The Time of Agony: Abjectivity Politics and the Investigation of Border Crossing Deaths along the US-Mexico Border

Abstract

González-Ruibal evocatively described a “time of agony” for contemporary ruins between their abandonment, destruction, or incorporation into some formalized heritage regime. Agonal time often escapes recognition as socially meaningful, when in reality it can be a time of deregulated social activity as well as degradation within and beyond the full control of human counterparts. This figuration of the time of agony strikingly describes an aligned ruination encountered during the course of ethnographic fieldwork among local-level officials in the US Southwest tasked with the postmortem care of tens or hundreds or thousands of undocumented migrants in their county jurisdictions who needlessly die as a result of federal border enforcement policy. These officials operate largely without federal funding, regulating standards, or oversight for this task. This time of agony similarly escapes attention as a site of negotiation, presupposed as a site of violence (merited, emphatically), but the affective reverberations and possibilities are ignored within the ruination and ruined lives officials encounter and attempt to rationalize within the scope of their normal responsibilities. In pursuing the framing of ruination, I foreground abjection, traumatic rupture, and possibility found.