lyons (2020) calls “forced amnesia,” whereby agribusiness installs systems that require farmers to “forget” alternatives to monocrop systems. Pablo’s transition entailed remembering past agricultural practices that he hadn’t implemented since his adolescence, while learning new agroecological methods. Indeed, the everyday labor of Pablo’s transition to agroecology works to thread a safer past into a contaminated present, in hopes of protecting the future of his land and his family’s bodies.
Pablo understands that he cannot fully avoid the region's toxicity. Yet, rather than move or change livelihoods (something he has tried in the past and still thinks might be necessary), his agroecological practices seek to rehabilitate the land that his family has cultivated for decades. For instance, the water he uses to irrigate his crops comes from the Rio Santiago, one of Mexico's most toxic rivers (McCulligh and Fregoso 2019). He told me he had been eager to participate in a research project that installed constructed wetlands for farmers located nearby the Rio Santiago. He walked me to the wetland at the edge of his property. There, water moves through several different cement compartments (filled with plants and volcanic rock) with the aim that by the time it reaches its destination, it is safe for irrigating crops. Threading memory, an anticipated future, and domestic concerns into his labor, Pablo's careful attention to the health of this constructed wetland and the safety of his water is one of the ways in which Pablo takes in, domesticates, and transforms forms of violence in El Salto.
—
In the wake of the death of her daughter and infant grandchild, Lidia, a 60-year-old domestic worker and resident of El Salto, threads new meaning into her everyday practices of cooking and eating. I met Lidia at a diabetes support group at a local health center. We had spoken many times before and after these meetings, yet it wasn’t until I visited her home to cook and share a meal that I learned of her daughter’s death. As we ate carne en su jugo, a traditional Jaliscan dish that she wanted me to learn, we chatted about her work. I asked if the pandemic had been challenging for her, wondering how she had navigated challenges like isolation, pay, and her elderly employers. She replied, “it was during my daughter’s hospitalization when the pandemic arrived…they kicked my daughter out [of the hospital]. The pandemic came in March. And in March they operated on my daughter.”
It took me some time to sort through the sequence of Lidia’s daughter’s illness and hospital stay. She was collapsing a standard temporal linearity, instead assembling the facts of her family's mistreatment one by one, the severity of each outmatched by the next. Lidia's words were punctuated by what she wanted me to know now: her frustration with the medical system. In every medical interaction after her daughter’s brain cancer diagnosis, there was some kind of uncertainty: she didn’t know why they continued to treat her daughter when she was terminally ill, or why they operated on her if, since she had seven tumors, it was unclear if it would be a successful surgery. Sitting side-by-side at Lidia's dining table, she ate her meal slowly. She told me, the doctors made her daughter go through “studies and studies and studies,” until Lidia's friend asked her, "if your daughter's already hopeless, why are they making you spend more money? Why do they make you bother to bring her in and take her out? She has no options left anyway."
She finished telling me the details of Silvia's illness and eventual death still with an almost-full plate and turned to point towards an altar in her living room, about five feet from the dining table where we were sitting. "That's Silvia there, with her baby who passed away in infancy." I would come to learn that for Lidia, her grandchild's death, attributed to a birth defect that they had not been instructed properly on how to take care of, bore a similar frustration with the medical system.
Lidia's gesture towards her altar recalls Janet Carsten's Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness, where she writes that homes “are selectively refashioned both in telling about the past, and in the creative rearrangements, restorations, and redecorations that are part of everyday house life…Homes and their furnishings can silently evoke, negate, or transmit memories of past relatedness...” (2007, p. 27). Lidia's altar points towards the visible ways she has reconfigured her home around memory and loss. Yet, this gesture also alerted me to the ways that her telling of her daughter’s death over our shared meal activated a different temporal register than that of the altar. The altar, in Carsten’s words, “transmits memories of past relatedness,” while Lidia’s weaving of her daughter's experience into our meal renders memory alive in the present—her nonlinear telling refigures the series of events around not just past loss, but as a complaint in the present and persistent threat posed by the medical system.
I wasn't sure if Lidia's slow consumption of her meal reflected her absorption in the telling of this story or was a strategy to eat slowly encouraged by the diabetes support group. For me, Lidia's telling and our slow consumption of the meal wove Lidia and her daughter’s experience into my relationship with the dish. I cannot eat carne en su jugo without thinking of them.
Saving the story of her daughters' death to share with me in the intimacy of her kitchen suggests the ways that forms of violence are taken in and transformed inside the home. It also made visible that, like the carne en su jugo, the telling of this story may also be a product of our shared labor made possible by the intimacy of slicing vegetables, frying meat, and warming tortillas side by side. Lidia’s sharing of her daughter’s death is a particular type of homemaking, one that reconfigures and re-temporalizes violence and loss in ways that both convey enduring threats and also allow memory to be threaded into the present.
Following inspiration from Clara Han’s chapter of Living and Dying in a Contemporary World, I have resisted the impulse to emphasize my interlocutors’ everyday resilience within a milieu plagued by exceptional violence. Instead, I have been exploring what it might mean to take seriously the “actual labor of threading life again and again through ordinary gestures and words in and through violence” (Han 2015, p. 506). This form of attention to the ordinary labors of Pablo and Lidia allows for an understanding of violence as something that circulates, binds, and permeates, but is also remade, negotiated, and contested in everyday acts of care. In this, I have wished to show how time and the temporal are used to negotiate forms of violence, and how forms of violence are made intimate as they become entwined with modes of vitality. Such an understanding makes visible the entangled workings of violence and reproductive labor, while also suggesting routes through which political claims become articulated in the domestic.
[1] These names are pseudonyms.
References
Carsten, Janet, ed. 2007. Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness. Malden, MA ; Oxford: Blackwell Pub.
McCulligh and Fregoso. “Defiance from Down River: Deflection and Dispute in the
Urban-Industrial Metabolism of Pollution in Guadalajara.” Sustainability 11, no. 22
(November 8, 2019): 6294. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11226294.
Han, Clara. 2015. “Echoes of a Death: Violence, Endurance, and the Experiences of Loss.” In Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium, edited by Veena Das and Clara Han. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lyons, Kristina. 2020. Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics. Durham: Duke University Press.