Mónica Salas-Landa

Mónica Salas-Landa received a PhD in Anthropology from Cornell University in 2015. Her project "Living among a Field of Ruins: (In)Visible Residues of Violence and Revolution" combines an archival approach with ethnographic research and examines the afterlife of the material traces left by post-revolutionary state interventions in the northern lowlands of Veracruz, Mexico. Through an engagement with the agentive and affective qualities of decaying oil infrastructure, ethnological photographs, agrarian documents, and the debris left by the development of an archaeological site, her project demonstrates how these scattered objects — disregarded, negated, cherished, or reified — continue to shape the political sensibilities of those who live amid what she conceives to be the concrete residues of violence and dislocation. As a postdoctoral fellow with the Mahindra Humanities Center, Salas-Landa will launch research into her second project: an ethnographic investigation into the Mexican state’s handling of drug-related violence. By focusing on the forensic and bureaucratic practices through which resurfacing human remains are being constituted and negotiated as persons and things, subjects and objects, meanings and matter, she seeks to render visible not only current processes of mourning and historicization, silencing and assertion, but also long-standing processes of violence normalization. Her research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Cornell’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, Cornell’s Latin American Studies Program, as well as Mexico’s Council for Science and Technology (CONACyT).