Association for Political and Legal Anthropology

Oral Presentation Session

Don’t go out after sunset: The everyday encounters with risk and fear in the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico.

Presenter(s)

• MR

  Meztli Rodriguez Aguilera

  University of Texas at Austin

Since the war on drugs that started in 2006, there are innumerable murders and disappearances in Mexico. At least 8 women are killed per day. In this generalized violence in the country, racialized communities of black and indigenous population confront not only this type of violence but also everyday forms of racism. In this paper, I will examine how after 10 months of fieldwork in a small community in the Coast of Oaxaca, Mexico, I faced everyday decisions and dilemmas in the context of narco-violence and State violence. As a researcher, I had to negotiate everyday my decisions in terms of safety but also of my own common sense and feeling of fear. Through an auto-ethnographic lense, this paper will explore the multiple ways in which my positionality as a researcher meant sometimes privilege, but also a visible subject on fieldwork that entail some risks. I also ponder about how the feeling of fear is an undeniable part of research and life in dangerous contexts.