Habitar una herida: sedimentaciones de violencias en los márgenes del Gran Canal del Desagüe del Valle de México
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article examines how different forms of violence—infrastructural, direct, and symbolic—intertwine and accumulate in the urban territory, shaping everyday life along the margins of the Grand Drainage Canal in Ecatepec, State of Mexico. Originally envisioned during the Porfirian era as a symbol of progress, the canal has since been repurposed as a clandestine grave, producing landscapes marked by disappearance, exclusion, and state abandonment. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between November 2024 and May 2025, in-depth interviews with women searchers, documentary analysis, and observations of social media networks, the study explores how this deteriorated infrastructure becomes a material archive of violence. The methodological approach centers on a situated perspective attentive to everyday practices, silences, rumors, and the community strategies that emerge around the canal. The article introduces the notion of sedimented violences as a conceptual tool for understanding how violence accumulates, circulates, and transforms within urban space. This concept allows for an interpretation of violence not as an isolated event but as a process that layers over time, becomes materially inscribed in the landscape, and shapes bodies, memories, and ways of dwelling. The argument advanced here is that infrastructural abandonment and impunity create an environment in which the canal becomes an unavoidable companion to daily life—between risk, persistence, and the drive toward living. The text brings spatial studies of violence into conversation with urban anthropology and infrastructural approaches, offering an original perspective on the relationship between disappearance, urban materiality, and everyday life. The conceptual and methodological proposal is transferable to other Latin American contexts where interwoven violences take shape within the territory and within practices of resistance.
Author: Ariana Mendoza Fragoso
Institution: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Language: Spanish
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7120061783
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